North Carolina’s 3,514 black bear records split between two landscapes that could hardly look more different. In the west they follow the Blue Ridge through Pisgah and Nantahala national forests and Great Smoky Mountains National Park, with Buncombe County leading all others. In the east they gather across the flat, wet coastal plain, where Dare, Hyde, and Tyrrell counties carry some of the heaviest totals in the state.
A mast economy in the mountains
Mountain bears live by the hardwood calendar. Spring sends them to new growth and whatever carrion winter left behind, summer to berries, and fall to acorns and other hard mast, the food that decides how fat a bear gets before denning. The unbroken canopy of the Smokies and the cove forests along the Blue Ridge Parkway supply that in abundance, though even in this core range most visitors never see a bear; the animals hear or scent people long before a person knows one is near.
Bears of the pocosins
The coastal bears work different country: dense, shrubby pocosin and swamp forest where a large animal can stay hidden in cover a person can barely push through. Reports there rise in May through July, when breeding adults and dispersing young bears travel widely, and hold strong into fall as bears feed heavily ahead of a mild coastal winter in which denning comes late and light.
Status in North Carolina
NatureServe ranks the American black bear S4, Apparently Secure, in North Carolina, and the species is native to the state. USGS NAS does not list it as nonindigenous here.
Full species profile
