Black Bear in Ohio

WARREN COUNTY, OH -- The American Black Bear is a several hundred pound native Ohio mammal that lived in our virgin hardwood forest until about 1850. By then settlers had cleared the state of all but about five percent of its natural woodlands, and the bears, along with other forest-dwelling wildlife, were extirpated from Ohio.

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In the 1900’s Ohio’s forests began to regenerate along its eastern and southern borders with Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and eastern Kentucky where mature forests still existed. With the restoration of our forests, Black Bears began expanding their range back into Ohio, and by 1973, occasional reports of bear sightings began to come in.

Within the past few weeks, a bear was sighted in Clinton County just south of Wilmington. Such sightings in southwestern Ohio are still quite rare with only a half dozen or so reported from 1993 to 2022 per this map published by the Ohio Division of Wildlife. Of the hundreds of sightings reported statewide these days, about half are actually confirmed.

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