A male black bear was struck by a pickup truck in Richland County, Ohio June 14.
The Mansfield post of the Ohio Highway Patrol said the bear had to be euthanized on scene due to the injuries it sustained.
The crash occurred days after a black bear was spotted about 60 miles away in Licking County, the first sighting in that county in more than 20 years.
Are there many black bears in Ohio?
Black bears were considered gone from Ohio by the 1850s, per ODNR, due to deforestation and hunting by Ohio settlers.
However, they have been spotted wandering through the state as populations in Pennsylvania and West Virginia grow, according to the Ohio Black Bear Monitoring Report from November 2023.
And they are making a small comeback, with an estimated in-state population between 50 and 100.
What happened in the Richland County crash?
Troopers responded to a one-vehicle, non-injury crash on Ohio 546 near Black Road around 7 a.m. involving a pickup truck pulling a livestock trailer.
Dawson Staley, 18, of Fredericktown, was operating a 2021 Dodge Ram pickup truck north on Ohio 546, according to the patrol. A bear entered the roadway from the west when Staley struck it.
Staley was not injured in the crash, the patrol said.
The Ohio Department of Natural Resources was contacted and the bear was taken from the scene by ODNR officers.
lwhitmir@gannett.com
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This article originally appeared on Mansfield News Journal: Pickup strikes black bear in Ohio: What we know
Reporting by Lou Whitmire, Mansfield News Journal / Mansfield News Journal
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