Ohio’s ‘wandering bears’ signal a possible comeback for the species

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On a warm night in mid July, Brandan Smith heard a sound outside his house in rural Coshocton. Curious, he opened his door and walked outside. As his eyes adjusted ...

On a warm night in mid July, Brandan Smith heard a sound outside his house in rural Coshocton. Curious, he opened his door and walked outside. As his eyes adjusted to the dark, he saw a large, hulking figure in his driveway, rummaging in the bins and boxes he’d readied for trash pickup the next day.

“I immediately turned around, went back inside the house and slammed the door,” Smith recalled. “That image of something huge spooked me. And it just kind of dawned on me: It’s a bear.”

Certain that no one would believe him unless he had proof, Smith grabbed his phone, gathered his courage and went back outside to capture a video.

“Sure enough, the bear was still there, eating garbage,” Smith said. “I’d just gotten done cleaning out the deep freezer, and it was into the old freezer-burned ice cream.”

According to Smith, the bear seemed completely unbothered by his presence, even though he was only about 25 feet away. Unsure what to do, Smith called the police. Then he watched the bear ransack his trash pile until a police cruiser arrived half an hour later and scared it off with a spotlight.

After virtually disappearing from the Ohio landscape in the mid-1800s, black bears could be making a comeback. More than 1,500 bear sightings have been reported to the Ohio Department of Natural Resources (ODNR) since 2022. While the majority have been spotted in rural areas near Ohio’s borders with West Virginia and Pennsylvania, black bears have been seen in 69 of Ohio’s 88 counties, and some have wandered into more populated areas, including near Pataskala in Licking County in 2025.

According to the Ohio Division of Wildlife’s 2026 Ohio Black Bear Monitoring Report, the number of confirmed black bear sightings gradually rose in the 1990s and 2000s, plateaued during the 2010s, then sharply increased starting in 2022.

“On average, over the past 10 years the Division of Wildlife has received 239 black bear sighting reports per year,” the report stated.

And based on local accounts, bear…

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