Mark Ternent Quotations

Learning about bears and being aware of their habits is a responsibility that comes with living in rural and suburban Pennsylvania or recreating in the outdoors.

Over the past 25 years, only sixty-three 15-year-old or older male bears have been examined at check stations during the hunting seasons. Equally interesting is that Seaman's bear outweighs most 15-year-old male bears, which?typically weigh between 400 and 600 pounds.

Black bear aggression is most often the result of a human intentionally or unintentionally threatening a bear, its cubs, or a nearby food source, and the best reaction is to defuse the threat by leaving the area in a quiet, calm manner.

Bears needn't be feared, nor should they be dismissed as harmless. They simply need to be respected.

Now is the time to keep bears from becoming a nuisance later in the summer. Bears that wander near residential areas in search of food are less likely to stay or return if they do not find anything rewarding. Conversely, if bears find food in your backyard they quickly learn to associate residential areas with food and begin to spend more time in those areas. Encounters between humans and bears increase, as does property damage, the risk of human injury and vehicle accidents involving bears.

Any time Pennsylvania hunters exceed the state record bear harvest by 25 percent, you have to figure they had some things working in their favor. To place things in perspective, the statewide bear harvest in 1969 was 295.

As a result of Pennsylvania's large human and bear populations, bears and people are coming into contact frequently. These encounters occur because housing developments and businesses continue to encroach into bear habitat and more bears are living closer to people than ever before. Chance encounters in the field also appear to be more common than before in some areas.

This is something the Game Commission has been doing for nearly 30 years. It's the cornerstone of our program, really.

Still, even in our best years, our hunter success rate for bears is about 3 percent. You have to hunt a lot of years to harvest a bear, and it's rare to get more than one in a lifetime. It's even more rare to get one that big, so it's quite an accomplishment.