Recent Bear Attacks Are Freak Occurrences, Experts Say

A hunter was attacked and seriously injured by a black bear Saturday on a road just outside Olympic National Park in Washington State.

The incident follows a black bear attack nine days earlier that killed a six-year-old girl in the Cherokee National Forest in Tennessee.

Some experts say the bear attacks may be a sign of a growing clash between humans and the wild.

'I think it is probably just a matter of there being more bears and more people in bear range than ever before,' Joe Clark, an ecologist with the U.S. Geological Survey, told the Associated Press.

But Lynn Rogers, director of the Minnesota-based North American Bear Center, points out that only a few of the killings have occurred in the eastern United States, which has by far the most bear-human encounters.

Bear attacks are 'freak occurrences' and remain exceptionally rare, he says.

[The Cherokee National Forest] fatality is among only 12 cases of black bears killing humans in the contiguous United States in the last century, according to the North American Bear Center in Ely, Minnesota.