Pennsylvania’s 1,293 black bear records reach most of the state but concentrate where the forest does. The ridge-and-plateau country of the north and east leads: Monroe, Luzerne, Pike, and Carbon counties in the Poconos, and the big public timber of Sproul and Susquehannock state forests farther west.
Big woods and the mast year
Pennsylvania bears run on acorns. Spring emergence sends them to skunk cabbage, grasses, and insects, and summer to berries, but the year turns on the fall oak crop. In good mast years a bear can feed out its hyperphagia inside a small home range; in poor ones it roams widely, and that is when bears turn up in farm country and backyards far from the big woods. The record reflects that engine, climbing from May through July as bears breed and young animals disperse, then staying active deep into fall.
Uncommon even where common
For all that, Pennsylvania is full of people who have lived their whole lives in bear country without seeing a bear. Black bears are retiring, largely nocturnal near settlement, and quick to leave when they scent a person. What most people find is sign instead: tracks in mud, scat full of berry seeds, a flipped stone or torn-apart log where a bear hunted grubs. The bear that has learned to find food near homes is the dangerous exception, and keeping garbage and feeders out of reach is how it stays the exception.
Status in Pennsylvania
NatureServe ranks the American black bear S5, Secure, in Pennsylvania, and the species is native to the state. USGS NAS does not list it as nonindigenous here.
Full species profile
