Bear Hunt Returns to Ocala Forest as Sierra Club Urges Lottery Entries in Protest
Florida's 2026 black bear hunt applications are open, with Marion County's Ocala National Forest again at the center of a fight over lethal management that has echoes for wildlife policy statewide.
What’s Opening, and Where
Applications for Florida’s 2026 black bear hunt opened last Friday, according to the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission (FWC). The commission has designated part of the Ocala National Forest in Marion County as open to hunting this December, citing the area’s large resident bear population. No Nature Coast county, including Levy, is named in the current hunt footprint described by FWC.
Last year’s hunt, held in 2025, was the first the state had authorized since 2015. FWC says the 2015 hunt resulted in 52 bears being culled. The agency has not, per available reporting, released final harvest figures from the 2025 season.
A Statewide Fight With Local Stakes
The renewed hunt has reopened a debate that predates the Ocala unit’s designation. Supporters, including FWC officials who set hunt boundaries and quotas, argue that regulated hunting manages bear numbers and lowers the odds of dangerous human-bear encounters as development pushes into forested habitat. Opponents counter that non-lethal measures, bear-resistant trash containers chief among them, address the same conflicts without killing animals.
That argument matters beyond Marion County. Florida’s bear management units cover much of the state, including areas near the Nature Coast, and decisions made in Tallahassee about hunt quotas, season length and unit boundaries set precedent that could reach coastal counties in future seasons even though this year’s hunt is confined to the Ocala forest.
Sierra Club’s Response: Enter, Don’t Hunt
Among the groups opposing the hunt is the Sierra Club. Sarah Younger, a member of the organization’s conservation committee, told WUFT’s Candy Fontana Verde that the group is urging members of the public to apply for the permit lottery whether or not they intend to hunt. The strategy is aimed at reducing the pool of permits available to hunters by increasing the number of lottery entrants overall, a tactic that doesn’t change FWC’s quota but can affect who draws a tag.
Younger’s full comments to WUFT lay out the group’s position that the state should lean on non-lethal population controls, such as stricter trash management ordinances near forested subdivisions, rather than lethal hunts, before turning to culling as a management tool.
What This Means for the Nature Coast
For Cedar Key and Levy County, this year’s hunt itself changes nothing directly, the December season applies to the Ocala National Forest portion of Marion County, not to any Nature Coast unit. But the underlying FWC policy on bear hunting is a statewide framework, and residents in bear-adjacent parts of Levy County and the wider Nature Coast have a stake in how the agency handles population data, quota-setting and public comment as the program continues.
FWC has not indicated in materials cited by WUFT whether additional bear management units, including those closer to this coast, are under consideration for future hunts. Readers watching for that decision should track FWC’s public notices directly, since the source reporting behind this story addresses only the Marion County unit and the Sierra Club’s response to it. No comment deadline or public hearing date for the 2026 season was specified in the available reporting.