At the dawn of the 19th-century, Kansas was a very different place. Buffalo roamed while deer and antelope played. Black bears lived alongside them.
You might be surprised but it’s true!
They lived in riparian zones along rivers and creeks where bears had plenty of food and shelter. Unfortunately, people wanted to live in the same areas. Proximity bred conflict and the bears lost. Badly.
You’ll have to keep watching to find out why they disappeared and how we brought them back! It’s a classic American conservation story.
The why is simple. Thanks to human wildlife conflict black bears were hunted off the Kansas prairies by the 1880s. Stories like this one in 1866 happened across the state.
In October, The Daily Kansas Tribune reported that Mr. Fisher killed a bear on the Cottonwood River. The bear was just strolling up the river in the heart of the tall grass prairie.
In a scene out of Frankenstein, Mr. Fisher, Jonathan Wood, and others banded together to kill the bear. By all accounts I could find it was peaceful.
People actually thought it was someone’s pet.[1]
Dick Stevenson’s hunt in 1872 drew state wide attention. He was a Sumner County commissioner and shot a 400 pound bear in Barbour County.[2]
Three years later another bear made state wide news. That time, a black bear visited Mr. Bird’s garden in Arkansas City. The Atchison Daily Patriot reported that it was spotted on a Sunday morning. That’s quite a surprise on the way to church![3]
I’m sure the bear was dead within a few days of that encounter.
Just like the European colonizers before them, Americans weren’t big fans of toothy critters. If you’ve watched my videos before, you’ll know that is an understatement.
They hunted everything that remotely poised a threat to humans. Even though black bears are pretty safe, they were a prime target. Between safety concerns, predation on domestic animals, and blood lust the bears had to go.
Death and destruction is only half the story though. The other is hopeful thanks to Arkansas.
Arkansas took one of America’s worst examples of market hunting and turned it into a very successful conservation win.
It all started in the 1950s when Arkansas decided to reintroduce black bears after centuries of overhunting.
Bear oil was an important historic commodity in Arkansas. Biologists with the University of Arkansas at Little Rock estimated that thousands of bears were killed every year for the oil alone.[4] Bears had dollar signs carved into their back. By the mid 1900s they were almost gone.
In 1957, biologists drove a few male young bears down from Minnesota and Canada. Over the next 11 years they released 260 bears into good habitat far away from humans.
The males needed time to establish territories so females weren’t introduced for a decade. Once that happened, the population slowly recovered. By 1980, bears had recovered enough that the state opened a limited hunting season for bears.[5]
Over the next several decades those bears expanded out of Arkansas. In 2009, Oklahoma opened its first black bear hunting season. In 2021, Missouri joined the party with a limited black bear hunt.
By mid 2010s, bears were spotted in Kansas as well. Every spring, more and more bears make their way into Kansas to reclaim their historic territory on the tall grass prairies.
So far there are no known breeding populations but someone captured a bear cub on a home security camera in Winfield, Kansas in 2022.[6] In 2023, someone spotted a bear just south of Kansas City in Cass County, Missouri.[7]
According to Jeff Ford a biologists with the Oklahoma Department of Wildlife, young males can range up to 150 miles away from their core habitat.[8]
For now, the bears in Kansas are younger males but if females wonder north biologists in Kansas believe they could establish a breeding population.[9]
We won’t see many predators come back to the prairies but any animals that return should be celebrated. Environmental historian Dan Flores called the 19th-century over hunting on the prairies of North American one of the biggest man made ecological disasters in human history.
Thanks to the biologists in Arkansas, we have started correcting a part of that disaster. Next time you think about animals we’ve saved, I hope you think of black bears along with the bald eagle, bison, elk, and many others.
Thank you for watching and if you enjoyed this video please subscribe!
[1] https://www.newspapers.com/image/60856253/?match=1&terms=%22black%20bear%22
[2] https://www.newspapers.com/image/80359109/?match=1&terms=%22black%20bear%22
[3] https://www.newspapers.com/image/81218816/?match=1&terms=%22black%20bear%22
[4] Bowers, Annalea K.; Lucio, Leah D.; Clark, David W.; Rakow, Susan P.; and Heidt, Gary A. (2001) "Early History of the Wolf, Black Bear, and Mountain Lion in Arkansas," Journal of the Arkansas Academy of Science: Vol. 55, Article 4. Available at: https://scholarworks.uark.edu/jaas/vol55/iss1/4
[5] https://news.uark.edu/articles/9023/arkansas-black-bear-reintroduction-one-of-most-successful-in-the-world-ua-researcher-says
[6] https://www.kansascity.com/news/state/kansas/article257771258.html
[7] https://www.kake.com/story/49051293/black-bear-sighting-confirmed-near-kansas-city
[8] https://www.wibw.com/2020/07/14/black-bears-appearing-in-kansas/
[9] https://www.cjonline.com/story/news/2017/08/16/wild-black-bear-population-grows-kansas/16533058007/