Bear Haul Second-highest

WATERTOWN - The harvest from the state's 2009 bear hunting season was the second-highest on record, the New York Department of Environmental Conservation announced this week. Hunters throughout the state took 1,487 black bears in 2009. The record annual statewide take was 1,864 bears in 2003.

Lewis and St. Lawrence counties provided the highest totals after Ulster County in the Catskill region, with 122 bears taken in St. Lawrence County and 119 in Lewis County. Hunters harvested 128 bears in Ulster County.

The numbers "strengthen my viewpoint that our bear population statewide is incredibly robust," said Steven R. Heerkens, a Utica-based wildlife biologist with DEC Region 6 who tracks black bear activity in the five-county region. "The animals are there, and the opportunities are there for people to hunt them."

The 2009 bear take in the Adirondacks represented a 40 percent increase over the 2008 harvest, according to a DEC press release.

Bear harvest totals fluctuate year to year based on hunter interest and the animals' population trends, but food availability is another important factor in determining bear activity and harvest totals, Mr. Heerkens said. In the northern part of the state in 2009, poor production of berries and cherries in September, the early hunting season, made bears more active as they searched for alternative food sources.

Another factor encouraging bear activity in northern New York in the fall was the lengthy maturation period for corn crops, thanks to the rainy weather, Mr. Heerkens said. In agricultural areas that abut forests, such as in Lewis and St. Lawrence counties, bears can be tempted out of the forest by cornfields where crops still stand.

And "the longer it stands, the better opportunity the bears have to find it," the biologist said.

Bears' attraction to human food sources, like corn fields, is usually a result of poor food availability in the forests, Mr. Heerkens said. The behavior yields greater volume of nuisance bear complaints as bears show up near human activity. It also makes the bears more visible to hunters - both outdoors and by raising the animals' profile with greater publicity surrounding complaints.

Those factors combine to create a larger bear harvest, Mr. Heerkens said.