GRAND RAPIDS — As expected even before the season started, a bumper crop of wild food in the woods kept some bears away from hunter-bait stations this fall and held Minnesota’s bear hunting harvest down compared to last year.

Wildlife managers expected the harvest to be down due to the

excess of acorns, berries and other wild food.

Combined with unseasonably warm temperatures to start the season in September, which likely kept hunters out of the woods in some cases, the preliminary harvest for 2023 was 1,802, down 22% from 2022 and down 19% from the five-year average, according to data from the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources. The harvest has been as high as 3,203 as recently as 2020.

The season ran Sept. 1 to Oct. 15, but the vast majority of bears are harvested during the first two weeks of the season each year.

Minnesota has a robust population of 12,000-16,000 black bears, mostly across the northern half of the state, with bears expanding farther south and west in recent years. The one exception is the northeastern part of the state, where the DNR has reduced available bear hunting permits because the population seems to have fallen off in areas of deeper forest with no farmland nearby.

Demand for bear hunting permits is still at near-record levels. This year, the DNR had 26,138 applicants put in for the lottery of 4,035 permits, the most applications in 20 years. In addition to those 4,035 quota permits, hundreds more permits are sold in the no-quota zone, where an unlimited number of licenses are available.

The ample wild food in the woods also led to a sharp decrease in reports of ”

problem bears

” this summer. Complaints to the DNR from cabin, home and business owners about problem or nuisance bears are the lowest they have been in at least seven years and are 40% below the long-term average, said Andrew Tri, biologist with the Minnesota DNR. There were about 300 complaints through August this year compared to nearly 600 in 2020.

John Myers reports on the outdoors, natural resources and the environment for the Duluth News Tribune. You can reach him at [email protected].