Important Message about the threatened Florida Black Bear

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This Wednesday, June 27th, the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission (FWC) will vote on a historic measure which - if passed - will finalize removal of the Florida black bear from the state list of imperiled species.

For the past 38 years Florida's black bears - a unique subspecies of the Americn black bear - have been designated as "threatened" and have been given special protection under the law.  Those protections include a ban on hunting (intentionally killing a bear - or any threatened species in Florida - is a third degree felony and can carry a prison term of up to 5 years and/or a fine of up to $5,000 dollars) as well as a ban on other activities considered "take" (e.g. harming, harassing, trapping or collecting).  But "take" under Florida law can also include "significant habitat modification or degradation where it actually kills or injures wildlife by significantly impairing essential behavioral patterns, including breeding, feeding or sheltering."

Up till now, threatened status designation has been an extremely effective tool for the protection of the bear - and has in fact led to a significant rebound in the population.  Once found throughout Florida, by the 1950s Florida's estimated 11,000 bears had dwindled to only a few hundred.  Indiscriminate hunting (as well as killing of bears as "nuisance animals"), loss and degradation of bear habitat due to Florida's legendary population boom, and fragmentation of habitat due to sprawl and road building (roadkill is now by far the most common cause of bear deaths in the state) have all taken their toll.  Largely a result of the protections the bear currently enjoys, approximately 2,500 to 3,000 bears can be found in Florida today.

However, Florida's beloved bear is hardly "out of the woods".  Bears exist today on only 18 percent of their historic range.  Equally troubling is the fact that the Florida black bear is no longer a single inter-connected and inter-breeding population.  Decades of geographic separation caused by urbanization and road building means that Florida's black bears have been pushed into genetically isolated sub-populations - some of which are just on the brink of survival. And that lack of genetic diversity means bears are already exhibiting some of the same genetic defects - e.g. reproductive and anatomical abnormalities - which have also plagued the single isolated population of Florida panthers in our region.

In short - this is not the time to de-list the Florida black bear and strip it of the very protections which have brought it back from near extinction.  Florida is once again adding to its already massive population and the state's own vision of the future -  "Wildlife 2060" - anticipates that growth over the next few decades (to a possible population of 35 million!) could lead to the development of about 7 million acres of rural and natural land - an area about equal in size to the state of Vermont.

Right here in south Florida, our own Big Cypress sub-population of bears is facing habitat loss and degradation from proposed construction of "new towns" (one ironically named "Big Cypress"); a new and greatly expanded road network across rural lands; the proposed construction of the largest fossil fuel plant in the nation just outside the Big Cypress Seminole Reservation (FPL's gas-fired "Clean Energy Center"); and the National Park Service's recent decision to run 130 miles of off-road vehicle trails through some of the least disturbed bear habitat which remains inside the Big Cypress National Preserve.

Time is unfortunately very short.  The Fish and Wildlife Commission will be meeting this Wednesday morning to make this decision.  If you can, please send a quick message to the commissioners and ask them to maintain the Florida black bear on their list of threatened species - and give this magnificent representative of Florida's natural heritage the continued protection it requires.

The commissioners can be reached at the following web address:

http://m1e.net/c?121296310-d7Te6011/LJj6%407633477-jUxyJqUZEd9.w

Or you can email the commission on this topic at bearplan@myfwc.com

Thanks as always for your support.

Matt Schwartz
Executive Director
South Florida Wildlands Association
P.O. Box 30211
Ft. Lauderdale, FL 33303
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954-634-7173