2 black bear cubs hit, killed by car

By SAUNDRA AMRHEIN

© St. Petersburg Times,
published September 23, 2001

SPRING HILL -- The fragile population of the black bear in coastal Hernando and Citrus counties became even more precarious after two male cubs were killed Friday night, apparently hit by a car while trying to cross Osowaw Boulevard.

Motorists discovered the two dead cubs lying in the middle of the road on Osowaw just west of Forest Glen about 7:45 Friday night, said Niki Everitt, a bear hotline coordinator (596-4157) with the Gulf Coast Conservancy.

After she learned of the accident, Everitt called the Hernando County Sheriff's Office, whose officials said they turned over the incident to the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission.

The deaths are devastating, she said, because the two were possibly the only cubs in the area belonging to an imperiled group of black bears that live between Aripeka and Chassahowitzka.

There are only about 15 bears in that swath of land, said Josh Brown, a graduate student with the University of Kentucky, who is part of a team brought in four years ago by the Southwest Florida Water Management District to study the population.

"Down here when we have a population of 15 bears and you lose two in one night, that's a severe hit," Brown said.

Making matters worse, most of the females in the group are at or nearing the point when they stop reproducing, between ages 13 and 15, he said.

The two killed Friday -- weighing 24 and 28 pounds, according to Brown -- were apparently trying to cross Osowaw Boulevard from West Hernando Christian School property into the Weekiwachee Preserve, Everitt said. They might have been following their mother, who remained at the edge of the woods on the north side of the road, wailing for her young.

"When we left, the mother was still in the woods crying," Everitt said.

The vehicle that hit the bears left the scene, she said.

The accident points to the need for large continuous tracts of preservation land for the bears and the dangers of fragmented habitat, both Everitt and Brown said. It also demonstrates the need for underpasses for bears and other wildlife.

Both Osowaw and State Road 50 are popular crossings for the bears. Wal-Mart has caused a stir recently because it wants to build a supercenter just to the east of this accident site at U.S. 19 and Osowaw Boulevard. The last bear hit in a car accident was last spring when a male bear was struck on U.S. 19. It suffered a broken leg.

"Every year in Florida we lose 50 bears to road kill," said Brown, whose work includes trying to devise a management plan for the state to handle the bears in the area for the next 15 to 20 years.

Brown thinks the mother bear and her cubs had been moving north from the Aripeka area, where Swiftmud controls pockets of preserve land.

Now he worries for the mother's safety.

"If these cubs were hit in the middle of the road, she's going to be in the area calling for them, sniffing around for them," Brown said. "There's a good chance she might be hit by a car, too."

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