A black bear like this one was taken in a West Sparta farm last week. Photo courtesy of the New York Department of Environmental Conservation
There have been a handful of bear sightings in the area this fall, the farthest north being near Long Point on Conesus Lake. And, for the first time in as long as anyone can remember, a bear was taken in West Sparta.
This is only the second year of an expanded bear hunting range in New York State that includes all of Livingston County. It was proposed by the DEC in the summer of 2008 as a proactive measure to deal with the increased incursion of bears into populated areas, and implemented without perceptible protest.
A seminar held in Dansville that summer to inform the public and invite comments was attended exclusively by hunters and farmers in strong support of an increased range, with no evident dissent. The measure had no effect that fall as one bear was taken in southern Livingston County, where the previous hunting zone had already been established.
But this fall it allowed for a bear to be shot farther north. It was taken by Nate Powell, a farmer whose family has owned their land in West Sparta for over 100 years.
“I was chopping corn, and it came out into the field,” he said. “Since it’s hunting season I carry a gun everywhere I go.”
It may or may not have been the bear that had torn up big circles in his neighbors’ corn field, or smaller ones in his own, but it was three years old and weighed 200 pounds, and it was big enough to be the one.
It may have also been the same bear that Donna Johnson of Granger, Allegany County, saw. She found it trying to get a hold of one of her Nubian goats on her farm, a mile or so south of the Livingston County line, before hunting season began.
“My daughter was talking on her cell phone about 9:30 one evening when all of a sudden she said, ‘Mom, I think there’s a bear in the woodshed.’ I was surprised, but didn’t want to make a big deal of it. We’d never had any bears here, although a neighbor just up the road had been having some issues with one.”
Instances like these are what prompted to the DEC to create the expanded hunting range. On top of safety concerns, they had had their fill of answering nuisance complaints, and having to capture and relocate rogue bears.
“We simply don’t have the time or resources to deal with it,” said a DEC spokesman at the time, “and as more and more bears move to populated areas, the chance of a (fatal) encounter increases right along with it. We’ve witnessed a 10-fold population expansion in the last 30 years in the Allegany and Catskill regions, and their range has increased dramatically from those regions over the past 10-12 years. We’ve had lots of agricultural damage along with an increasing amount of negative human contact, and we’re looking to curtail it before it gets out of hand.”
So Nate had the blessing of the DEC when he shot his bear, and was every bit within the law when he did it.
A happy hunting story, right?
Not necessarily.
A local resident reported him for “illegally killing a bear.”
“I’m not looking to stir up any trouble,” said Nate, who was reluctant to speak about it at all. “It’s bear season, I shot a bear, and that’s all there is to it.”
Whether you think of bears as warm, cuddly, and benign creatures, or dangerous, unpredictable wild animals that can do immense harm is your choice. But the fact is that there’s more and more of them coming around, and the powers that be put the problem right back in the people’s laps to take care of for them.
That’s good news for hunters and farmers, but bad news for bear lovers.
See complete story in our Dec. 17 print edition.