This week’s column examines why West Virginia’s 2009 black bear kill, the second highest ever in the Mountain State, didn’t exactly raise eyebrows:

When hunters killed 1,828 black bears last season – the second-highest total on record – the person least surprised by the news was Chris Ryan.

Ryan, the Division of Natural Resources’ bear biologist, predicted how the season would turn out even before it began. He didn’t forecast exact numbers, but he said bowhunters would have a really good season and firearm hunters would have a really mediocre one.

Bingo.

Bowhunters killed a whopping 987 bears during the month-long archery season. That’s the highest total ever by far. The previous high was 776, set during the 2003 season.

Firearm hunters, on the other hand, killed just 841 bruins, well off the record 1,587 taken during the 2008 season.

This season marked only the third time in state history that the archery harvest outstripped the gun harvest. The other occasions were in 1997 and 2002, when shortages of acorns and other mast items concentrated bears near available food sources and made them more accessible to hunters.

Decades worth of DNR bear-harvest data have shown a strong relationship between the amount of food and the number of bears killed. Ryan cited that relationship late last summer, when the first dismal mast-survey reports started coming in.

He said at the time that a bow-harvest record was “a very strong possibility.” He also said the gun harvest would drop a bit, and the drop would become even more substantial if cold weather forced bears into hibernation earlier than usual.

The mast situation became a catastrophe. In the 40 years DNR biologists have conducted a mast survey, they never experienced mast conditions as bad as they were last fall. With food in such short supply, bears followed their noses to every available food source. No doubt hundreds of those sources turned out to be bait piles set out by bowhunters to attract deer.

Then came an early December snowstorm that, as Ryan predicted, sent bears scurrying for their dens. With fewer bears to hunt – and with deep snow keeping them out of the state’s high mountains – the firearms-and-hounds crowd suffered through a forgettable season.

What’s yet to be decided is what effect the mast shortage and early hibernation might have on bears’ breeding success. Most of the available sows will have been bred well before they went into hibernation, but that’s no guarantee they’ll deliver cubs.

Breeding success or failure often hinges on the sow’s condition as she heads into hibernation. If she’s had plenty to eat and is in good physical shape, she cruises through her gestation period and delivers a couple of cubs.

But if she’s starving or is in poor physical condition, a funny thing happens: She reabsorbs her unborn offspring and emerges barren from the den.

Given how poor the mast crop was, and given how long and hard the winter is turning out to be, no one should be surprised to see fewer sows with cubs this year.

Were the state’s bear population not this large and this healthy, a poor breeding season would be grim news. But with more than 12,000 bears running about – and with hunting regulations designed to maintain the numbers at approximately that level – one substandard generation of cubs should be nothing to worry about.