Asheville’s black bears: How many are too many?

“Black bears and North Carolinians have tussled over space for centuries. While traveling through the western part of the state in 1774, naturalist William Bartram complained about them in his journal, writing ‘the bears are yet too numerous.’ American pioneers hunted them for food and for sport, often to excess — when trapper ‘Big Tom’ Wilson died in Asheville in 1908, his obituary bragged that he had killed 110 bears. All of this barely dented their numbers.

“Starting in the 1920s, though, development and deforestation began taking their toll. When a midcentury bout of chestnut blight decimated the bears’ food supply, they were already struggling. By 1970, there were only about 1,500 left in the state, and North Carolina conservationists began setting aside protected land to bring their numbers up, but things still looked grim.

“Then came the 1990s, and the housing boom. New developments were perfect safe spaces for bears, full of food and birdseed and free from hunters…. In 1993, the N.C. Wildlife Resources Commission got 33 calls about human-bear encounters. In 2013, they got 569.

“[Today] somewhere around 8,000 black bears range around western North Carolina, and many make Asheville part of their meandering….The scientists behind [N.C. State’s] Urban-Suburban Bear Study are interested in figuring out this new habitat’s ‘social carrying capacity’ — exactly how many of these new neighbors the human residents of the city are willing to tolerate….”

— From “The Civilized Black Bears of Asheville, North Carolina” by

 

How come Big Tom Wilson never saw a panther?

“Just off from the summit [of Mount Mitchell], amid the rocks, is a complete arbor, or tunnel, of rhododendrons. This cavernous place a Western writer has made
the scene of a desperate encounter between Big Tom [Wilson] and a catamount, or American panther, which had been caught in a trap and dragged it there, pursued by Wilson. It is an exceedingly graphic narrative, and is enlivened by the statement that Big Tom had the night before drunk up all the whisky of the party which had spent the night on the summit. Now Big Tom assured us that the whisky part of the story was an invention….

“But what inclined Big Tom to discredit the Western writer’s story altogether was the fact that he never in his life had had a difficulty with a catamount, and never had seen one in these mountains….”

— From “On Horseback”  by Charles Dudley Warner (1885)

Despite the best efforts of generations of wildlife biologists, belief that panthers (by whatever name) roam the North Carolina mountains seems inextinguishable. Check out the impassioned responses to this column.