Beginners Guide to Bear Hunting with James Brandenburg

Black bear season is just around the corner and we're taking it back to the basics at the Global Headquarters of Bear Hunting Magazine! Guest James Brandenburg from EP. 34 is back and interviews host Clay Newcomb with a long list of questions from people who have never hunted the icon of the North American wilderness, the black bear. This was a fun podcast to record and we know you'll enjoy it whether you're a new to bear hunting or a seasoned professional!

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
You're listening to the Sportsman's Nation podcast network, brought to
you by Interstate Batteries from your truck to your trail
camera and everything in between. If you have a piece
of hunting gear or a piece of hunting equipment that
needs a battery, Interstate Batteries is that got you covered.
You can go to a local retail store or you

(00:22):
can go visit online at Interstate Batteries dot com. They
have thousands of local retail shops all over the US,
so you can go there as well. Interstate Batteries outrageously dependable.
My name is Clay Nucoman. I'm the host of the

(00:43):
Bear Hunting Magazine podcast. I'll also be your host into
the world of hunting icon of North American wilderness. There
we'll talk about tactics, gear, conservation. It will also bring
you into some of the wildest country on the planet
chasing bearing. On this episode the Bear Hunting Magazine Podcast,

(01:12):
we're taking it back and notch and we are talking
about the basics of bear hunting. So this conversation that
I have with my good friend James Brandenburg and Kolby
is is speaking to a crowd or a person that
it says if they know nothing about bear hunting. So
we talk about where bears are, how you hunt them,

(01:34):
how you locate places to hunt, the ways in which
you hunt them, and just kind of go down to
some of the very foundational basics of bear hunting. So
if you're new to bear hunting, or you know somebody
that's new to bear hunting and they want to they
want to learn more, but some of the stuff is
maybe over their head. This is a good podcast for them.
Check it out. I want to bring your attention to

(01:56):
the Southeast Chapter of the back Country Hunters and English
back Country Hunters and Anglers and an organization that's designed
to keep public lands and public hands and keep those
lands open two hunters and fishermen. The Southeast Chapter encompasses Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia,

(02:19):
and I believe South Carolina and Florida, and there's a
big group of us in this part of the country
that are that are interested in public land related issues.
I encourage you to check out back Country Hunters and
Anglers and if you so, there's just one organization, back
Country Hunters and Anglers. But if you're from one of
those states and you become a member back Country Hunters

(02:42):
and Anglers. You become part of the Southeast chapter. Um
so check out back Country Hunters and Anglers and you're
gonna hear more about him on this podcast. Also want
to talk about our good buddies over at the Western
Bear Foundation based out of Cody, Wyoming. These guys just
this week they were in Idaho giving away free bear

(03:04):
spray to hunters and hikers. They're doing a lot of
good things out west where there is a lot of
bear conflict human conflict, and it's where a lot of
the controversy is over the de listing of the grizzly bears.
And hey, these guys are hunters and they're also wanting
to keep bears on the landscape by giving hunters and

(03:24):
hikers bear spray so that people can protect themselves. And uh,
they're just doing some good stuff. Their membership driven nonprofit organization.
Joe kN Dellis has been on the podcast before and
I highly recommend that you become a member of the
Western Bear Foundation. We're at the Bear Honey Magazine global

(03:50):
headquarters and we have a we're gonna have a fun
conversation today. I've got with me in the office Colby
the Art Tech morehead. And we've got James Brandenberg. Uh
James was on the podcast with us on episode thirty four,

(04:11):
which was about ten podcasts ago. We've been pumping them out,
that's pretty crazy. So it's been it's I guess it's
been about ten weeks ago then, because we've been producing
the podcast every week. Where has the time gone? Where
has it gone? But yeah, James was with us, and
James is uh is the chair of the Arkansas b
h A. That's hit right, state chair chair for Arkansas

(04:34):
for the Southeast Chapter. I didn't say it right at all.
I'm gonna get a card. Yeah, well I should have
took some notes. But all right, now, so last time
when you were on, we talked about what was going
on in Arkansas, the Southeast Chapter and kind of what
was going on. So we uh man a lots going on. Yeah, yeah,

(04:56):
we've got um just coming up this fall. We've got
some really exciting things going on just here in Arkansas
which I can specifically talk about. And you've heard of
the World Champion Squirrel cook Off. I mean, I don't
know that that needs any more promotion, but you know,
we will, we will be there as part of an
initiative that's getting started here in the state to try

(05:16):
to recruit some new hunters. We're gonna have a few
teams involved up there, you know, bringing their own renditions
of squirrel. We're gonna have a little get together at
at my place before that to just welcome everybody in,
and then, um, I'm I'm gonna be there, man, I
can't wait. I'm I'm pretty pumped about it. Yeah, yeah,
I am looking forward to seeing what you guys come

(05:37):
up with. I've never been a few things cooking. Yeah,
I like it. I like it. We've also got some
other stuff coming up later in the fall that that
we're not quite ready to announce yet for Arkansas. But
we've got got some some bigger fundraising ideas coming up.
And then, man, we are seriously looking for people. We
were interviewing people for leadership positions, okay for here in Arkansas. Uh,

(06:03):
that's what's going on right now. Right on. Well, I
want to let you know, I did change my address,
so I am getting those now that's not still a
Texas member of the h So we're in Arkansas chapter,
remember now. Yeah, I think I think i'm officially in
Arkansas now because I would join the h A chapter.
Vercense doesn't know. Man, you gotta license, you gotta train
of mule, training, squirrel dog. These are a lot of

(06:25):
things you gotta do before you're officially in Arkansas. Bottom mule,
I'm on my way. Okay, I forgot about that. Kobe's
a mule owner. Okay, yeah, oh man, I'm changing. You're
you're getting there, jumping in with both feet, get all
integrated like it integrated it. Hey, let's go ahead and uh, well,
I'll introduce our topic at hand. We wanted to we

(06:46):
wanted to have a conversation that somebody could listen to
and basically go from zero two pretty informed about how
to start bear hunting. Okay, So that's what we're gonna
talk about on this podcast is we're gonna try to
cover as much as we possibly can of some things
that a lot of guys might just take for granted

(07:09):
that is kind of a knowledge base of bear hunting.
So we're gonna answer some really fundamental questions. And so
if you're listening to this podcast and you're interested in
getting into bear hunting, this would be this would be
a good starter point for you. And I hope. So
I'm gonna play the role of the guy who doesn't
know anything, because you know, that's what I know. He's
so good at that. You know, I don't know that

(07:33):
on the right, I want to answer that, but just
maybe it's because I don't know. Man. You you you
uh no, you you gotta. You came up with some
great questions and that's what I asked James to do.
That's why he's here. Is like I said, sometimes if
you when you've been doing something, you take for granted
some of the more simple questions. And you know, in
bear Hunting magazine, I want to get better at answering

(07:59):
some of the fundamental questions because typically, if I'm honest,
I'm I'm catering content towards experienced hunters. I mean, you know,
you're trying to get because that's the guy that subscribed
to your magazine. You you want to give him something new,
and so you're diving into this like maybe deeper stuff.
But at the same time, we want we want to

(08:20):
recruit guys to you know, just into into bear hunting.
That we want them to see the the what they
can do with bear meat, what they can do with
you know where they can hunt bears, how they can
hunt bears, how they can enter in that it's not
that big a deal from hunting deer or even hunting
small game. Honestly, I think sometimes people are pretty intimidated
by the idea of bringing down this big animal and

(08:43):
then what do I do? And uh yeah, with just
a little bit of preparation, a little bit of knowledge,
it's it's really not that much different than killing the
deer um. And so we'll talk about that, But before
we get much further than that, let's talk about the
live facebooks. That face book live session that we're gonna
have on August twenty nine, Thursday, August nine, we're going

(09:09):
to at seven pm Central Standard Time on the b
h A Southeast Chapter Facebook group page. Yep, exactly. James
and I are gonna be having a question and answer
session where you can You've got to be a member
of the group though, So that's that's the that's the
ask right now. If if you want to be a

(09:30):
part of the question and answer session, you've got to
go requests to be a member of the back Country
Hunters and Anglers Southeast Chapter group on Facebook. Ye yep,
that's exactly it, which costs no money. We'd love you
to be a member of b h A, but um,
you know, all you have to do is request to
be a member of that group and and look like
you belong there. And yeah, we're gonna we're gonna get

(09:54):
on there and answer questions. We've done this a little
bit for what we call our Western Hunt series. So
if a guy's getting ready to go, um out to
Wyoming for antelope, let's say, or um, we got a
guy on his way to hunt doll sheep right now,
and uh, and he's done some stuff on there in
that regard. Just trying to educate people on things that

(10:16):
maybe aren't is common down here in the Southeast and
get him up to speed as quick as we can
and just create a that same type of camaraderie where
you know, hey, I'm new to hunting or I'm new
to this subject, and ask your questions in a in
a place where somebody's wants to answer them. And that's
what we're doing. Yeah. Entrance pathways, Yeah, yeah, try to

(10:40):
break down some of those barriers to entry when it
comes to bear hunting. Um. So that's again Thursday, seven
pm Central Standard Time, August twenty nine, August Thursday, August
twenty nine, And um, yeah, you'll just be able to
come to that page and you'll see James and I

(11:01):
sitting here at the Global Headquarters, and we'll just answer questions. Yeah,
stupid questions, good questions, any questions you know we're both married, questions.
We don't need any marriage proposals or anything like that,
which I know that we might get, you know, just
being you know generally uh, you know, face for radio

(11:22):
kind of guys, but exactly exactly. Well, yeah, so that
that'll be fun. We'll do that. And um yeah, so
let's just jump right in, all right, jump right into
our question all start us off with the first question,
which is where bears at? Yep, black bears. So if

(11:43):
you're let's say you're in Indiana, or you're in Alabama,
or you're in Atlanta, Georgia, and you're like, man, I
want to be a bear hunter, and that's a good
thing to think. Yeah, where bears at bears are? I
say that question, I'll answer the question, gentlemen. That's good.

(12:06):
Bears are in the woods, and we know what they
do in the woods. Yeah, bears, bears are bears range
from all the way from the eastern United States and
Appalachian Mountains all the way up into Canada, all of
the eastern deciduous forest um naturally before presettlement. Let me

(12:27):
just say they were there in the east. They're also
in the Rocky Mountain west all the way to the
Pacific Ocean. Bears naturally were in Texas and Louisiana and
Arkansas and all them mid South, and the bears are
obviously in all the Canadian provinces in Alaska. And we're
talking about black bears. So historical range of the black

(12:47):
bear covered almost all of the yeah, North American continent,
I mean except where glaciers were, except where there was
massive snowpack way north. And so today the main states
where people are bear hunting and and and will start
in the southeast. Can bear hunt in Arkansas within over
the counter tag. You can bear hunt in southeast Oklahoma,

(13:10):
whether over the counter tag. You can bear hunt in
Georgia within over the counter tag, North Carolina, Tennessee, South Carolina. Uh,
there is a limited bear hunt in Kentucky. So that
kind of covers like that. Those are the states and
places that have bears right now. Well, and then as
you continue to move up the east coast. All of

(13:31):
those states on the East coast have bears. West Virginia, Virginia, Pennsylvania,
Pennsylvania is one of the biggest bear hunting states in
the country. Um, Pennsylvania, New York, New Jersey, uh Vermont,
New Hampshire, Maine, all those states up there through there
have bear seas. Some of the smaller states like Connecticut

(13:52):
and stuff. To be honest with you, I'm not certain
on the They definitely have bears in those places. I'm
not certain on the hunting. There's such small states. It's
you know, there's better places to go on a bear hunt.
But so that's where bears are. And then bears are
in the West. Almost all the Western states, I mean, Nevada, Utah, Wyoming, Montana, Idaho, California, Washington,

(14:17):
Utah already said Utah, um Oregon, all the western states,
New Mexico, Arizona, all the states are gonna have bears,
and almost all of them have. Uh. Well, all those
states have bear seasons, every single one of them. Now
do you have to draw for any of those places
that you've just been all the East coast states, no draws.
All those would be over the counter for black bears.

(14:39):
In the West, there are draws like Utah and Nevada
would have pretty limited hunts. Um. But all those other
places are let me just say, there are over the
counter tags available Montana, Idaho, Wyoming, Washington, Oregon. There are
over the countertag is available in Washington, Oregon. There are

(15:01):
some draw hunts. But the three big states where people
are just getting in their truck and going spring bear
hunting are well. The two big ones would be Montana
and Idaho. I mean that's the place to go for
a Western bear hunting um. And yeah, I prep your legs.
But so in the mid in the Mid South, the

(15:22):
only places where there's huntable bear populations right now are
Arkansas in Oklahoma. If you just looked at the big
the big picture, UM, so the east coast Arkansas and
Oklahoma the East and then I can't say talk about
bears without the Great Lake States, uh, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Michigan,

(15:42):
big bear states. I mean there that is also a
major hub for bear hunting. You can run and most
of those states you can hunt over bait. Well, all
those states you can hunt over bait. Wisconsin and Michigan
you can hunt with hounds, so that's where bears are.
Any questions on that, thoughts on that, well, I mean
it sounds like they're pretty much everywhere. So I mean

(16:06):
you're within five or six hours of somewhere. You can
bear hunt in most any place in the US. Okay,
that's a pretty and I'm just pulling that out of
the cuff, but I think that's probably pretty true. That
sounds about right. I mean, based on everywhere that you
just named, your pretty close to. I mean, if you're
in St. Louis, Missouri, man, you can drive to Arkansas

(16:26):
in five hours. You can drive to West Virginia going
the other way and being overcounter bear tag. So if
I'm a guy who says, look, I I like to
hunt white tail, but I'm looking for a little bit
more adventure, you know what's another animal that I can
I don't have to draw for or um, you know,
I want to get out on some public land somewhere,

(16:48):
or you know, get someplace rugged. Black bear hunting would
be a pretty viable option because tags are available, the
animals are there, and and it's a season. Tags are
relatively cheap, I mean for over the counter tag as
as over the counter tags go it's compared to elk
and stuff. I think the highest the two highest priced

(17:11):
over the counter tags in the country of California and Oklahoma.
And that's like a five tag. It's just still not bad. Yeah. Well,
and and those are you're you know, those are those
are high price tags. I mean in Montana, I think
we paid uh to eighty six or something, Yeah, like
two or eighty bucks. Uh hunted, hunt hunted. Then uh

(17:31):
Tennessee a couple of years and paid in the two
d and fifty dollar range for a nonresident tag. So
usually under three hundred you can get a bear tag
in Arkansas. If you're a nonresident, came here, you get Yeah,
and a lot of these Southeastern states and and over
in the West, excuse me, in the East, you're getting

(17:51):
deer tags along with your bear tags. Like for instance,
then uh, like a Georgia sportsman's license is like, let's
just say it is is under three hundred man, you can
hunt bear, deer, and I'm pretty sure Turkey, that's the
way it is. In Arkansas. Non resident get a nonresident
sportsman's license, you can hunt all those. So that's what's

(18:13):
cool about Southeastern bear hunt or Eastern bear hunt. It's
usually you're getting some other kind of tag with an
overlapping season. Okay, so you might kill a deer too.
All right, well, so you've drawn a very large map.
I mean, the next question is, all right, I'm gonna
go to Georgia. We won't pick on Arkansas since we

(18:33):
don't come here. You're you're gonna go to Georgia and
and hunt bears or you know, name the state. It
doesn't matter what am I what am I looking for?
You know, if I know, if I'm a decent deer
hunter and I know where to look for deer, how
I never see any bears when I'm out deer hunting.

(18:54):
I mean that's I'm sure you know some people do.
But yeah, Well, the first thing to do with a
state would be to find where the bear zones are
and where they have a bear season, because in every
state that most states are going to have parts of
the state that could be closed to bear hunting. And
that's common even in states with lots of bears. Uh

(19:14):
like in Arkansas. You know, the Arkansas Delta is pretty
much not close to bear So wherever there is a
bear season, you can conclude that they have bears not
open to bear and not open to bear wherever they're
I'm not sure what I said. I don't remember what
I said, but there are parts of these states that
are not open to bear hunting parts that are. So
you're gonna want to hunt in the parts that are.
Guess that's the best way to avoid you know, doing

(19:36):
something wrong, yeah, or just finding a bear. But so
with just a five minute Internet search, you can find
out where bears are just like a general region of
the state, Like in Georgia, it would be northern Georgia.
I mean that's where they have big blocks of national forests.
That's where that's just where their bears are. You could

(19:57):
I mean, you could go to a forum, you could
go to Facebook group and you could just type in
where bears in Georgia and I guarantee that it would
pop up and you would see maps of you know,
it might be a game and fish map that shows
the different bear zones. From there, I would look for
the biggest blocks of national forests that you could find
pretty much anywhere that there is big healthy populations of bears,

(20:22):
You're gonna find big blocks of public land. That's true. Um,
you know, the so in the Appalachian Mountains. Uh, all that,
I mean the bear the hub of bear habitat in
the east is going to be public land. The hub
of beared habitat in Arkansas, Oklahoma, and southern Missouri is
public land. The hub of bear habitat in the West

(20:46):
is public lands. So that's the cool thing is that
you know, if you're hunting whitetail, you know you're gonna
be looking for private land to have the best chance.
Not necessarily so with a bear, because these bears are
looking for vast unfragment the wilderness, not wilderness with the
capital W as in federal wilderness, but wilderness and a
more generic term just forested, you know, forested just wild places. Yeah,

(21:11):
and so that's what that's the phrase that could describe
where a bear wants to be large blocks of unfragmented wilderness.
So that's gonna be national forests. And so pretty much
wherever you're going, you could you could pretty quickly find
a region that would be good. And from that region
you're gonna need I mean, you could call a biologist.

(21:35):
I mean, there's so much resource available. I mean, one
call to a regional biologist of that state would get
you all kind of answers. When I hunted in Georgia,
go ahead, Well, what I was gonna say is along
those same lines, do do you know if the state
game agencies published that kind of information, like the scientific

(21:57):
research that they're doing that says the bears are more
prevalent here or there, or what type of habits, like
the filter through their reports. They don't ever just have
like I mean, I don't like Arkansas doesn't just put
out a thing that says, you know, best place to
hunt bears in Arkansas, even though they want to give
you that information, it's not hidden. But they give harvest reports.

(22:19):
Almost every state is going to have harvest reports. That
would be a good thing to search. Harvest reports for
black bear and Georgia, harvest reports for black bear and
West Virginia, you know, and you would you would find,
oh man, these counties and the highest harvest and that's
absolutely where I would start. Okay, that's a good that's
a good tip. And then maybe try to zero in

(22:39):
from there on specific places that you might like to
go as a hunter for whatever reason. You know, everybody
has their different criteria. But then maybe you could build
a list of questions or things that you want to
talk to biologist about and then make a phone call
where you have some specific things to ask him. And
it's not just like, hey, I'm coming to West Virginia,
where can I go hunt bear? And inside of those

(23:01):
websites that that harvest data, they'll show you like the
age class and like the breakdown of what sex was
harvested and what zone and all of that, at least
from the research that I've done in the past. Okay,
there's a lot of as you want, you can break
really dive deep inside of it. Okay. So I would
say to make a short tip, go to the counties.

(23:22):
Starting the counties with the highest harvest. That's usually going
to be the densest populations. Now, there could be sleeper,
sleeper counties that aren't near metropolitan areas. Sometimes where there's
big population hubs, there will be more harvest in those
counties around that just because more people are hunting. But typically,
like in Arkansas, that's not true. Highest counties for bear

(23:45):
harvests would be the places where there's the most bear. Okay, yeah,
so yeah, that's good. All right, So where do we
go from here? James, Well, so now I'm a hungry bear.
I'm gonna as you found where you're gonna go. You've
decided I'm going to X County into X National Forest
on these dates. Yeah, well, maybe we'll talk about dates. Well, yeah,

(24:08):
let's talk about dates first, because I need to know
when to go when to go. Well, okay, so we
we talked about that in the in the lower forty eight.
There are a handful of states that have a spring
bear season. Okay, so montanas a spring bear season, Idaho, Wyoming,

(24:30):
oh Man, a couple others. Uh, but they're they're limited.
Those are the main ones. So we're gonna primarily talk
about fall. It's fall time, so we're not really talking
about spring hunting, even though there definitely are spring seasons
that you can go to in the fall. Most most
fall seasons for bear starting in September. Okay. The Georgia

(24:52):
season I think opens like the second Saturday of September.
Um Tennessee seasons may not open until October, but you
know it's gonna be that September October. Range Arkansas season
opens the fourth Saturday of of September. Okay, so this
year's September does the season openings kind of follow the

(25:13):
way they typically do with white tail, where you're gonna
have archery first. Yeah, well, that's right, yeah, yeah. So
the every state that I know of, the first available
season is an archery season, and uh and usually especially
in the Southeast, it coincides with the deer seasons. So
Arkansas deer season opens with Arkansas bear season. I know.

(25:35):
It's the same way in Georgia. So that timeframe is
a great time frame to take a bear. I mean,
it's probably like prime time, I would say, would be
September early October harvest to bear and that well, so
bears during the summertime, it's kind of the season of

(25:58):
plenty for them. They've got veggete Haitian, They've got a
vast resource of berries they I mean, it's kind of
like the good the good old buff can eat. So
as as the fall creeps in, bears start to hone
in their ranges and they start to their home ranges
actually start to shrink significantly, and they begin to hone

(26:22):
into their fall ranges, and then they key in on
food sources in those fall ranges, which are gonna be
less than the summer food ranges in terms of options.
And so and for now we're just gonna stick with
the southeast, would be acrons and hickory nuts, primarily in
beech nuts in some places. What kind of hard masks,
what kind of acorns do they have a preference? Yeah,

(26:44):
they do. I mean, just like in in generic terms,
you would say wide oak acorns would be every critter's
favorite acorn in this part of the world wherever there's
white oaks, white oak is the preferred food source. Now
in the West and the all you're gonna be hunting berries,
like in Montana, they don't really have they're not having

(27:04):
this big hard mast. And that's the terminology that you
would use hard mast. So hard mast would include acorns,
beech nuts, and hickory nuts. Um. In a bear, he'll
he'll chomp hickory nuts just like a squirrel, but he
would prefer an acorn, and he would enough acrens. He'll
eat a red oak acre and all day long, but

(27:25):
he would prefer a white oak acren you know. So
that's that's your ideal food source during that time. UM,
and so in the fall, what's cool is as the
bear is honed down their ranges and if you can
find that preferred food source that has food on it
because just because you have a white oak tree in

(27:45):
your where you're hunting doesn't mean that there's gonna be
acrons there. And it doesn't necessarily mean that there's gonna
be a bear there. I mean it doesn't you could.
So you have to cover a lot of ground in
areas that you know, Okay, there's wide oak ridges in here,
there's a lot of white oaks, and you would know
that just by going there. You would know that, by

(28:06):
talking to a biologist, you would know that, by having
some familiarity with the area that, Man, this ridge top
has white oaks on it. I'm gonna walk this ridge
top and I'm gonna be looking for well, I don't
want to tell what we're gonna be looking for. Is
that answer your question? What they're eating? I mean the
fall that you're you're totally concentrating on, hard mask and

(28:27):
potentially water that most of the time, water is not
the limiting resource. So there's water everywhere most of the time.
But how much what kind of water do they need? Man,
they don't care they I mean, honestly, I think they
just am drink out of a mud hole as they
would a clear, beautiful stream. So even like I mean,
are we talking about there needs to be a trickle

(28:48):
in the stream or a seep out of a rock?
Is enough? Absolutely? I mean so that's so that's I
mean that could be anywhere then, I mean that's right.
And so that's usually why you wouldn't key on the water.
But I've killed is over water and it was because
it was super dry, and maybe there was well where
I'm talking about was like a four service pond that

(29:11):
you know that in Those are common in a lot
of places where there's big national forest where they make
wildlife ponds that hold water. And you know, if you
found bear sign on a pond, I mean put a
trail camera up or you know, sit it. I mean,
they could be coming in there. But if it's if
it's been raining a ton, not going to be a
limiting factory. So okay, so I've got out of that

(29:33):
little discussion right there. I've got three different ways to go.
So let's um, let's talk about the range. So you
said they start to limit their range down in the fall,
and so how big of a range do they have? Well,
so if when you talk about an animal's home range,
you talk about the furthest points that it ever travels

(29:56):
in a given year, some timeframe, it's life. So I've
seen maps that have data points of collared bears, and
this is the way it looks, James, is there will
be this cluster of points like right in the somewhere
in the center, you know, keyed in on some topographic feature,

(30:17):
like maybe it's two or three drainage basins that come together,
and it's like it's just covered with data points. And
then out from that core there will be a little
forays out into other places. And so that bears home
range might actually encompass. If it's a female, that might
encompass eight to ten square miles, So there'll be dots

(30:39):
in a square eight to ten square miles. A male
could be much bigger than that, Okay, I mean like
on average they'll probably twenty to thirty square miles. So
so as a male bear, I mean, we got so
many different threads to pull on now all of a sudden.
But is a male bear going to be more nomadic?
Just in general? He's he could be here today and

(31:02):
he could be a county over tomorrow. Well it's not. No.
His his spread all has to do with breeding, which
is not taking place in the fall. So it's kind
of you know, it's kind of irrelevant information that a
that a male bear would have this massive home range
because that all has to do with breeding, which has
taken place during the summer, so the fall. And that's

(31:24):
a good point for somebody that doesn't it's new to
bear hunting. It's that the we're so used to hunting
unguluts in the fall that are influenced by the breeding season,
the rut, elk rut, moose rut, deer rut, you know
everything rut. Well, in the fall, bears aren't breeding at all.
They're all they're thinking about is food all they think about.
So then so then that makes the first point, find

(31:47):
the food that much more important that that is the
whole story within the podcast. Now, well on the food, Well,
we found the food. But another thread we need to
pull on then is you said we need to find
bear son, so tell me what does that look like? Well,
so let me let me go back to the fall

(32:09):
range though, because that was a great question, and this
helps I think the more people understand bear, the more
confidence you have when you're going into it. So is
that you bears have this core and and most of
those dots on that core are probably taking place in
the fall, because that's they hone their range down to

(32:31):
this place they really want to be, you know, and
um and when you find when you find that, a
lot of times that's really good bear habitat. And there'll
be a lot of core bear areas that are overlapped
on top of each other. So like do you find
a spot where there might be multiple bears in that area? Yeah,
like all these ranges that are different ranges, but they

(32:54):
overlap in like these certain barry areas which might be remote,
don't have much human intrusion. They might be food rich.
It might just be a ridge that is just full
of white oaks and has I mean, just for whatever reason,
is just good bear habitat um. And so that's what

(33:16):
you're looking for. But you don't know where a bare
home range is. I mean, you're just walk out there
and you're looking for bear sign that that's what you're
looking for. You're looking for bear sign um and you're
looking for scat number one. I mean that is it
sounds so silly, and but man if I could do

(33:38):
one thing in bear hunting, if you could say clay,
you can only with your eyes, you can only see
one bit of sign. I wouldn't I wouldn't care about tracks.
I wouldn't care about trails. I wouldn't care about scratches
on trees. I wouldn't care about broken limbs and trees
where they're breaking down acorn and we're gonna talk about

(33:58):
all these things. I would want to find fresh bear scat.
When I try to simplify my philosophy for hunting bears
in the fall, is I want to walk until I
find fresh bear scat. Okay, So, I mean everybody can
google what does that look like? So you know we

(34:19):
don't have to spend a lot of time on it.
But you know, a guy walks around in the woods,
he's out in the middle of nowhere, and you don't
have a cell phone signal. You come across the pile
of something, you're like, what is that? So they're they're
distinguishing characteristics other than the amount of it. A bear

(34:40):
scat is gonna be quite variable based upon what he's
gonna eat, but for the most part, it's gonna be
bigger than anything in the woods around him, Like if
you and so, most canine scat is tubular, I mean,
like fox coyote. I mean, those are the main things
that we would have. You're not gonna see wolf scout
down here. It's gonna be super tubular. It's probably gonna

(35:04):
have hair in it because their predators and they're eating
stuff with hair. Bear scot is gonna be much bigger.
It can be tubular, and that's where it's kind of
can go either way. I mean, you could have a
pile of bear scout that looked like a cow pie,
just a big PLoP okay, or you could have bear
scot that was very tubular. I think it's a good discussion.

(35:27):
We gotta do it. Yeah. Uh, I have people send
me pictures of what they're asking. Is this bear? Is
this bear scout all the time? And uh usually if
you have to ask it, it may not be because
it's uh a lot of times it's kyote or something.
But it's just like when you see it, you know it. Yeah,

(35:48):
there's nothing else. There's nothing else. I mean, the only
other competing animals would be kyote. I mean, what other
big animal do we have? I mean all the ungulates
that we would have, which I mean primary would just
be deer around here or out west of the Elka
moose too. They're gonna have pellets. I mean, there's nothing
else that's leaving unless you're in mountain lion country. And

(36:10):
I couldn't even tell you what mountain lion scout look like.
So don't worry about if you find mountain lion scout,
You've just like won the lottery, So good for you.
So yeah, I don't I don't think they're gonna have
much trouble. But I mean it's just big. It's big.
It's big. Can you break down the diet of a
bear like throughout the whole year, like a percentage of

(36:33):
blocks of what they eat? So a bear eats? Are
bears in Arkansas the studies, and this would reflect a
lot of other places plant matter and animal matter, and
of that like a very high percentage of that is insects. Okay,

(36:53):
So bears are bears are they're eating lots of plant
And by plant matter, that would be berries, that would
be grass in the spring, it would be acorns, hickory nuts,
beech nuts, would be prickly pear cactus and Arizona New Mexico.
I mean like plant matter, and then would be protein
animal matter which they will catch deer fauns. They will.

(37:16):
A hungry bear would probably eat on the carcass of
the deer if it found it, I mean a full
grown carcass. But they're rolling logs, they're digging rocks, eating insects,
so okay, all right, yeah, so that's so that's the
number one sign you can tell. You can what you

(37:37):
can tell so much from a pile of scat. I mean,
like because you see a track, Like, honestly, most places
you're not gonna see bear track. I mean you you
only see bear tracks where the ground's wet or where
the grounds really dry and bear I mean, you're not
gonna really see bear tracks in the leaves. So if
you walk up here, I mean, you're gonna walk a

(37:58):
long time in Arkansas before you find d a bear track.
So I'm not really looking for that. And if you
see a bear track, it's hard to tell really how
old is but man bear scot with any with any
understanding of how something wet and mushy interacts with hot weather,
you can tell. If it's got a crust on top

(38:19):
of it, it's it's a day old. If it's hard
and crumbly, it's so old it's irrelevant. If it is
smoking hot and just no crust saw I mean, you know,
you you you, you gotta learn how to analyze animal
scout to turn to test test its freshness. And uh,

(38:39):
there's a big difference between a four or five day
old polo scat and a poly scat that was made
this morning. And that's exciting signed for me to find.
When I find a smoking hot pile of bear scout,
you can kill that bear for real. So then it's
get your eyes open and start looking. Well then, so

(38:59):
it's object to number one. It's fine a bear, you know, yes,
I mean like, and then you go into step number two,
hunt the bear, hunt the bear. Yeah, And and you
might do it all in one step, which I've done
that and it's been successful. I mean, just like scouting
fine sign and in the same block of time see

(39:24):
a bear and kill it. That's very possible. A more
likely scenario would be that you go, man, this is
a nice looking ridge. I'm gonna walk two and a
half miles down that drainage and make a big loop
and come back out to the truck and you go
off down in there, and dang, there's some fresh bear
sign and and you might see bear trails. We can

(39:46):
talk about that. But you find bear sign and it's
twelve o'clock in the day and it's hot, and you're
not really prepared to sit there the whole day, you know.
I mean, at that point, you you start hunting that
bear like you would a deer. Okay, you would use
the wind in your favor, because if he smells you,

(40:07):
you're done big time. Oh, you would use the wind
in your favor. You would just analyze the sign and
be like, the bear seems to be using this side
of the ridge more than that side, So I'm gonna
hunt this side. I mean, you know, it just just hunting,
and he's gonna be like a deer. He's gonna use

(40:28):
these areas morning and evening. They're they're crecepular. I'm not
saying that right. How do you say that word corpuscular, crepuscular?
I think that's how you said. Okay, I thought it
was a cr crepuscular. He might be right, we're on
the track. I think the mornings and the twilight movers.
I mean totally. So you would hunt him just like

(40:49):
that morning hunt, evening hunt. That being said my most
successful just like spotting stock Eastern hunting anyway has been
going on in scouting, but prepared to hunt. Okay, scout,
but prepared to stay all day. That's what I always say.
And when I leave my truck in the morning to

(41:10):
go scout, it's like I may be back here in
five hours because I didn't find anything. But if I
get up there and find something, I'm not leaving. And
that's how I've killed several bears. It's just going in
with packing a little food, packing the packing the bow,
packing what you need, and you might just bump into
a bear because you don't want to. If it's season,

(41:33):
you might as well be packing your yeah, your bow,
even if you're doing some serious scouting. What you're gonna
have to do. So, yeah, you gotta cover the ground
and find him. Okay, that was something I was gonna ask.
I mean, we'll come back to that. So, so we've
we've found an area that we want to hunt. What
what don't we talk about other bear sign though? That's

(41:55):
what I was just gonna say, so so, so tell
me the other kind of bear signs. I found A
found a steaming pile. All right, now, what am I
looking for? Well? So bears in the fall are are
inside of a biological process they call hyper faji, which
is and we've talked about that a lot on the

(42:15):
podcast where they have a fall feeding frenzy. They're getting
ready to go to sleep for four months, they got
to eat a bunch of groceries. They can forage for
up to and I've never seen this myself, but they
say they can forage up for up to twenty hours
a day. Wow. I mean, just they're just eating, pounding, pounding,

(42:35):
and so what I have found that the way that
bears use food resource is they will just pound a
resource until it's gone. I mean, and I don't know
if that's really much different than deer, but like, let
me just put it this way. If there's a ridge
top that's got fresh bear scot it might look like

(42:56):
a it might look like a zoo up there. I
mean it's like a cattle yard maybe. Yeah. And so
you're gonna see bear trails, and bear trails would just
be patted out wide areas, and the leaves that you
can discern that this is a game trail, it's gonna
be patted out. I mean, a deer trail is usually
kind of narrow, and I mean, you know, you can

(43:18):
tell a hoofed animals what's been a bear trail is
gonna be wider, it's gonna be flatter, the leaves are
gonna just look like they're just mashed down by a
flat pad, you know, and they're bigger animal. You will
also see places, and this is hard to visualize until
you see it, but in certain places where the topography

(43:41):
narrows down, bears will actually step in the same place
over and over before on like on Kodiak Island, you
can see pictures where they like coming around the rim
of a point or something where I mean literally there's
holes in the ground to foot deep that look like
bear tracks, and it's for thousands of years. Bears when

(44:03):
they come around that point, they put their feet in
the same place. Well, on a micro scale, that will
happen on top of that ridge top that they're pounding
the food source. They're not gonna do it everywhere, but
if there's a reason, if if they're like walking straight
and they have to go around the rock, around that rock,
you'll find these little paths and so you'll you won't

(44:24):
find it for like fifty yards, you'll find it for
like five or six yards. Does that make sense? Yeah,
perfect sense. Yeah. So, and and that's a tailtale sign
of a bear for sure. But those trails will last
for long periods of time. So just because you find
that doesn't mean that you're finding smoking hot bear sign.
You should probably look around then and see if there's

(44:46):
still food available in that spot. If there's food there,
then there's a good chance that there could be a
bear coming to that. Hopefully you didn't speak. Hopefully. What
you find is you get up there and you're like, man,
there's wide oak akers on the ground. There's wide oak
aker in the trees. Oh, there's a pile of bear scaut.
You walk in another fifty yards and you're like, oh, man,
look where they are going through this saddle. They're making

(45:08):
a trail. I mean, once you're there, you're in the
chips and and this is this is encouraging to me
because it's hard to find that spot. I'm not gonna
lie to you. I mean the reason guys aren't bear
hunting so much because they're tough to kill. They're tough
to find um. But that spot is out there. I

(45:28):
mean when I when I enter into the big woods
looking for to go bear hunting. You know, there's these
mine tricks that you play with yourself. And I'm like,
you know, and I found spots like that before, and
I'm like, that spot's out there right now where you
know you just kind of look around. You're like, it's
that there's a bear pound in this mountain coming to

(45:51):
the same place every morning and evening right now today,
I just gotta find it. And so you can, you
can easily, uh you know, chalk off areas. I mean,
you walk on top of a ridge and you don't
see much, don't go back there, got you don't waste
your time, go somewhere else, you know, just keep well.

(46:13):
They I mean obviously they can't be in every single
spot at once, you know, eating every single acorns. So
they're gonna move around. Is there a way that they
would go from you know, earlier in the season until
later in the season. They're gonna be maybe earlier in
the season they're down on the maybe they're on the

(46:33):
north side where it's cooler or something like that, or
they're closer to water. I don't know, is there stuff
like that? I don't think. So, I see what you're saying.
So if you look, if you were looking at this
huge mountain. Maybe there's acorns all across the top of
that mountain for ten miles, and every single spot you
pop onto, you're not gonna find bears. There's gonna be

(46:55):
certain places that you're gonna find what I'm talking about.
And I don't I think it's just I don't know
if it's just how it goes you alright, alright, So well, okay,
So in the early season in the Southeast, and I
guess as we talked about this, I keep talking about
the Southeast because it is different. Bears are doing the

(47:18):
same thing everywhere. We talked about this before, James. I mean,
a bear in in Montana and the fall is doing
the exact same thing as a bear in Arkansas, Georgia, Virginia,
North Carolina. In the fall, they're trying to stuff their
bellies full food. Okay, that's what they're trying to do.
So I went to Montana. I'm gonna you need to
know what the food sources. Yeah, and you'd be looking
for blueberries. I mean, like Montana season wouldn't go very

(47:40):
long into the fall because it gets so cold up there,
you know. I mean, I think it probably just goes
through the end of September or something. But I mean, yeah,
you're looking for berries, and that bear is gonna be
doing the same thing. He's gonna find a berry patch
and he's gonna pound it until it's gone. So you
gotta find that berry patch for For for our analogies,
we're gonna talk about why okacren ridges um broken branches

(48:02):
out of trees. Yep, that's a in the early season,
bears will eat acorns before they fall. Okay, so there's
a point in the fall when white oak acorns and
acorns begin to fall on their own, you know. And
typically that's when animals eat them. That's when deer eat
acorns because can't climb. A bar can climb a tree

(48:25):
like a squirrel, and he will tiptoe like a ballerina
out onto these branches and eat acorns off that tree
like a wizard. I mean, it's amazing to see it
and to think that they can, these big, huge animals
are doing this, but they do, and they'll they'll go
out and break branches. I mean, and and this is

(48:47):
not you. If you find this, you've found something special.
But they do this all the time. But again, it's
not you're not just gonna walk out and find it,
but like the ridge top that's just I mean, restep
you take. You're seeing broken branches, broken branches, broke, I
mean just branches as big as your thumb to even
a little bit bigger, just snapped. And uh that's early

(49:11):
season though, before the acrons are falling, so that would
be pretty much during September. Usually by October acrons are falling.
So trails, broken branches, bear scout, rolled logs, which those
are less relevant because you're gonna find rolled logs for
long periods of time afterwards. But that does tell you

(49:32):
that there's a bear in the area. So you might
see a rolled log in the fall, don't set up
your tree stand and hunt that thing. If you find
a rolled log with fresh bear scout, then there's two
points of data. But you know, we could walk out
just about anywhere and find old bear sign of rolled
logs and rocks, rolled rocks. They're rolling rocks grubbing and

(49:54):
looking for ants and stuff. And uh, the you can
tell how old rock roll is based upon the liking
on top of the rock. I mean, like if you
look at, uh, like this picture James behind my bear
here all these rocks, and those rocks are the liking
and mosses growing on those things in an equal way. Man,

(50:16):
if one of those rocks gets flipped over, it looks
like a neon sign flashing on the side of that mountain,
because that buried part of that rock all of a
sudden is exposed. And so you can go over there
and get a you can get a pretty good data
point of how long ago it was that a bear
was standing over that rock flipping it over. So you know,

(50:37):
that tells you there's at least a bear around. Um.
Bears love to eat yellow jacket ness in the fall.
It seems like I've heard that before too. They eat
the heck out of them. You don't even realize how
many yellow jacketness there are until you go walking through
the woods and see where the bears are digging them up.
I guess they're eating the larvae. I guess they. I've

(51:00):
never studied it, but apparently the larvae maybe over winter
because they're they're larvae in the ground in the fall.
I would assume that they overwinter and then come out
in the spring. The wast larvae or yellow jack at
larvae or whatever. They'll eat the heck out of them.
I mean they'll dig a hole. Okay, okay, alright, So

(51:21):
so we've got different kinds of sign to look for. Um,
we've we've found the sign. So we're we're in the
hot zone. All right. We came ready to hunt. We're
using our best white tail hunting tactics. So we're trying
to avoid you know, the wind and all that kind

(51:42):
of stuff. Are we gonna are we gonna sit on
the ground? We need to get up a tree? Do
we need to walk around? All three? Now, it all
depends upon the amount of concentration and sign and what
what weapon you're using. Um, if you're if if I
were using a muzzleloader, Let's say there's a muzzloader season

(52:04):
and you found some hot bear sign. Man, with that
longer distance weapon, you could sit back a little bit further.
I mean I usually find myself wanting to hunt off
the ground when I have a musloader. Um, I actually don't,
now that I think about it. I rarely tree stand
hunt in situations like that. Bears are stalkable on the

(52:25):
ground when they're eating, they really are they. So if
you if let's say you find this, let's say you
found a saddle. A saddle would be a low spot
on a ridge where animals cross, that's got acorns, it's
got trails, and it's got bear scat. I mean, I'd
probably go in on the down wind side and you know,

(52:49):
maybe build a little brush blind and just sit on
the ground mainly to get a I just feel like
I'm locked in when I'm up in a tree and
at the same time at the same time, though, you
would be much more concealed with your scent and movement
being in a tree. So if it's just like ultra

(53:09):
sign that is like in this twenty yard block, like yeah,
maybe you need to be in a tree stand and
you can find sign that that is that specific like
he gonna be right here. Or it might be more
like there's just bears using this ridge top for this
quarter mile section, and that's real likely. It's like just

(53:29):
in this section there's quite a bit of bear sign.
So maybe you need to start, you know, at four
o'clock in the afternoon with a wind in your face,
just slipping down, you know, timing your movement so that
you will finish about dark on the other side of
that bear sign. Something like that. Because now if a

(53:50):
bear is traveling just with his head up, just moving.
I mean, he can see you just like me, or
you can see him. So how good are their eyesight?
That was well there, their eyesight is as good as
they want it to be. They you know, biologically, they
see just about like us see color, they can see movement.
They're very similar to us on their ability to see.

(54:12):
But because they're an apex predator, they're easily distracted because
they're not that afraid of stuff. And so what I
found is when they're feeding, you can slip right up
to them. And in western spot and stock guys would
know that. But but even in the crunchy deciduous forest,
you can stalk them a lot better than you think.
If they've got their head and a pile of acorns

(54:35):
and uh, you know, you can get within bow range
of them if the wind is right. Now, if the
wind is wrong, you're dead. You probably spooking bears that
you never even saw. Or if they're in an area
where there's grizzly, right, what doesn't a black bear act
different in an area where there's well, there's a lot
of speculation on that. I mean, historically people would say, oh,

(54:57):
you'll never see a black bear, whether you see it grizzly,
but people do all the time. They do act different.
They're more spooky, for sure. But the only place that
would be happening in the lower forty eight would just
be in that Yellowstone region, so not too it wouldn't
be something very common to bounce into, you know, except
just right out there. But yeah, they do act different. Okay,

(55:19):
so we're gonna, we're gonna. So you could slip, you
could tree stand hunt. If the sign was ultra concentrated,
you could I call it slip hunting, just where you
just kind of slipping through. Or you could build a
ground blind in a safe place. And I wouldn't go
set up a ground blind, no, I mean like a
man made ground blind. I mean a lot of people

(55:40):
hunt out of those these days, and yeah they're good
for deer and turkeys and stuff. But a bear would well,
I just wouldn't. I don't think he'd tolerated. He'd come
over and maybe chew it up. You'd use it as
bait to get him in your lab. Maybe I think
it would spook him at first, and he'd come back
in at night and tear it up. Yeah, Yeah, that
makes sense. Yeah, okay, so we've we've found founding area

(56:09):
we want to hunt. We know how we're going to
go through there. Um, we we had success. Let's go ahead.
Let's go ahead and we'll we'll skip the part where
you've covered pretty well in other episodes. You know how
to where to shoot and things like that. Yeah, we
do have some good podcasts about shot placement and stuff

(56:30):
where we talked for an hour about just about place. Yeah,
so let's we've killed the bear. We've killed the bear.
Now what do I need to have in my pack?
First of all, Um, you know this is my first
time out there. I'm great at going out and taking
care of deer. I can pack a deer out. What
do I need to have in my pack that's different
than that for a bear? Right? Good question. I think

(56:53):
that would be the biggest question that people maybe get
stumped by or a little bit intimidated by. You've got
this animal on the ground. It's usually pretty warm in
the fall wherever you're at, so you you know, it's
not like you're it's a November December hind So you
gotta take care of this animal relatively quickly, and you
got to get him out. Um, The thing is is
that most bears aren't over two hundred pounds. I mean,

(57:18):
if you kill a five hundred pound bear, yeah, you
got a chore on your hands. Most likely you're not
gonna kill a five Okay, most of the time, you're
gonna kill an animal that's just a little bit bigger
than a big deer. Okay, So think about it like that.
This really isn't much bigger than a deer, and it's
no different. Skinning a four legged haired animal is the

(57:40):
exact same, no matter what animal it is. If you
skin a squirrel, if you skinn of deer, if you
skin a bear, you're gonna cut around his feet, You're
gonna come down his arms. I mean, you're gonna you're
gonna peel the hide off of that animal, just the
same as you would anything. I mean, and I'm simplifying

(58:00):
it for the purpose of giving people confidence, but it's true.
You're gonna gut that animal just like a deer. And
there's other resources that talk about how to feel dressing animal. Okay,
but it's no big deal. Anybody can do it. Anybody
can do it that's got a good sharp knife. Um.
So that's my short version is that it's just like
anything else. A bear has four quarters, a bear has backstraps,

(58:23):
a bear has inner tender ones, a bear has a
rib cage, a bear has neck meat. A deer has
all those same cups, and all of that stuff is
just as good to grab and and get. I mean,
you want all of that meat that you can. And two,
in terms of equipment, you don't need anything different than

(58:43):
you would if you were killing a white tail back
in there and trying to pack it out. And and
you know a lot of situations, maybe you kill an
animal close enough of the road that you can get
it out whole. I mean, so let's just say you
can get it in the back of your truck with
a couple of buddies. And I mean, you know, I
more power to you. You can take it to a

(59:03):
process or and have somebody else do it. I mean,
I I love I think processing your own game. I
feel dressing it is a big part of it. But
you know, let's just say there's a guy that that
is you know, if you can get it out the whole,
you can you can take it let somebody else do it.
That's an option. That is an option. Um, but um.
And then if you get it out the whole. Uh.

(59:25):
I like to skin a bear on the ground. You'll
never see me hang a bear in a tree to
skin it. I can skin a bear on the ground.
I take pride and how fast I can skin one
on the ground. Um, I don't like to hang them up.
I just you just I did that for the first
time with a deer this past fall. Just always, you know,
the way I learned it was always hanging and I

(59:46):
kind of liked it better on the ground actually, So
I could see that just being easier. It's what you know.
If that's what you know, then that's what you do.
But um, yeah, I could see that just being easier
to work at your not how even you're not having
to worry about grabbing another hand, you know, for holding
the bear. You know, you kind of gotta get them

(01:00:08):
rolled on their back and spread out and uh so
it helps to have another hand. But you know, you
just need a sharp knife that you can preferably resharpen.
I mean, you know, if I were just telling somebody
what they would need, I would say, go get a
have a lin you know, knife with replaceable scalpel blades.
Get about two of those, and you can skin all

(01:00:28):
the bears in the country. Um, but just a sharp knife.
Potentially game bags if you're gonna be hauling, if you're
killing an animal way back in, they're gonna be hauling
it out. You can use uh these white uh cotton
game bags that you take the quarters and get the
quarters in and then you can put those inside of

(01:00:49):
a backpack. And you'd be surprised at two pound bear
by the time you quartered out. Um, two guys could
easily haul that out in one trip. Okay, honestly, one
guy could probably haul it out on one trip. Because
you're not gonna get a hundred pounds of meat out
of a two pound bear. Um, it's probably like thirty yield. Yeah,

(01:01:12):
would be a little bit more. I mean, cause you're
gonna be carrying carrying the hide out and skull out
as well. But you kill a twohnder pound bear, you're
gonna be hauling out, you know, probably way out with
a hide in the head. You know you're gonna be
hauling out a hundred pounds or more. But you know,
so two guys or two trips if you're alone, two
trips back in there, no big deal, No big deal. Uh.

(01:01:36):
And and here's the biggest question too, is that bear
meat is excellent meat. A lot of people have who
really haven't used it very much, would have had some
kind of negative experience or heard negative things about bear meat. Man,
bear meat is incredible. I mean, actually, the more I
use it, the more I realize how good it is. Um.

(01:02:00):
I recently just cooked straight up bear burgers, just ground
bear meat, put some Montreal steak seasoning on the top
and bottom pretty heavy. This seasons up pretty good, just
because I like heavy season not to hide anything. We
had my wife's school. All the teachers came over, women teachers,

(01:02:24):
most of them. They loved that bear meat. I'm not exaggerating.
Two Twice in the last three weeks we've had guests
from like not hunters. They had no reason to like it, James,
no read, they had no bias to like it. You say,
if you kill something, you want to like it, you know,
so like didn't count. It makes it more tasty, for sure.

(01:02:45):
It doesn't count if I'm like, bear meat's good, but oh,
it's it's good good. It's even though a bear is fatty,
it's relatively lean meat as compared to beef. Even I mean,
you know, you can mix in a lot of fat
with it, but you would use bear bear meat just
like you would use any other red meat. Anything that

(01:03:05):
you use red meat for, you would use it for
bear or you would bear the same way. So along
those lines, and one of the things that I wanted
to ask about was trick and ella. So you know,
I think most people know, and they might even be
some bias against that. It's like, Okay, you know, we
can't eat bear meat because it might give us tricking
nosis or whatever. So just talk me through that a

(01:03:29):
little bit. You know, Am I going to get it
when I'm cleaning the bear or um? You know, what's
the situation? You You treat bear meat as if it
has it just like you do pork. I mean, probably
less so these days, but when we were growing up
and kids even more so. I mean it's like man,
watch out for port. It's the same today. But basically

(01:03:49):
they there is no more trick and nella inside of
uh commercial swine. They kind of got rid of it
just through good health practices and farming and stuff. But
bears are carriers carriers of trick and ella. It's easy.
Trick and ella dies at like a hundred forty five degrees.

(01:04:10):
The U s D A minimum meat temperature for chicken, pork, beef,
and everything else is a hundred and sixty degrees. So
everything that we cook, even if you don't know and
you're cooking something on accident, I promise you you're cooking
it above a hundred and sixty degrees. I mean you're

(01:04:31):
that's like minimum internal temperature. Tricknella dies before the one forties,
so it's super easy to kill by heat. Okay, some
trick an Ella is killed by freezing, but not all,
so you can't count on that. So if you if
you freeze it, that doesn't count. Um. But yeah, you
don't want to get tricknella. Yeah it won't kill you.

(01:04:52):
Tricknella won't It wouldn't kill you, but you don't want
to get it, So that that is a concern, and
you you if you just have just the smallest amount
of precaution, it's a non issue. The non issue. You
wear gloves when you're I've never wore a pair of
gloves in my life. When I skinned the bear, if
you had a big cut on your finger, and uh,

(01:05:14):
and what you can do with those? Have aalon knives
pretty easily. You know, I've had open cuts on my
hands when I have skinned a bear, and I just
washed the fire out of my hands afterwards. I would
have done the same thing with the deer. I would
have done the same thing if I had been skinning
a turkey. I mean, you know sometimes when you're hunting, Yeah,
you get skinned up and you gotta you know, get
a briar on you, and so yeah, you just have

(01:05:37):
you just take care of that cut and you'll be fine.
But you could get it. You could get it from
an open cut on your hand, and then skinning a bear,
you absolutely could. Can you Is there tests for it?
I mean, can you send it off? Can you send
a sample somewhere to get it tested? I'm sure there is.
It's not common. I mean, this is the way I
understand it is that pretty much every bear is gonna

(01:05:58):
have it, okay, I mean, just playing on it being
there and respond accordingly. In in the amount of trick
and ella cases in the US that people get from
bear his minuscule. I mean, people do get it, but
it's always from some irresponsible scenario. Uh. And there's there's

(01:06:21):
good well known I mean, you know, our friends Steve Rinella,
trick and Ella. It was I mean they were in
the back country and just cook this meat and it
was undercooked, you know, I mean that kind of stuff happens,
and they all nobody died, They just got tricknella. So
it's it's it's really a non issue with just a
little bit of care, you know. Okay, Well, we've got

(01:06:46):
our bear, We've got him on the ground. What about
as we closed that, what what if we talked about
what to do with the hide? Oh yeah, that's okay.
I didn't want to ask that because so you said
you're gonna carry the hide and the skull out, So
you know, do you have to I guess every state
it's gonna be different on how you have to check it,

(01:07:07):
That's right. So you would always want to leave evidence
of sex on any animal that you killed, if you
had to butcher in the back country, you'd leave a
standard procedure. So let's just say we can take the
we can take the We've got the hide in the
in the skull out. So what are we gonna do
with it? Well, you're gonna want to keep that hide

(01:07:27):
and skull as cool as possible. It'll be. I'm just
gonna throw out some numbers here. But let's say it's
sixty degrees when you kill the bear at five o'clock
in the evening on a fall day, you don't retrieve
the bear until ten o'clock that night. Um, well, let's

(01:07:49):
let's say you don't retreat the bear until the next morning.
Kind of got down into the fifties. You better skin
that bear pretty quick the next day, but it would
probably be fine. Uh. They bear does go uh go
bad a little bit quicker than an ungulate for whatever reason.
They will they'll they'll they'll spoil a little bit quicker.

(01:08:12):
But you know, so if you leave one overnight, you
need to take care of it pretty quick. But the hide,
you just want to keep it cool, and you'll take
that hide off. I mean, that's for another it's not
even for a podcast. Watch some videos on how to
cape a bear. We've got videos on how to cape
a bear. Bear Hunting Magazine YouTube channel, some of our vlogs. Um,
so we maybe we'll find a link and put that

(01:08:34):
in there, cobe. Uh. But so you're gonna take this
hide out, and I don't know anybody that's tanning their
own bear hides. You're gonna take it to a text
germist and you're gonna have them professionally tanned, and and
and the cheapest way to handle a bear hide is
just to get it, uh, buckskin tanned. Just take that
thing in an ice chest or from you know, get

(01:08:56):
it in a freezer as quick as possible. You're gonna
wanna You're not gonna want to bawl it up and
put it in a freezer because think about the installation
on that bear high, So the very inside of it,
it's gonna be days before. So a lot of bear
hides get run by guys that ball up their bear
high and put it in the freezer and they think, oh,

(01:09:16):
I'm good, it's in the freezer. Well, it's three days
before the center of that thing gets frozen. So it right,
it'll sour and we'll go rancid. And so kind of
spread it out a little bit, let it cool for
about thirty forty minutes in that freezer, and then before
it freezes, then ball it up so it's evenly cooled
all the way across. That makes sense, yea perfect sense,

(01:09:38):
And just take it, take it to a text ARUs
and say I want to I want to buckskin tan
and they'll charge you thirty dollars a foot or something
For a five ft bear, it will cost you, I
don't know, two or something and it it'll end up
being tu and then and you can mount the bear.
You can do whatever you want with it. I mean,
you could spend a lot of money on a bear.
That's a big thing that I hear people say it's

(01:10:00):
like financial concerns with killing a bear. Yeah, but you
know there's no laws that so you haven't even have
to keep the hide, Okay, like that's not I mean,
the only regulation is that you keep the meat, you know,
of course. Yeah, yeah, but I think everybody if you
kill a bear, man, you better you better tann a hide. Yeah,

(01:10:23):
I mean that. You know, people can throw that dirty
word around, but as hunters, we like to have keepsakes
from what we kill. Heck, yeah, you know, man, bear
hides are beautiful. They're there, great, great, they're beautiful, beautiful trophies,

(01:10:47):
memory activators, rugs, keepsakes, conversation starters. You know what. I
find a lot of non hunters like bear bear hides. Yeah.
I have a lot of people that have that have
been really interested in my bear high. It's like wanting one. Yeah, oh,
I believe it. I mean we talked about that in

(01:11:07):
my house. My wife's not a hunter, and wouldn't a
wouldn't a bear skin rug look good right here from
the fireplace? Blah blah blah. I mean she's almost me
the permission to do it. Yeah, I mean, not that
I need her permission to do that kind of stuff,
but you know it's almost like she's, yeah, well and
she's not real keen on the you know, the deer
amounts that we have up there, So hey, you need

(01:11:32):
you need, you need to kill a bear? Well to
help you You're you're you're educating me and bringing me
along and and which I greatly appreciate. We've got to
find time in my calendar to get out there. And
it's just like anything in life. You know, you've got
to find time in your calendar to go out and
do the things that you love. Well, the cool thing

(01:11:54):
about the state you live then, is that you go
on a deer bear hunt, you know what I mean.
So it's not you have not I'm not gonna say
a great chance of success on either one of those,
but it's fun to go on a combo hunt. Me
That's the funnest thing is to go in the big
woods and just be ready for anything. Yeah, man, be

(01:12:15):
ready for anything and a lot of time. And wherever
the feed is, that's where deer gonna be too, So
you could find deer in the same areas you're gonna
find bear. Absolutely gotta do it, all right, that's just
put one more thing on that bucket list, One more man,
one more Well, all right, we've okay. So we started
from what we didn't even know where bears were, and

(01:12:38):
we went all the way taking a hide to the
text dervist. That's how it's supposed to be done, right,
It's the full gamut, right, and in what an hour
and ten minutes or so? You know, everybody should be
well educated. Now, No, this is good. Any other any
other thoughts? You know? The only other thing that I
was gonna say that I as I was going to

(01:12:59):
ask you about was when we were well, we kind
of talked about sight and smell and hearing was the
other thing. You kind of touched on that already, so
I don't think we need to go too much into that.
And I was gonna ask you, how do I know
what kind of bear I want? To shoot. I mean,
how do I know if I want to shoot that bear? Okay,
I found a bear, But do I want that bear?

(01:13:22):
That's a that's gonna be a maybe a subject for
a different podcast. We have a podcast on judging black
bears where we nerd out for a long time, hour
and a half probably talking about judging bears. And that's
a good resource. It really is like I almost want
to go back and listen to it. Uh uh yeah,
because bears are hard to judge. But from a regulation standpoint,

(01:13:45):
most states, you know, just you know, you're not supposed
to shoot a South cubs because that's general rule everywhere
you're hunting bears, is that you want to be able
to look at a bear long enough to recognize if
it's alone, and it's and and if if she's got
young cubs, those cubs will be close. Okay. I mean
that's just general rules. So you can't shoot a South

(01:14:06):
with cubs and uh and there's some regulations about weight
in some places, and Arkansas there's not you know, but uh,
you know, and I don't even want to say because
I can't remember, but I mean there's some places where
it's like you're not supposed to shoot a bear under
seventy five pounds or something, which that should be pretty obvious. Yeah,

(01:14:26):
you're if you see a bear that's about as big
as a half grown Labrador retriever, you're not gonna want
to shoot it. I might mistake it for a laboratory retriever. Yeah, okay,
oh man, I think we've we've hit We've left some
some things undiscussed or probably just scratch the surface in

(01:14:49):
some areas. But that'll be the great place for people
to come and ask us questions. Remind them again where
we're gonna be. All right, So we're gonna be on
Facebook August any nights seven pm Central Time on the
back Country Hunters and Anglers Southeast Chapter Facebook page. Right,
so you just get on Facebook and search for Southeast

(01:15:10):
Chapter of back Country Hunters and Anglers. It will pop
right up and um, if you're not a member of
that particular page, then asked to join, and some of
our generous page administrators will evaluate your requests and get
that all set up. So we can do that, and
you know, I guess people could even submit questions before

(01:15:31):
then we loaded with some questions and they could they
could email info at bear dash hunting dot com, Bear
info at bear hyphen hunting dot com. Yeah, if you
had just some questions on your mind right away, or
Instagram US or you know, private messages on Facebook, Instagram,

(01:15:52):
there's a thousand ways. But if we came in preloaded
with a couple of questions from this podcast, that would
be good. But now, I think sometimes people well are
intimidated by bear. But here's something we gotta say before
we end our bears dangerous. Oh yeah, that was on
my list and I was like, man, yeah, I mean,
most people that are gonna have been have hunted much

(01:16:13):
at all, are gonna know that black bears are really
just not that dangerous. I mean, you're not gonna be
walking out in the woods and a bear attack you.
I mean, it's just not gonna happen. But you did
say that we're gonna try to be quiet, We're gonna
slip along. So if we're doing our job right and
staying staying down wind of them, there's always that chance

(01:16:35):
that we could surprise one. And the worst one to
surprise would be a sal with cubs. Yeah, so real quick,
what do we do in that situation? I mean, let's
cover it real quick run like a girl scout. Hope
that you run faster than your body now, you know, yeah,
that is probably you know, my good buddy Most Shepherd

(01:16:55):
that we did a podcast with Moe has actually been
I'm not gonna say attacked, but he had his bow
chewed on by a bear that he was poking in
the face. Uh, super rare situation. I mean, ultra rare,
but it did happen like twenty miles from here. He
he was walking in the fall long a ridge top

(01:17:18):
spooked two cubs, cubs of the year, you know, young
look look like footballs, and they ran up a tree
right beside him. You know, he just came up on him. Bam.
They ran up a tree and started chattering and making noise.
And then Mama just rushes in sees Mo standing there,
and she absolutely just like an attacking dog, just comes in,

(01:17:40):
wolfing and popping, and and he was backpeddling and poking
that bear in the nose with his recurved bow. And finally,
you know, he just backed up and he was hollering
and yelling and kicking, and I think he actually even
kicked the bear. Moill have to get Most. I can't remember.
I drew a picture of it ten years ago for

(01:18:01):
a magazine article that I did on it. Yeah, I've
got a picture of most Shephard fighting a bear with
his boat. That's a really rare situation. I mean, godly,
if you see a sala cubs, just duck your head
and just get the heck out of just back out
of there slowly, or try to scare it. I mean,
that would probably be my initial response if a south

(01:18:25):
bear started charging me, I'd probably holler and scream at
it and throw my arms and I mean, she's she's
not gonna attack you, Okay, all right, she did attack
mo though. Yeah. But in general, there's no reason to
be afraid of bears. Now, if you're out west and

(01:18:45):
then grizzly bear country, that's another podcast. But there's only
that's not that's a whole another podcast. Grizzly bears are dangerous.
Black bears are typically not all right, Well cool, I
think I think we've covered the high points, left some good,
left some ground to ply. Well, we'll see everybody on

(01:19:06):
Thursday twenty nine. There are people that want to be involved, Kobe.
What do we always say, you gotta keep those wild
places as well, because that's where the Bears live. And
there was a long pause. There we are, You're waiting
for me to finish. I'm trying to beat it. Well yeah,
but then I was trying to get my brain my
brand boys, the wild places wild because that's where the

(01:19:28):
Bears live. Ye