From rare visitors to regular sightings, the bears in acadia national park

By Sabrina Martin | Bangor Daily News via Bar Harbor Story

Acadia National Park has drawn visitors for more than 100 years who come to enjoy the rocky shorelines and cool summer breezes.

Local residents have mostly grown to accept the presence of millions of tourists who descend on MDI each summer and fall, but in the past couple of years a different kind of visitor has become more evident — and is getting more attention.

Over the last few years, island residents and visitors have reported more black bear sightings than in previous season—though it is not clear why. Scientists aren’t sure if it’s because the park’s bear population has grown or their behavioral patterns have shifted, drawing the curious mammals closer to territory frequented by people.

To get a better understanding of why there are more bear sightings, and what might be done to manage their presence in the state’s top tourist destination, scientists in the next couple of weeks will begin the first-ever multi-year study on how many bears are roaming around Acadia National Park.

Brittany Slabach ’09, a biology professor at the College of the Atlantic and the project’s lead researcher, said bear sightings in Acadia National Park have risen over the past decade, according to record keeping by the National Park Service and anecdotal evidence.

Bear sightings on Mount Desert Island have been historically—and notably—rare. Since around 1968, black bears have been spotted only “here and there,” partly because of an 1800s anti-predator movement that used tactics like bear skin bounties to expel much of the island’s bear population, according to Slabach, a vertebrae ecologist.

Up until now, scientists have thought black bears on the island were transient, likely migrating for the summer season from Trenton and surrounding mainland towns.

But, after conducting a pilot study last year that photographed three distinct bears early in the season, Slabach now wonders if the island has a resident bear population. Scientists identified the three individual bears through their unique scarring, she said.

Slabach is partnering with the National Park Service and Maine Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife to conduct the bear study and understand how they’re related to each other, she said. That study is set to begin within the next two weeks and could last two to three years.

Slabach and the park are also developing a Google form to centralize bear sighting reports, which are now scattered across several agencies—the park, state wildlife officials, and local authorities.