A new program from the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission (FWC) lets some bear hunting start early on certain private lands. But to qualify, landowners have to meet certain criteria.
Michael Orlando is the bear management coordinator for the state’s wildlife commission. He says landowners must have conservation efforts underway to qualify, “like prescribed fire or … removing exotics.”
“If they…jump through all those hoops, then they can actually be awarded into this,” Orlando says. “So it is kind of an incentive to have these large tracts of property, you know, stay on the landscape and not being converted into anything other than good quality wildlife habitat.”
The land also has to cover at least 5,000 contiguous acres.
Orlando says he sees it as an all-around win. He says the program helps conserve habitat and manage the bear population.
“The benefits are pretty easy to actually describe,” Orlando says. “Having some incentive to keep large contiguous tracts of land in 50% plus of bear habitat in wild areas is obviously going to be good for bears and all wildlife, right? So having some incentive to keep those large tracts of land in perpetuity hopefully to keep wild lands contiguous and bears and other critters on the landscape.”
“The other part of this is to help us with our stated objective to start to lower our population growth rates,” he says.
In recent years, residents in wooded areas throughout Florida have grown concerned about increasing numbers of bears coming into their neighborhoods. It’s something Franklin County Sheriff A.J. Smith says he sees regularly, and he thinks a hunt is a good way to manage the population.
“It’s like any other game. It needs to be regulated,” Smith says. “I live in downtown Apalachicola, and a couple of months ago, there was one in a tree a block from my house. So these bears are born and raised in our communities.”
Others have pushed back on hunting bears in Florida, saying the best way to keep bears from coming out of the woods and into neighborhoods is better trash management. Bears are hungry, especially in the fall as they’re looking to pack on weight for the winter, and trash has a lot of calories.
Clay Henderson, an environmental lawyer who helped push for the creation of Florida’s wildlife commission, says he has concerns about how the bear hunts have been run in the past and disagrees with the new program for hunting on private lands.
“I understand the incentive nature of this, but the reality of it is basically a reward to large landowners to be able to charge trophy hunters a large amount of money to guarantee to have a trophy,” Henderson says.
Henderson says the state allows hunters on private lands to use feeding stations — something he takes issue with.
“There’s not much sport in it because the reality is that most of these bears are actually harvested around feeding stations. So the hunter stands there waiting for the bear to come have its last meal, and that’s not much sport at all,” Henderson says.
But John Organ, a former wildlife manager from Massachusetts, says hunting is a proven way to manage animal populations and ensure they don’t expand beyond the habitat that’s available.
“I think having a limited bear season when a bear population is expanding, it’s a way to exert some control over the population and hopefully to minimize conflicts with humans, because when human tolerance declines for a given species, that can have bad implications for conservation,” Organ says. “We want to keep these animals on the landscape and we want to prevent conflicts that could turn public acceptance away from them.”
When it comes to the argument of trophy hunting, Organ says that’s not what he thinks is happening. He says the program helps provide protected habitat for bears.
“Trophy hunting is a loaded term, and it can mean different things to different people. I certainly don’t see this as an endorsement of trophy hunting,” Organ says. “I’ve looked at the guidelines for this program. It’s not a simple matter in order to get one of these private landowner permits.”
2025’s bear hunt saw 52 tags collected through the month of December. This year’s hunt begins in early December.
