As a professional bear hunting guide, I answer a lot of questions about bear behavior from prospective clients as well as non-hunters who are just simply curious. Quite often, I find myself answering the same questions frequently. Most of these are based on old wives’ tales and hunting fallacies passed down from generation to generation. Here are the top two ‘rural’ legends I am most asked about during bear season.
Multiple Harvests
Myth: Once a bear is killed and retrieved from a bait site, it goes cold due to an abundance of human activity.
While it sounds like common sense, this belief couldn’t be further from the truth. Every season and practically every individual camp, hunters ask to sit a stand that hasn’t been hunted before, believing that prior human activity makes a bear site less desirable. The truth is that during the fall season, bears are entering the hyper-feeding stage in anticipation of the winter slumber. Food is on their mind constantly and little will prevent them from seeking it. In Richard P. Smith’s Hunting Trophy Black Bear, the author notes how a Michigan bow hunter, testing new equipment in Ontario during a no bag limit hunt between 1969 – 1970 successfully dropped four bruins within 42 minutes at the same bait site. Two of the bears went down where they were hit with a third bolting a short distance, piling up within sight. More bear approached the bait site later, pausing to inspect one of the downed bears then continued on to the bait undeterred. The fourth bear the archer arrowed made it to cover before going down.
During the 2020 fall bear hunt here at Tucker Ridge, my client Bill McGuire took his first black bear on the first day of his hunt. The trail camera recorded Bill and I retrieving the bear at 6:51 p.m. The next photo on the camera’s memory card was another bear at the bait at 9:06 p.m. Yet another bear showed up at the same bait the following morning!
Abandoned Baits
Myth: If bears stop tending a bait site, it isn’t worth hunting anymore.
There are many reasons bears will stop visiting a bait site that has been active. Changes in natural food source availability, weather and the want for variety can all cause it. Sometimes, just the smallest change of scent in the air from a hunter being on stand can cause a bruin to hang back from a well-tended site. The key to what may be perceived as an abandoned bait site is patience. Bears know the bait is there. They want to eat that bait. They just need to be comfortable returning to it after whatever triggered them off of it doesn’t bother them anymore or they have had their fill of beechnuts, berries and any other natural foods they have been seeking out.
Josh Peters was hunting one of my most productive stands during the 2019 season. Tucked away inside the wood line looking over a cedar swamp to the north with a corn field to the south, this site had multiple bears visiting nearly daily. As soon as Josh took the stand however, the site shut down. After not seeing bears for three days he was getting anxious. I was too, the trail camera revealed no bear activity. Then I noticed bear sign at the edges of the cornfield and saw patches where bears had been feeding heavily in the rows, trampling flat spots throughout. I convinced Josh to hang tight at that stand for the rest of his hunt and he tagged his first black bear two days later.