by Ted Alcorn for New Mexico In Depth
Bears in trees. Bears nabbed near schools. Bears electrocuted on light poles. Bears hit on highways. In New Mexico this year, human-bear encounters have made inescapable news. And data kept by the Department of Wildlife show just what an outlier it’s been.
New Mexico has already killed more bears in “conflicts” with people this year than in any 12-month period on record, and the season has seven months to go.
From April 1 to September 8, game officers or private landowners killed 254 black bears including after the animals broke into homes, killed livestock, or otherwise ran afoul of people. That is nearly four times the annual average over 25 years of published statistics and passes the previous record of 242, set over the full 2011-12 license year, when a dry winter and an unusually large bear population combined to drive animals into towns.
Hunters have killed another 253 bears since the season opened in August, and at least 41 more died on roads or by other accidents.
This story was originally published by New Mexico In Depth
The killing is geographically concentrated. The high country from Santa Fe through the Pecos to Mora, which the department manages as Bear Zone 4, accounts for 69 of the conflict kills. Nick Forman, who runs the department’s bear and cougar program, attributes the cluster to towns pressed against the foothills and to the Hermit’s Peak/Calf Canyon burn scar, which drought hit harder than intact forest this year.
In some cases, the department tranquilizes and relocates bears, but that’s atypical. This year more than four were killed for each one moved. A relocated bear’s prospects are also poor. In a Wisconsin study of more than 1,200 bears trapped and moved after causing trouble, researchers estimated only about half survived any given year, well below the norm for bears.
But set against the state’s overall bear population and the booms and busts of history, this year’s toll is less dire than it sounds. The department estimates the state holds roughly 9,000 black bears, a population Forman says has been stable if not growing for a decade. This year’s conflict kills come to about 3 percent of that.
The last two winters when his team checked on a sample of bears in their dens — a routine scientific practice — they were “super, super fat” thanks to an earlier bumper piñon crop, and every female had cubs. But the aberrantly hot and dry weather in 2026 brought a string of shortfalls, even for bears well-adapted to drought and a range of food sources. With almost no winter precipitation, there was little green grass to greet bears leaving their dens. A late monsoon delayed the prickly pears that bears count on in July. And chokecherries, currants, and huckleberries are only coming in now, almost two months late.
Forman expects encounters to slow as acorns and juniper berries ripen and the bears head back to the mountains to hibernate by November. An optimist, and a self-professed member of “Team Bear,” he’s pinning his hopes on winter forecasts of a powerful El Niño and heavy snow.“
When they come out of the dens in spring,” he said, “they’re going to come out to mountains that have a bunch of green grass out there for them, and a bunch of foods, and they’re going to just completely forget about the grocery stores that they found out in town.”