Maryland’s 186 black bear records tell a western story: Garrett County alone holds nearly half of them, with Allegany and Frederick counties trailing, and only a thin scatter of reports reaching the counties around Baltimore and Washington.
Mountain bears at the edge of the suburbs
Maryland’s resident bears belong to the Appalachian forest west of the Piedmont, in the big wooded tracts around Deep Creek Lake, Dans Mountain, and Mount Nebo. Bears were nearly gone from the state by the mid-twentieth century and recovered as the western forests regrew, but the recovery has stayed west. Records in Baltimore and Howard counties are mostly young males wandering through on dispersal, not the sign of a spreading population, and such travelers usually move on within days.
A summer crest, then the den
Reports crest from May through July, when bears breed and yearlings set out on their own, and fall away to almost nothing in the denning months. Even in Garrett County, where a resident is most likely to share ground with bears, most encounters amount to a glimpse of an animal already leaving. The encounters that go wrong nearly always start with a bear that has learned to find food near people, which is why unsecured garbage matters more than anything a hiker does on the trail.
Status in Maryland
NatureServe ranks the American black bear S3, Vulnerable, in Maryland, a rank that reflects how confined the state’s population remains. The species is native to its Maryland range, and USGS NAS does not list it as nonindigenous in the state.
Full species profile
