Armed with updated data showing a “robust” and growing black-bear population, the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission is working to hold another bear hunt.
Commission Chairman Brian Yablonski on Wednesday directed staff and commissioners to prepare to discuss during a June meeting how a hunt could be managed. A commission spokeswoman said later a decision has not been made to hold a hunt.
“There is a process of how the hunt is set up, what the quota objectives are,” Yablonski said during a commission meeting at the Wyndham Grand Jupiter at Harbourside Place in Jupiter. “There’s a ton of options out there.”
The Florida Administrative Code already includes an outline for an annual bear hunt to be held in late October, and Yablonski said it’s up to the panel to set quotas.
The commission in October 2015 held its first bear hunt in more than two decades as a means to slow the increase of black bears in the state and to reduce dangerous interactions between bears and humans. But the hunt was highly controversial, with opponents protesting in parts of the state.
Jacki Lopez, the Center for Biological Diversity’s Florida director, said Wednesday opponents have “been anticipating” the commission putting the quota issue on an upcoming agenda.
Conservation groups headed by the Center for Biological Diversity and the Animal Legal Defense Fund have petitioned the federal government to approve an endangered-species protection designation for Florida black bears.
The commission set a collective “harvest objective” of 320 bears that could be killed in four parts of the state.
The areas are the eastern Panhandle region, which includes the northwestern Big Bend area to west of Apalachicola Bay; the South region, which includes Broward, Collier, Hendry, Lee, Miami-Dade, Monroe, and Palm Beach counties, the North region, which goes from Jacksonville west to Hamilton and Suwannee counties, and the Central region, which includes the St. Johns River watershed to the Ocala National Forest.