Louisiana’s 119 black bear records belong to water. The record runs through Madison and Concordia parishes in the Mississippi River bottomlands of the northeast, and St. Mary and Iberia parishes in the Atchafalaya Basin to the south, the two great surviving blocks of swamp forest in the state.
A bear of the bottomlands
The Louisiana black bear is a creature of bottomland hardwood and cypress swamp, feeding on acorns, blackberries, palmetto fruit, and insects in some of the wettest bear habitat on the continent. Records cluster around that cover, from Boeuf Wildlife Management Area in the north to the Atchafalaya Delta and Attakapas Island wildlife management areas near the coast, and the wide gaps between them trace how much of that forest has been cleared for agriculture. A bear here travels sloughs and wooded levees rather than ridgelines.
A short den season in the Deep South
Reports arrive in every month of the year, with rises in May and again from September through December, when bears range widely for fall foods. Louisiana’s winters are mild enough that denning runs short and shallow compared to northern bears, and an animal may be active on a warm midwinter day. Sightings stay uncommon even in the best habitat; a person can spend years in the Atchafalaya country and never see one.
Status in Louisiana
NatureServe ranks the black bear S3, Vulnerable, in Louisiana, a rank that reflects how much bottomland forest the state has lost. The species is native to its Louisiana range, and USGS NAS does not list it as nonindigenous in the state.
Full species profile
