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 simply curious. Quite often, I find myself answering the same questions.
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 often 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 in a tree 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 their 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 bowhunter, testing new equipment in Ontario during a no-bag-limit hunt between 1969 and 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 before piling up within sight. More bears approached the bait site later, pausing to inspect one of the downed bears before continuing on to the bait undeterred. The fourth bear the archer arrowed made it to cover before going down.
Truth: 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 me 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 desire for variety can all cause it. Sometimes, just the smallest change in scent 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 to back off no longer bothers them.
Black bears will always choose a natural food source over bait when possible. They know a bait site isn’t a natural occurrence and may present a danger to them. Once natural food sources become scarce, or they have had their fill of beechnuts, berries and any other natural foods they have been seeking, hungry bears will return.
Truth: Client Josh Peters of Roseto, Pennsylvania, 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 cornfield 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. I noticed bear scat at the edges of the cornfield and saw patches where bears had been feeding heavily in the rows, trampling flat spots throughout.
Despite his objections, I convinced Josh to hang tight at that stand for the rest of his hunt, knowing that bears were in the vicinity and that they would return to the bait site.
He tagged his first Maine black bear two days later with only minutes of daylight remaining in his weeklong hunt.