They are turning up more and more wherever West Virginians hunt, travel and live. In the past year, for example, I have observed them while I was float-fishing for smallmouth bass, driving down a back road, spring gobbler hunting, deer hunting, and I even saw one rifling through a compost bin.

The "they" being referred to is Ursus americanus. In the Appalachian Mountains sometimes they go by nicknames ridge-runner or gap-crosser and elsewhere by the appellations bruin, black bear or just plain bear. Whatever we call this biggest of West Virginia's big-game animals, there's no doubt that the state is seeing an upsurge in their popularity among hunters and in their numbers among citizens.

Last year, state sportsmen tallied 1,804 bruins during the bow and firearms seasons. Of that number, firearms hunters took 728, while stick-and-stringers bagged 1,076. This total shattered all matters of records: the largest harvest ever, the first time the total topped 1,800, and a solid 6 percent increase over the 2006 harvest of 1,704 (which broke down to 516 with the bow and 1,188 with firearms).

A quick glance at the harvest tables gives further insight into how much better chance hunters have these days to kill a bear, regardless of how they hunt. For example, in the 1970s, sportsmen killed 14 bruins by bow and 523 with firearms. During the 1980s, for the entire decade only 261 bears were killed by bow and 1,542 with guns. In the 1990s, the bow tally stands at 2,363 and the gun at 4,507.

This decade from 2000 to 2005, the bow harvests have been 305, 475, 726, 774, 374 and 585, respectively, while the firearms harvests have been 1,023, 785, 670, 958, 861 and 1,076, respectively. I asked Chris Ryan, Black Bear Project Leader for the West Virginia Division of Natural Resources (DNR), why the harvest increased last year.

Ryan said that the impressive kill was based on a number of different factors and they all resulted in the record harvest of 2007. As was true in much of the state, spotty mast conditions helped archery hunters check in the second-highest archery harvest on record. The outstanding bear population and average weather conditions during most of December resulted in gun hunters totaling their second highest harvest on record. Together, these two second-place finishes resulted in the highest harvest ever. In addition, state sportsmen killed bears in many non-traditional counties in the western, southern and eastern portions of the state, and that added substantially to the harvest, according to Ryan.

As is typically true with white-tailed deer and wild Eastern turkeys, when the soft-mast and especially hard-mast foods are abundant, bears are typically harder to locate because they can find nourishment just about anywhere. When the mast crop is below average, bears are much more concentrated in a few places and savvy hunters who take the time to locate those spots often do well.

Another positive factor, as Ryan noted, was that the weather was not abnormally cold. The bears were thus able to remain afield later in the season and did not den up, making them more available to hunters. A frigid December no doubt could well have negatively affected the harvest.