9 Investigates: Is
Florida's bear hunt necessary?
It started out being
250 bears?
Now it is up to 320?
Black
Bears food tupelo, saw
palmetto, blueberry are being gathered up and sold faster than it can grow!
But 9 Investigates
discovered that FWC doesn’t know exactly how many bears live in the state.
“Most animal
populations should be estimated every generation, which is roughly every eight
years for bears,” said Sarah Barrett, of FWC’s Black Bear Management Program.
“We have updated numbers on four of the subpopulations and are collecting the
data for the remaining three subpopulations.”
“If they’re going to
hunt, they may as well kill them all because they have nothing to eat,” Lake
County resident David Baumgardner said.
Baumgardner’s family
has lived in Lake County for three generations. He said his family has always
shared the land with the bears, but recently they have had far more
interactions.
“I have seen more
bears, morning, noon, afternoon and night in the past six years as the bears
scurry about trying to find native food sources than I have in the previous 65
years,” Baumgardner said.
No comments:
Post a Comment