Last year in Maryland, hunters killed about 200,000 mourning doves and 87,000 deer. Squirrels and rabbits died by the tens of thousands.
Nobody held a protest or filed a lawsuit. Instead, it was a typical year in a state that, despite its urban and suburban centers, has more than 100,000 licensed hunters.
This year, everything has changed. Blue state, meet black bear.
As Maryland prepares for its first bear hunt in 51 years, hunters are lining up for the challenge: More than 1,600 have applied for the 200 licenses that will be handed out in a lottery this week.
But the response has been equally strong from hunting opponents, who have picketed the governor's mansion, dragged state regulators in front of a legislative committee and threatened legal action to stop a hunt set to begin next month.
"We've had people comment that they hope that we die, instead of killing the bears," said Harry Spiker, the state's chief bear biologist.
All this for a hunt that will net, at most, 30 bears.
Maryland is the latest East Coast state to struggle with controlling black bears, whose comeback was an environmental success story until it became a nuisance.
But Maryland is also what political scientists call a blue state, the kind of densely settled and traditionally liberal place where animal rights advocates have a better chance of being heard. In New Jersey, another blue state, last year's inaugural bear hunt turned into such a public-relations debacle that authorities called off this year's hunt.
Maryland officials say they need the hunt to thin a bear population that has grown so fast that the animals are invading cornfields and back porches in western counties.
Maryland's bear population hit a low of about a dozen in the 1950s but has rebounded to about 500, state scientists say. The bears are concentrated in the state's two westernmost counties, Garrett and Allegany, but have been spotted as far east as Rockville and Aberdeen. Similar growth in the population has been seen from Virginia to Maine in the past couple of decades.
The reasons are the same everywhere: less hunting and more food. In particular, the decline of logging and farming in the East has revived old forests, with the acorns, hickory nuts and wild cherries that black bears love. Also, eastern black bears are learning to live off what civilization has to offer, readily teaching themselves dumpster-diving and beehive-raiding skills.
"You've got people moving out and living next to bears, and you've got bears moving in and living next to people," said Mark Ternent, a wildlife biologist with the Pennsylvania Game Commission. "The end result is that people and bears are going to bump into each other."
In Maryland, these encounters are becoming more frequent: Last year, there were 496 complaints about bears, according to the state Department of Natural Resources.
