New Hampshire’s 933 black bear records reach into every county in the state, but they thicken where the forest does. Grafton County, which holds much of White Mountain National Forest, leads with 249, and the record follows the big timber north into Coos County and southwest into the wooded hills of Cheshire County.
Beech country bears
New Hampshire’s northern hardwood forest runs on a boom-and-bust food supply, and bears ride it. Spring bears eat new grass, sedges, and insects torn from rotting logs; by late summer they shift to berries, and in fall to beechnuts and acorns, the calorie-rich mast that determines how well they enter the den. Records climb sharply in May, when hungry, newly emerged bears travel widely, and stay high through July as breeding pairs and dispersing young males cover ground. Encounters remain uncommon; most people who walk the Whites for years have only sign, a clawed beech, a shredded log, scat on the trail, to show for it.
A deep winter shutdown
Black bears do not truly hibernate, but a denning New Hampshire bear comes close, going months without eating or drinking while cubs are born in January and nursed in the dark. State records thin to a handful from November through March, the months when nearly every bear in New Hampshire lies in a den under a root mass, in a hollow tree, or tucked into a brush pile.
Status in New Hampshire
NatureServe ranks the American black bear S5, Secure, in New Hampshire, and the species is native across the state. USGS NAS does not list it as nonindigenous here.
Full species profile
