Black Bears Around Tallahassee

Black bears turn up in Tallahassee because Leon County sits inside the range of the Apalachicola bear subpopulation.

The Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission places Leon in its East Panhandle Bear Management Unit, a 13-county unit that also takes in Bay, Calhoun, Franklin, Gadsden, Gulf, Jackson, Jefferson, Liberty, Madison, Taylor, Wakulla and Washington counties, and names the subpopulation after the Apalachicola National Forest. FWC's goals for the unit include forested connections with the West Panhandle and Big Bend units and fewer human-bear conflicts and vehicle-related bear deaths.

The forest itself is large. The U.S. Forest Service says President Franklin D. Roosevelt established the Apalachicola National Forest in 1932 and calls it the state's largest forest at 567,742 acres; the National Forests in Florida supervisor's office is at 325 John Knox Road in Tallahassee. The same Forest Service page says landscape-scale wildlife corridors give larger wildlife such as black bears the space to roam and breed.

Food is what turns a passing bear into a regular visitor. FWC's Living with Bears page says a bear's sense of smell can detect odors over a mile away, and that the calories a bear can eat from one garbage can often surpass what it finds in an entire day. Bears that lose their fear of people become habituated and food conditioned, and FWC says such bears are often killed by vehicles, illegal killing or management actions. In the East Panhandle unit, FWC's call statistics list bears in garbage as the reason for 31 percent of calls from 2016 to 2025, close behind general interactions at 32 percent.

FWC's estimate for the bears around Leon County rose from 411 to 653 in 2002 to an average of 1,060 in 2015.

The agency's bear management unit table gives the East Panhandle (Apalachicola) figure as an 86 percent increase from 570 in 2002, and puts the statewide population at approximately 4,050 bears. Only the Central (Ocala) unit had a larger estimate in that table.

Source: FWC Bear Management Units.

Bear range across Florida, including the forests around Tallahassee, has recovered as well. FWC's distribution map page says bear range shrank to 18 percent of its historic extent by the mid 1970s, with bears remaining in core areas of large public lands, and that bears have since re-occupied 49 percent of it. FWC's bear rules page notes the Florida black bear was removed from the state threatened species list in August 2012.

The bears seen in Leon County are big animals. FWC's bear facts page lists adult males at 250 to 350 pounds and females at 130 to 180, with males usually living within a 60 square mile area and females within 15. About 80 percent of the diet comes from plants such as fruits, nuts and berries. Breeding runs from June to August, and cubs are born around late January or early February.

FWC logged 9,124 bear calls and 745 bear deaths in the East Panhandle unit from 2016 to 2025, and most of the deaths were on roads.

The yearly figures below come from the East Panhandle statistics FWC publishes; FWC separates core complaints, which are conflicts, from non-core reports of interactions that could be positive or negative.

Source: FWC East Panhandle BMU statistics. FWC's call list shows two entries labeled 2022; the first sits in the 2021 position of its 2016 to 2025 series and is shown here as 2021.

Two FWC pages describe the unit's share of statewide calls differently. The East Panhandle page says over 25 percent of statewide bear-related calls each year come from the unit, while the statewide BMU page gives the East Panhandle 15 percent of the 60,200 calls FWC received from 2016 to 2025, behind the Central unit at 45 percent and the West Panhandle at 21 percent.

On its bears and roads page, FWC states that vehicle collisions are responsible for 90 percent of known bear deaths and that bears are most active around dusk and dawn, when more collisions happen. It lists wildlife underpasses, warning signs and slower speed limits in frequent roadkill areas among the measures in use. The East Panhandle unit accounted for 22 percent of the 2,717 Florida bears killed by vehicles from 2016 to 2025, second to the Central unit at 57 percent, according to the statewide BMU figures.

FWC's advice to Tallahassee households starts with securing garbage.

Its Living with Bears page asks residents of bear areas such as Leon County to keep household garbage in a shed, garage or wildlife-resistant container, to put it out on the morning of pickup rather than the night before, to feed pets indoors, to clean grills and store them in a locked place, and to pick ripe fruit and remove fallen fruit from the ground. Its attractants page adds that bird feeders should be removed or hung at least 10 feet above the ground and 10 feet from trees or structures, and that screened enclosures will not keep bears out.

When a bear is already in a Tallahassee yard, FWC says to make sure the bear has a clear escape route and then, from a safe location, scare it away by yelling, banging pots and pans or using an air horn. Children with a long walk to a bus stop can carry a whistle or small air horn, should stay in a group when a bear is seen, and FWC should be told about a bear that lingers near a stop. FWC directs human-bear conflicts to its nearest regional office and asks anyone who sees or suspects bear feeding to call the Wildlife Alert Hotline at 888-404-3922.

Feeding is regulated, not just discouraged. FWC's bear rules prohibit intentionally feeding bears, and prohibit leaving food or garbage that attracts bears and creates a nuisance after written notification from the Commission; the penalty system for wildlife feeding violations starts with a $100 civil penalty. FWC's bear management program has nine dedicated staff, three of them based in Tallahassee, plus area bear biologists who each coordinate three to 10 trained bear response contractors.

Leon County has joined FWC in BearWise education about bear-proof garbage.

A Leon County news release announced a BearWise public education event with FWC at the Fort Braden Community Center, 16387 Blountstown Highway, describing BearWise as a community-wide effort to educate residents and businesses in bear-prone areas; the county said it and FWC had already trained front line staff, and a bear-resistant trash can valued at $300 was to be raffled to attendees.

Leon County households can no longer look to state cost-share money for cans. FWC's BearWise page says a total of $2.1 million in BearWise funding has gone to local governments since 2007, including over $1.4 million with support from the Legislature and $680,000 from the Fish and Wildlife Foundation of Florida, and that FWC is no longer offering BearWise cost-share funding. FWC's attractants page now tells households to ask whether their waste service provider offers bear-resistant trash cans or dumpsters.

Part of Leon County is inside the East Panhandle Bear Hunting Zone, the zone with the most permits in the 2026 season.

FWC's bear hunting page says the zone is bounded on the north by Interstate 10, on the east by the Aucilla River, on the south by the Gulf and on the west by State Road 79, includes the Apalachicola Wildlife Management Area, and covers all or parts of 11 counties including Leon, Wakulla and Jefferson. The 2026 statewide season runs December 5 to 27.

Source: FWC Florida black bear hunting page.

The hunt returned in 2025. FWC's August 13, 2025 release says commissioners meeting in Havana approved rules creating Bear Hunting Zones in four of the seven units, with 187 permits, each allowing one bear, issued by random drawing at $5 per application. Its December 30, 2025 release reports that 172 permits were issued and 52 bears were harvested. The previous hunt, in October 2015, took 304 bears, according to FWC's bear management page, which describes hunting as a tool used to stabilize subpopulation numbers. FWC's 2025 release adds that managing bear populations does not manage human-bear conflicts, so garbage control remains the main advice for Leon County neighborhoods.

Last verified: October 18, 2026, against the FWC East Panhandle and statewide bear unit pages, its living with bears, attractants, roads, rules, facts, distribution, BearWise, management and bear hunting pages, two FWC hunt releases from 2025, the Leon County BearWise release and the Forest Service description of Florida's national forests.