Betsy McClain has never shot anything but the breeze yet the Longwood animal advocate hopes to win a bear-hunting permit for Florida’s first hunt in a decade.
If lucky, she’ll be taking aim at saving a bear by blocking a bonafide sportsman from securing one of 187 bear permits the Florida Fish & Wildlife Conservation Commission plans to distribute by lottery to licensed hunters to participate in the controversial December hunt.
The state will begin accepting applications Friday at 10 a.m.
“I consider myself pretty experienced with black bears,” said McClain, 71, who lives near the Little Wekiva River, where bears often roam. “I’ve had black bears on my patio, in my garage…I’ve had them in my yard for as long as I’ve lived here. I love them, I really do.”
Conservation groups like the Sierra Club and Speak Up Wekiva have encouraged their members and others opposed to hunting the state’s largest land mammal to buy a hunting license, apply for a tag allowing a hunter to “harvest” one bear, but then skip the hunt.
“Spare a bear, bag a tag,” an email from the Florida chapter of the Sierra Club reminded supporters.
The cost to enter the bear-tag lottery is $5 per application. The lottery winners must pay $100 for a bear tag if they are Florida residents and $300 if they live out of state.
Florida admits plan for December bear hunt, its first in a decade
Blocking hunters this year could increase kill quotas in future bear hunts because hunter success rates figure into the equation, according to FWC.
The agency may tweak this year’s bear harvest quota of 187 before the application window opens Friday, said George Warthen, the agency’s chief conservation officer. He said the last-minute adjustment wasn’t intended to thwart the strategy to foil the hunt, but he also noted the bear tags are meant for hunters.
“We set harvest quotas for a specific reason. We use good science, good data to set those quotas,” Warthen said.
“This is an opportunity that’s been put out there for hunters and we hope people stick to that,” he said. “If somebody is trying to buy a permit for the sole purpose of not using it, what they really end up doing is skewing the data and making it more difficult for a wildlife biologist or a wildlife manager to do their jobs.”
Hunt opponents say their goal is to keep bear permits out of the hands of hunters, in part because they argue the state ignored the public’s concerns about the planned hunt.
“We’re doing this because the Florida wildlife commission was utterly dismissive of public testimony opposing a hunt and uninterested in the lack of public support for a hunt,” said Susannah Randolph, president of the Sierra Club Florida Chapter, citing opinion polls show overwhelming opposition. “Our people are very interested in saving our bears from a repeat of 2015. Everybody remembers the terrible, horrible images of dead bears last time.”
Scheduled for a week, the 2015 hunt was halted after two days and 304 dead bears, shy of FWC’s “harvest” objective of 320.
Nearly half — 143 — were killed in a 12-county region that includes Lake, Marion, Orange, Seminole and Volusia counties.
The kill quota in the same region is set at 18 for this year’s hunt.
Chuck O’Neal, director of Central Florida-based conservation group Speak Up Wekiva, said the vast majority of Floridians are not licensed hunters and disagree with the wildlife agency’s decision to resume hunting black bears, once listed by the state as a threatened species.
He criticized FWC for green-lighting a hunt before completing an updated census of the state’s bear population.
The wildlife agency estimates 4,050 bears roam Florida, about 1,200 in Central Florida.
O’Neal said he expects “at least hundreds but maybe thousands” of non-hunters will apply for a tag.
Life-long hunter Chuck Echenique, president of The Future of Hunting in Florida, shrugged off the strategy of bear hunt foes.
“They’re perfectly within their rights to do it,” Echenique said of non-hunters getting licensed and applying for a bear tag. “If it means that much to them to spend the money to buy a license, then go ahead. You know, for some of them, it’s probably the very first time in their lives that they’re actually putting their own money towards real conservation, where it will actually get spent on management.”
Applying for a bear tag requires a state hunting license.
A Florida resident annual hunting license costs $17.00, a five-year license for a Florida resident costs $79.
Licensees may apply as many times as they want Sept. 12 through Sept. 22 at 11:59 p.m.
To apply for a bear tag, visit GoOutdoorsFlorida.com or complete an application worksheet in person at a tax collector’s office. The hunt is set for Dec. 6 through Dec. 28.
