Kentucky’s 117 black bear records hug the far southeast: Harlan, Letcher, and Bell counties against the Virginia and Tennessee lines, with a second scatter west through McCreary County and the Daniel Boone National Forest. The state’s record is a mountain record, drawn almost entirely from the Cumberland Plateau and the ridges of the east.
Recolonists from across the state line
Kentucky’s bears were reduced to near absence by the early twentieth century, and the animals in the record descend mostly from bears that filtered back in from healthier populations in Virginia and Tennessee as the eastern forests matured. Jefferson National Forest on the state line and the Daniel Boone’s long wooded ridges supply the connected cover a wide-ranging animal needs, and records outside the southeast stay thin and scattered. Most of those outlying reports are young dispersers passing through, not settled residents.
An early-summer crest, a silent January
Reports jump from May through July, when bears are breeding and yearlings disperse across the ridge country, then ease through fall and drop to nothing in the midwinter denning months. Even in the core counties a black bear is seldom seen; the species keeps to cover, hears people long before it is heard, and most Kentuckians who live in bear country will never lay eyes on one.
Status in Kentucky
NatureServe ranks the American black bear S4, Apparently Secure, in Kentucky, and the species is native to its Kentucky range. USGS NAS does not list it as nonindigenous in the state.
Full species profile
