Severely injured young black bear euthanized in KS after being hit by vehicle
Authorities in eastern Kansas said Friday that a young black bear had to be euthanized after it was hit by a vehicle near Iola.
The man driving the vehicle wasn’t hurt, the Allen County Sheriff’s Office said in a Facebook post. But the bear was so “severely injured” that a Kansas Department of Wildlife and Parks game warden made the decision to put it down.
The bear was found wounded a short distance away from where the man hit it around 4:15 a.m. Friday on West Virginia Road, east of Old U.S. Highway 169 about five miles north of Iola, the Sheriff’s Office said.
“Due to the severe and mortal nature of the injuries, KDWP law enforcement personnel working in consultation with KDWP wildlife biologists euthanized the bear to prevent further suffering,” Kansas Department of Wildlife and Parks Chief of Public Affairs Laura Rose Clawson said.
Clawson said the bear was hit about 25 miles north of where a black bear had been sighted around Chanute earlier in the week.
She described the bear as a young male about 15 months old. That’s around the age male bears leave the area where they were born “in order to establish their own home range where they can find food, water, shelter and potential mates,” Clawson said.
“Often these dispersal movements are very long (up to several hundred miles) and this represents a risky time in a bear’s life,” she said. “Many natural and anthropogenic barriers to dispersal occur on the landscape with one of those being roads. Wildlife-vehicle collisions are often a high source of mortality for various bear populations, especially during times of dispersal.”
Clawson said black bears have been documented in Kansas only occasionally since the 1880s, although sightings have increased since 2000 due to established populations that are close to the state. Historically, black bears made their homes in the woodlands of eastern Kansas and in the Red Hills of south-central and southwestern Kansas but likely didn’t roam open grasslands, she said.
Chanute and Iola are a roughly two-hour drive east of Wichita.
