The New York State Department of Environmental Conservation recently released its annual black bear harvest report, noting that hunters took 1,356 bears in 2023, slightly more than last year’s harvest of 1,318 bears, but down about seven percent from the five-year average.
But in the Oswego County town of Minetto, the number of bears harvested jumped 100 percent when a bowhunter killed a male black bear in October 2023. It marked the first time since 1970, when DEC began tracking bear harvest numbers, that a hunter killed a bear in Wildlife Management Unit 7A, an area comprised mostly of northwest Oswego County and slivers of northern Cayuga and Onondaga Counties.
WMU 7A has only been open to bear hunting since 2014, after DEC biologists recognized that the bear population was expanding and made regulation changes to open all portions of Upstate New York to hunting beginning in 2014, DEC said.
While most people will never lay eyes on a black bear in the wild, bears are well established across much of the state, and they “continue to expand into areas occupied historically,” DEC Commissioner Basil Seggos said in a press release. This expansion represents a “conservation success story,” he added.
The density of the 2023 bear harvest—around 3 bears per 100 square miles—was similar to recent seasons in both the Northern and Southern Zones. This suggests that bear population densities in the Southern Zone have begun to stabilize following population expansions throughout the early 2000s, DEC stated.
Broken down by zone, hunters harvested 485 bears in the Northern Zone, a six percent increase compared to 2022. In the Southern Zone hunters killed 871 bears, about the same as last year.
Black bears were harvested in 73 of 88 WMUs currently open to bear hunting. The Catskill region once again had the highest density of harvested bears. In WMUs 3A, 3C, 3K, 4R, and 4W hunters took more than 10 bears per 100 square miles. WMU 3K, located in Sullivan County, had the…
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