A 400-pound black bear is dead after running into the path of a vehicle on a Martin County highway. The driver told deputies the bear darted into the roadway before the collision. The bear died at the scene. The driver wasn’t hurt.
It happened on SW Martin Highway near Warfield Boulevard, in the rural western part of the county near Indiantown. The Martin County Sheriff’s Office said the bear was in the middle of traffic when the vehicle hit it, CBS12 reported. The driver stopped right away and called 911. The Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission removed the bear, and traffic was flowing normally again before long.
At 400 pounds, this was a big animal. In fact, it was likely an adult. The sheriff’s office turned the crash into a reminder when reporting the incident on social media. Wildlife is an important resident on the road, just like people are with their own vehicles. the county’s rural roads, it said, especially around dawn and dusk when animals are on the move. It’s not even the first bear to turn up on the Treasure Coast this month, as that’s already happened as well.
That’s right – a black bear was filmed earlier this month swimming through a waterway in a Port St. Lucie neighborhood nearby. That makes two in a few weeks, in an area not exactly known for bears, at least not usually. So it’s worth asking why: why are these bears showing up, and why do so many die on the road?
Why Bears Turn Up Where You Don’t Expect Them
Florida has more black bears than people tend to assume, and they end up all over the place. The state’s only native bear nearly vanished decades ago, down to a few hundred, before conservationists were able to boost the population back up to 4,000. As it turns out, bears need space. An adult male can range across roughly 60 square miles, and he’ll roam a lot of it looking for food and mates.
Summer is a restless season for them. It overlaps with breeding, when males in particular travel farther than usual, and young bears strike out to find territory of their own. As they move, they run into a landscape carved up by roads and subdivisions. A bear swimming through a Port St. Lucie canal or crossing a rural highway isn’t lost. It’s doing what bears do, in a state with less and less open ground to do it in.
On Florida Roads, Cars Are the Biggest Threat to Bears
Despite all the worry about bears, the danger mostly runs the other way. Vehicle collisions are the leading cause of death for Florida’s black bears. They account for about 90 percent of the deaths the state knows about. A few hundred bears are killed on Florida roads in a typical year, by the FWC’s count, most of them at dawn or dusk when the animals are moving. The worst stretches are near the Ocala National Forest and parts of the Panhandle, but a bear can step onto almost any road in the state.
The advice for drivers is simple enough. Slow down on rural and wooded roads, especially at first light and after dark, and treat any wildlife-crossing sign as a real warning. If you do hit a bear, the FWC asks that you call it in and not approach the animal, even if it looks dead. The driver in Martin County did exactly that, stopping immediately and phoning for help. The bear didn’t survive, but no person was hurt, and the highway was clear within the hour.