12 things to know about bears in Missouri right now

Missouri’s growing population of black bears is doing well, with the animals expanding their range in many areas, say state wildlife officials.

That expansion includes places around the St. Louis region, as bears spread beyond what state experts currently consider their “core” range that largely covers the sparsely populated Ozarks and the southern part of Missouri.

Bears are now more commonly spreading to the north, toward — and sometimes beyond — the Missouri River. Near the metro area, bears are becoming more common in Franklin, Jefferson, and St. Louis counties, said Nate Bowersock, a black bear and furbearer biologist for the Missouri Department of Conservation.

State officials estimate that there are currently about 1,000 bears in Missouri. The population is growing at an estimated rate of about 9% annually, putting it on track to potentially double in a decade.

The state offers plenty of good habitat and quality resources to enable the population to grow for the foreseeable future, said Bowersock.

“We can definitely handle quite a few more bears,” he said. “There’s quite a bit of room.”

The growing ranks of Missouri’s bears represent a remarkable comeback. Though once abundant, unregulated hunting made them rare by 1850, and by the 1930s, the species was thought to have been extirpated, or driven to local extinction, in the state. (Genetic analysis, however, suggests that a small, remnant population of bears had survived in remote parts of Missouri’s Ozarks, undetected by officials, despite people reporting occasional sightings that “were kind of shrugged off,” Bowersock said.)

The region’s bears began to rebound in the 1950s and ’60s, when Arkansas launched a reintroduction campaign using black bears from northern places, such as Minnesota and Manitoba. That influx of northern bears helped the species gradually reestablish itself in forested areas straddling parts of southern Missouri, Arkansas, and Oklahoma.