Black bears vanished from Ohio by the late 1800s, hunted and logged out along with most of the state’s original forest. The 63 records in the state’s occurrence data today represent a slow, ongoing return, not a resident population in the way Ohio once had one. Most of the bears now moving through the state are young males dispersing out of established populations in West Virginia and Pennsylvania, looking for new territory rather than settling in. Killdeer Plains Wildlife Area, Big Island Wildlife Area, and The Wilds, a large reclaimed-land conservation area in southeastern Ohio, are among the places records have turned up, but a report at any of them is still a genuinely rare event.
Records peak in late spring and summer, from May through June and again in August, which lines up with when yearling males typically leave their mother’s territory and start wandering in search of new ground. Ohio’s NatureServe rank is S1, critically imperiled, the state’s most serious conservation category, reflecting how small and marginal the current Ohio presence still is. The species is native to Ohio in every historical sense, and its slow reappearance is one of the more closely watched wildlife stories in the state.
Full species profile
