Summary

  • Wyoming Game and Fish large-carnivore supervisor Dan Thompson, Missouri Department of Conservation biologist Nate Bowersock, and bear biologist Wes Larson attribute the 2026 surge in bear-human encounters documented across at least 15 states to drought-triggered failure of berry and acorn crops, layered atop fifty years of bear population recovery and a parallel expansion of human settlement into carnivore habitat.
  • Colorado Parks and Wildlife has logged more than 8,600 sightings and incidents in 2026—more than double the 2025 count—and has euthanized 294 bears so far this year, three times the 2025 total, with 10 confirmed attacks, the agency’s highest annual figure on record.
  • Florida and Connecticut agency complaint and home-entry curves climbed steadily across decades 2006–2025, a slope population recovery and human development fit but that a single weather event cannot produce; only drought-driven food scarcity operates on the timescale that matches the 2026 spike.
  • Thompson frames human-food conditioning as irreversible for individual bears, sustaining elevated removal counts beyond any single weather event through a multi-year cohort lag that the substrate does not yet permit measuring.

State biologists identify drought-triggered failure of berry and acorn crops as the proximate driver of the 2026 bear encounter surge documented across at least 15 states, layered atop fifty years of bear population recovery and a parallel expansion of human settlement into carnivore habitat. The Washington Post’s national tally, aggregated by The Guardian, drew on agency data from Colorado, Connecticut, Florida, New Mexico, and Wyoming; Colorado Parks and Wildlife alone has logged more than 8,600 sightings and incidents and euthanized 294 bears so far this year, three times the 2025 total, with 10 confirmed attacks, the agency’s highest annual figure on record.

What the biologists named

A layered account emerged from interviews with three state biologists. Bowersock, who chairs the coexistence organization BearWise, named the components directly. Bear populations “had been drastically reduced by persecution and habitat loss during the 19th and 20th centuries,” after which “restricting hunting and preventing the complete clearcutting of forest ecosystems — instead, just doing sustainable logging” allowed numbers to grow over the past 50 years. Human development expanded during the same period; the National Park Service recorded 268 million recreation visitors in 1994 and 331 million in 2024. The western United States this year, in Bowersock’s account, “experienced a warmer winter and severe drought conditions, limiting the berry and acorn crops that bears rely on to rebuild fat after hibernation.” Bowersock summed up the demographic component in direct terms: “We definitely are seeing more people moving into areas where bears are common, and so that does lead to more encounters.”

Thompson, supervisor of the large carnivore section of the Wyoming Game and Fish Department, placed the year in operational terms—his agency, like Colorado’s, is on pace for one of its highest annual removal counts on record. Larson, a bear biologist who hosts the Tooth & Claw podcast and maintains a popular Instagram account on bear encounters, attributed the behavioral shift to depleted natural food sources that have, in his words, “pretty much forced [bears] to take higher risk food opportunities, so stuff like going into communities and getting in the garbage or maybe investigating a campsite or even investigating a person as maybe a potential source of food.”

The timescale discrimination

The 2026 spike is large enough to discriminate against some of the candidate causes listed alongside it. The National Park Service’s three-decade visitor increase of roughly 23 percent does not generate Colorado’s roughly 100 percent year-over-year rise in sightings and incidents, nor the tripling of euthanizations the agency has recorded. The Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission fielded an annual average of about 2,500 bear-related complaints from 2006 through 2010; that figure had more than doubled, to more than 6,400, in the 2021–2025 average. Connecticut received fewer than 25 bear-home-entry reports per year from 2014 through 2020 and at least 60 in each of 2022, 2024, and 2026.

Those curves are gradual. Demographic change at those slopes cannot produce a single-year doubling, and the simultaneity of the 2026 spike across geographically dispersed states—15 by The Washington Post’s count—is a pattern the slow-moving explanations cannot generate. Weather-driven food scarcity, by contrast, arrives as a single event and produces a step change.

The conditioning pathway

The mechanism that converts a drought year into mass euthanization is human-food conditioning. Thompson described the threshold in direct terms: “Once bears have obtained food rewards that they associate with people, we call that human-food conditioning. Once they are at that level, we are going to have to put that bear down.” Thompson, who said “none of us got into this job to kill the animals we love,” placed the threshold jointly on the bear’s learned behavior and on the human food-management practices that produce the learning. Conditioning is, in his account, irreversible for the individual animal.

That introduces a cohort lag. Bears conditioned in 2026 may continue to seek human food sources after weather normalizes. Thompson, who has been with the Wyoming department for almost two decades, said he expects this year’s high removal numbers to ease—“I have seen over the years and decades that things ebb and flow… I would not expect this to be the norm”—but the conditioning pathway is a candidate whose downstream effect the simple drought-and-recovery model partially suppresses. Drought compressed natural foraging onto garbage and other human food sources; the half-century of population recovery and human expansion ensured the compression happened close to people; and conditioning, once initiated, persists.

Alternative accounts the reporting undercuts

A documentation-inflation account—that more encounters are recorded now because more agencies track them and the public is more aware of bear issues—is difficult to reconcile with the tripling of state-conducted euthanizations within a single year, or with the documented August fatality in New Mexico, in which a bear killed a 67-year-old wildland firefighter inside his home. Neither outcome is the kind a documentation-rate story predicts.

A pure reversal-to-mean account, in which 2026 falls within ordinary annual variation and will revert without intervention, is partially endorsed by Thompson’s “ebb and flow” framing but undercut by the explicit record figures: Colorado’s 294 euthanizations are three times its 2025 total; the 10 confirmed attacks are the agency’s highest annual figure on record; more than 8,600 sightings and incidents, more than double 2025’s count. The 2026 figures appear to fall outside ordinary variation.

Jurisdictions the substrate does not pin down

The reporting names only five of the 15 states The Washington Post identified as having documented 2026 increases. Connecticut’s home-entry curve began climbing in 2021, before this year’s western drought, suggesting cyclical mast failures outside the drought footprint or population-growth effects operating in that jurisdiction on their own. Florida allowed its first black bear hunting season in a decade in 2025, after black bears had previously been designated “imperiled,” introducing a policy variable the drought-only account does not fully explain. Local mast-failure records, year-by-year precipitation data across the 15 jurisdictions, and hunting-policy comparisons across the 14 states The Guardian’s article does not name would test which subset of drivers—drought, conditioning, policy variance, or reporting effects—dominates in each.

Two forward questions the reporting leaves open: whether 2026 is a one-year anomaly tied to a specific mast failure, or the leading edge of a multi-year trend should climate-driven drought recur; and whether human-food conditioning can be reduced at scale through the measures BearWise recommends—bear-resistant containers, backcountry food storage, public education—before individual bears cross Thompson’s threshold. Larson framed the desired outcome in educational terms: “If they have done a necessary amount of education to where they know how to respond to a bear, it puts them in a headspace that they can then enjoy that encounter rather than be afraid.” He added: “In a perfect world, I would love that every encounter between human and bear is full of wonder and awe. But unfortunately, there are some that become a lot scarier or even violent.”

Synthesis

The candidate explanations operate on different timescales. The slow, multi-decade rise in complaint and home-entry data fits population recovery and human expansion. The 2026 jump fits weather-driven food failure. The conditioning pathway operates on a multi-year cohort lag that would extend elevated removals beyond the weather event that produced them. The available data appear most consistent with food scarcity as the proximate driver of the 2026 surge, with population growth and development as the underlying conditions and conditioning as a self-reinforcing mechanism whose downstream magnitude in subsequent years the available evidence does not yet permit measuring.

Analytical techniques used in this piece

This analysis applies the methods below. Each links to a short, plain-English explainer you can read and reuse.

Differential Diagnosis
Lists the candidate explanations for a symptom and rules them out one by one.