July 30, 2024 • 30 mins
Kolby is joined by die hard bear hunter Josh Kirchner, @dialedinhunter, to talk about how he finds success in the dry arid mountains of Arizona chasing black bears. Make sure and check out his new book on how to become a bow hunter, it's available now on Amazon.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:10):
Welcome to the bear hunting magazine Hunt Cash with me
Koby Morehead. We're gonna nerd out on bears hunting in
the outdoors. We'll tell stories, talk biology, tactics, gear, and
the fight to protect the pursuits that we hold dear. So,
grab your bino's, lace up your boots, load up your barrels,
and gather the hounds. We venture on this journey together.
(00:41):
Today on the podcast, we're gonna continue a similar conversation
to the last one. We were talking about keying in
on fall bears. This time we're talking to Josh Kershner
from Arizona. We're gonna talk about what he looks for
and how he scouts for fall bears in Arizona. There's
a lot of things we can learn from Josh and
other people that hunt in harsh, extreme environments. We've seen
(01:04):
time and time again that Josh really learns and has
figured out how to overcome obstacles in his way and
have the ability to adapt in and.
Speaker 2 (01:14):
Find the bears.
Speaker 1 (01:15):
Most years, Josh writes a couple of articles every year
for Bear Hunting Magazine, and we've seen just how passionate
he is about bear hunting and whether you live inside
of a similar environment or not. There is stuff to
learn about bear behavior inside of this and good ways
of thinking. So even if it's not something that you're into,
(01:37):
there's always something to learn. We're starting out this episode
with Josh telling us a little of his background.
Speaker 3 (01:43):
Here's Josh been bear hunting down here. Mostly. Bears really
got me into hunting a lot, he said, Deer hunting
my dad kind of like an annual deer camp every year,
which was amazing as a kid. But I got older
for some reason. Dude, I don't know what it was,
but the bear thing just kind of got to me.
(02:05):
So that's what really I just decided. I was like, man,
I'm gonna learn how to do this, you know, And
I just dove headfirst into bears, which is super unique
for where I live because we're not necessarily considered a
bear state Arizona. Like a lot of people that live
here don't even know that bears exist here. Started learning
how to bear hunt, and through doing so, that was
(02:26):
the thing that kept me in the field the most.
So I decided to try to do a kind of
an online journal about it, which turned into a blog
called dialdon Hunter, and I think that was about a
decade ago. At this point, I didn't know anyone was
reading it. I just wanted to be transparent, kind of
(02:47):
have an online journal for myself to reflect back on
and see where I messed up, see where I succeeded.
I got a message from Clay about a bear that
my first bear that I got, and he was asked
me if to write an article, and that's the first
article I ever had published. So nowadays, ten years later,
(03:08):
I am a writer, videographer and photographer in the hunting
industry and I'm due this full time. I've written a
couple of books too, So yeah, that's me in a
nutshell without getting too far into the weeds.
Speaker 1 (03:28):
I really like the quality that Josh has where he
was starting an online blog, but he was doing it
a lot for just himself and not knowing if anyone
was reading. And then out of the blue, he gets
a call and he was first published inside of Bear
Hunting Magazine, which is cool. You never know where Clay
Nukelemb's name is gonna pop up. But if you want
(03:50):
to learn more about Clay, check out episode one. That's
episode uno of the Bear Hunting Magazine Hunt cast to
hear more about Clay. So since Josh brought up his
first ever article that was published inside a bear hunting magazine,
I asked him to go ahead and tell us that
story real quick.
Speaker 2 (04:11):
So here's Josh.
Speaker 3 (04:17):
That was a roller coaster of the season. Ended up
kind of all over the state, bouncing around. First bear
I was on, ended up getting run out of the
country by dogs. I actually shot a bear in August,
tracked it for two days, couldn't find it, almost quit
bear hunting that year. It was just a nasty deal.
(04:41):
And then returned that following October and found this big,
old jet black boar with my brother and he walked
out and there was two other bears with it. We
saw nine and bears that morning. I think I was
wild and I shot that bear and that was my
first bear. And that's so that's the article that I wrote,
the first one for Bear Hunting magazine. Through all of
(05:03):
the looking around I've done for bears because so like,
one of the hardest things about the bear thing here
is food isn't consistent from year to year. So you
can't be like, oh, yeah, I saw nine bears here
last year and then go back the following year and
guarantee that they're going to be there. So because of that,
(05:23):
you bounce around a lot, and through doing so I
would find good deer spots and stuff too. So yeah,
I along with the bears. Man, I absolutely love Coos
deer hunting. Black bears are my number one love out
in the mountains, but Coos deer is number two for sure.
I hunted meals for a couple of years and was successful,
(05:45):
but ever since I got my first coups, I haven't
hunted one meal deer in Arizona since I'll go out
of state Colorado, Utah or whatever to hunt meal deer. Also, obviously,
we have great elk hunting here. You know, it's kind
of a blessing and a curse to live in a
trophy state like Arizona, because pulling a tag is like
incredibly difficult, but I do, I do get after the
(06:07):
late archery bull hunts are like fairly easy to draw,
so like, I do that quite a bit and then
have alinair are super fun too, and we got good
turkey hunting here as well, so awesome.
Speaker 1 (06:16):
Yeah, I think there's a lot of value that comes
from the struggle. I wonder if Josh would have been
able to have an easy chip shot ride at the
first day break of day kind of luck with a
(06:37):
bear if he'd be the same hunter he is today.
I think sometimes the struggle makes us a lot better hunters. Well,
I know it does. There's one particular story I asked
Josh to share, and we're gonna be talking about the
bears and the pears. It's an article he wrote a
while back that talks about how plan a plan be
(07:00):
doesn't always come into play and that you have to
be able to adapt. So here's Josh talking about the
bears and the bears.
Speaker 3 (07:12):
Every year it's I mean, some years it's absolutely arid,
and some years it's like a monsoon, and some years
it's kind of in between. All of that has an
effect on food, on what food, on how fast food
is growing, what food is growing, and where it's growing.
(07:32):
So it's incredibly vital as a bear hunter, more specifically
as a fall bear hunter, to go out and actually
find that food. So what I do in a lot
of scouting is I'm out there looking around for acorns
and stuff like that to make sure that stuff is there.
That story, I was predicting that there was going to
(07:55):
be a lot of acorns, and I was right, but
I also was wrong. So let me I'll elaborate on that.
So we have different species of oaks here. Okay, so
we have one called a scrub oak and another one
called a gamble oak. Those are the two main ones
that I focus in on for black bears. The scrub
(08:15):
oak is an early season a corn august. The gamble
oak is a later season a corn that happens in October.
On that particular year, we had a good early season
acorn crop, but not a good later season a corn crop.
The struggle was I was going to these areas where
I thought bears were gonna be at based on the
(08:39):
early season acorns, and I was finding old sign. Okay,
this is in October, by the way, When I was
out here looking around, and I was assuming, and this
is like growing pains of a bear hunter, right, I
was assuming that we would also have a good October
acorn crop. But it just wasn't the case. I found
(09:00):
that out once I got into the field, saw old
sign but no new sign. So after three or four days,
I mean, I packed into the back country pretty far
on that hunt, went back in there. I found one
young bore way up high, but I think I saw
three acorns when I was hiking in on the trail.
(09:22):
You know. So for people that don't know, like, if
you do not have the food, you do not have
the bears, Like if you're wasting your time. Really Like,
I'm a guy that likes to think that no day
is wasted in the field. Okay, but if you're out
there looking for bears, you best be you best have
the food located. Okay. So I pulled out of there
and I went to a different area to look at
(09:45):
because another thing that will happen as acorns will occur
in pockets. So I was like, oh, I wonder if
it's better over here. So I pulled out, went to
a different area, same kind of scenario. The early season
sign was there, but there wasn't any newer sign. So
after a couple of days of looking around, I was like,
you know what, if there's no acorns, I'm gonna go
(10:08):
check this other food source, which another main food source
for us is prickly pears. There's a big berry that
is about two three inches long that grows on a
prickly paired cactus, and those bears, it's like candy to them. Okay.
So I went to a different spot lower in elevation
(10:28):
this occursion, and the first evening I was there, we
found a giant bore going through the prickney pears and
it's like, okay, now we're talking. So we never got
a shot on that bear that evening. He ended up
betting up in a spot that was just we just
couldn't get a shot on him where he was. He
ran out of light. Return the next morning, knowing that
(10:55):
a bear is not going to leave an area if
he doesn't have to, particularly a big boar, If he
has food and water where he's at, he will completely
clear that area out before he leaves on his own
unless something pushes him out, which a something pushing out
a big board the only thing that's gonna do that.
(11:15):
As a hunter, I feel like or another big boar.
So we came in the following day in three point
thirty pm. He comes walking out. He was beneath us
the entire time and we never saw him. He was
betted up all day long, comes walking out and feeding
on prickly pairs, and I shot him at four hundred yards.
(11:37):
What I didn't say that fought that morning though we
found another bear that was in the same area. So
what I'm getting at here is we found the current
What's important is finding the current food source, like what
they prefer right now, not a month ago. And once
we got that, we saw bears regularly, okay, and it
(12:00):
was only a matter of a couple miles okay, and
the spots that I was in to start out with,
these are areas have I'm not I've seen in upwards
of twenty bears in like within like three four hundred
yard area on certain years. Not this year though, it
was different. Which is the hardest part about black bear
(12:24):
hunting in Arizona to me is it's a moving target.
You can't just guarantee things. So yeah, just a prime
example of yeah, you need to go out and you
need to actually spend the time proofing the food source,
and you can't bet your money on what you saw
last year.
Speaker 1 (12:43):
A lot of the things that Josh was talking about
made me think to the last episode with Myron Means
talking about natural foods and kenn On bears, for one, like,
we weren't talking about the same types of things. I mean,
we were both talking about acrons, but we weren't talking
about the the ones on scrub oaks and gamble oaks.
We were talking about white oaks and post oaks and
(13:05):
black oaks, and we weren't talking about prickly bears. We
were talking about other soft masks here, like cherries and
black gumberries and muscadions. I think it's a good reminder
to always know that the same spot won't always work
you after year. All right, let's start talking about scouting
(13:28):
for bears.
Speaker 2 (13:30):
Here's Joshua.
Speaker 3 (13:37):
Time is money Cooby with Arizona in particular, how our
bear season works is it opens on a Friday, and
our units they're open based on South Quota limits. If
a unit hits South Quota, that will close the following
Wednesday at sundown. So what I'm getting at is you
might only have six days to hunt a certain area, okay,
(14:03):
because it might shut down you don't know. So in
the spirit of that, in my opinion, it's very important
to scout ahead of time so you're not wasting days
during the hunt finding what you need to find. The
beauty about on X and using something like the terrain
X feature is that is really just how important elevation is.
(14:28):
So I'm doing this literally right now, like I just
got back less than a week ago from a scouting
trip in any unit I've never been to. And what
I'm trying to do is I'm trying to key in
on a certain elevation band between you know, forty five
hundred feet six thousand feet, like right in there, like
(14:50):
that that area, because in the past, I know that
that is kind of the area where food is going
to be ripe during laid off. Okay, where in that
is it going to be ripe? I'm I don't know.
Within on X, I will use that terrain X feature
to block out everything that isn't forty five hundred to
(15:13):
six thousand feet, So basically everything will go like to
like a dark shade of gray or something like that,
and everything that I want to see will be in color.
Super beneficial, Okay, cut a lot of the weeds out
on a country. There's also the view shed tool on
there where so I'm a glasser, Okay. You can only
(15:35):
tell so much from a glassing point on a computer
as to what you're like, what you're going to actually
see when you get there. There's been many times I'm
looking at a topple map and I'm like, oh yeah,
this looks like a good glassing spot. And then I
get there and I'm like, I can't see anything. So
the cool thing about that terrain X in the view
(15:55):
shed is you can actually drop a pin on wherever
you're thinking about glassing and it will highlight what you
can see the view from that point, So you can
have a really good idea of what you're gonna be
able to see before you even get there. But once
those areas are located on the map and I've I've
(16:18):
my ONYX looks like a Christmas tree with with all
the pins all over it, the water sources, the potential
glassing positions, which I try to do stuff like I
try to find like like an ideal scenario would be
like find like a big main ridge where I could
walk along kind of like like shimmy along the top
(16:39):
and I can look down off of both sides, down
into the basins beneath that right and and fingers crossed
that there's water down on both sides. For Arizona, that's
incredibly vital. I won't even hunt an area if there's
not water around. I won't even like I won't even
go look at the food if it's not there. People
(17:01):
in like the PNW and stuff like that. They like
like with water, water is everywhere, dude, I'll tell you what.
Like down here, the desert water is gold. Okay. So
once I have areas of interest on on within my ONYX,
then it's time to go prove them. And that's what
I just did. I went. I went about a week ago.
(17:21):
I went, and I hit all these points, not glassing
at all. Okay, Like I'm not sitting down and glassing
because the reason being is because I know that they're
not there yet. The bears aren't in those areas yet
that I know where I could go see bears right now.
But the food source changes and the bears move with that. Okay.
(17:42):
So what you're trying to do is you're trying to
you're trying to alley up them. Basically, you're trying to
find where they're going to be, not where they are, Okay.
So and that's that's where finding that food, those food
sources all come down to, uh, it comes into play.
So that's what we did. We went, we proof water.
We found lots of food sources, found a lot of
(18:03):
good stuff, found a lot of bad stuff. Stuff like
that I'm looking at on a map and I'm like, oh,
this looks really good. I got there and I'm like,
you know, I'm a little disappointed. That's what That's why
it's so important to actually go and see it. So, yeah,
that's that's what I do.
Speaker 1 (18:16):
And you're not glassroom for bears, but I'm assuming that
you take your optics to be able to see the
food sources, so you're not having to walk all the
way over there.
Speaker 3 (18:25):
Yes, yes, let me yeah, let me let me back
up there. I was being more specific towards black bears.
I have binoculars with me, and I also have a
spotting scope, and I have done this in the past
where I've actually used my spotting scope to zoom in
on like prickly pair of cactus from a long ways
out to see how the berries are looking and stuff.
(18:45):
I do it in oaks because some of our so
the early season acorn that we have a scrub oak.
It's a smaller acorn. I mean it's only about the
size of your fingernail, okay, so so when it's coming in,
it's really small, all right. And like said, like sometimes
like it's like a pe. So having optics to be
(19:06):
able to sit there like even if I'm looking at
something from less than one hundred yards away, you can't
see them. Okay, so you need you actually need your
optics to glass down into the food to see the acorns,
butting and stuff. So yeah, another thing I'm glassing for
Kolbe is the water, because the water will naturally pull
(19:28):
up in the bottoms of our canyons, and I can
oftentimes see that from above. So when I do see that,
I'll use So a really cool tool that recently came
out on within on X is there the compass mode
on there. So with that I can actually pinpoint. I
(19:52):
can like point my phone at the water, pinpoint where
that is, and drop a pin right on that water
is from where I'm standing, and then I have that
there for future reference. Well.
Speaker 1 (20:14):
I wish we had time to do a deep dive
into pre scouting and scouting inside of on X and
on the ground, but Josh did a good job of
bringing it down to the key things that he looks
for and not getting too much into the weeds. I
will say that there's some good resources on the on
X YouTube channel. They call them masterclasses, and there's some
(20:36):
pretty good resources in there regarding looking for bears, and
you'll get some good information from those types of resources.
The next thing that I want Josh to share with
us is what kind of intel is good for him
whenever he's in a season. So if him and a
hunting buddy are in a similar area, what kind of
(20:57):
information would he like to know about bear behavior here?
And I think that it gives us some good questions
so that whenever we just see a bear, it gives
us a good list of questions when we're out there
hunting to really begin to try to understand what it
is that the bears are actually up to.
Speaker 2 (21:15):
Here's Josh.
Speaker 3 (21:27):
If you find one black bear, and let's say you're like, oh, yeah,
I found that bear. He's at he's at he's at
forty seven hundred feet okay, and he's doing this. I
always ask people that, like people that send me like
oh yeah, I saw a bear. I'm like, well, what
was he doing? It's like if he was just walking,
(21:48):
maybe he was going to a different elevation band, it
was he feeding? Okay? What was he eating? Okay? So
then you know that okay, which which then means it's like,
don't look at that. It's just one bear. Now you
have this valuable piece of the puzzle, Okay, to be like, Okay,
I saw this bear forty seven hundred feet he was
(22:10):
eating this type of acorn, and he was on this
facing slope, so he was on like a south facing slope.
He's not west facing slope. Whatever that is. You can
take that information and transpose it to different areas in
where you're hunting, which then is gonna make more bears.
Like I always tell folks like, if you see a
(22:32):
black bear in an area, that bear is there for
a reason. Okay they and chances are there's more than
that bear around, Okay, So just yeah, So I always
look at someone finds one bear, I'm like, there's more
than that around for sure. That bears there for a reason.
Speaker 1 (22:52):
So when it's time to go on a hunt, how
long do you give a spot before you move on
to another spot that you've keaten on?
Speaker 3 (23:00):
So I like to give a spot at least in
evening and the morning, you know, sit from like three
o'clock or something two o'clock until dark in glass, and
then the following morning be in your spot before daylight.
With black bears, I think that's so important, like being
late to your glassing spot when you're bear hunting is
(23:23):
just man, you're just doing yourself a disservice. Man. Those
bears really like to operate in twilight, in those like
gray light hours. So yeah, like glass evening last morning,
you know, first light to I don't know, ten eleven
o'clock in the morning. And if I haven't seen anything
in an evening in the morning unless I know, like
(23:44):
I've walked through the area and I'm seeing a bunch
of sign. If you're seeing fresh sign, okay, I'm just
not seeing what's here, right, That's a good thing to
key in on. I killed a bear two years ago
at this point. I never saw that until I shot him.
And I hunted for probably over a week before I
(24:05):
actually saw him, and I put the puzzle together of
how to play this bear what I was seeing. I
would walk this canyon bottom up, and then what and
there was a spring. It was a beautiful spring, and
then I would I would sit that spring, okay, and
I would wait for the bears to come into water.
Along my route, I noticed there was pine needles that
(24:30):
were simply moved, like if you took your fist put
it down in the dirt and you push the pine
needles forward, and so it makes a you that's what
I was seeing. I never saw any paw prints. I
just saw that going through the pine needles, and I'm like, man,
that's a bear. One hundred percent. That's a bear. Once
I got the wind figured out, which is also a
(24:52):
super interesting situation, this was this was like one of
those moments where I was like super just good hunting,
you know. I was just super proud of how I
figured this area out. There's water. I sat on the
side of the spring where the wind was hitting me
in the face. Okay, that sounds pretty good, right, the
(25:15):
wind's going away from the water, it's sitting me in face. Well,
what was happening is in the morning, like first thing
in the morning, the wind would parallel the water, so
it would actually go down the trail that I was
hiking in on. And my thought was, oh, there's should
be bears walking all around here. I don't know exactly
when this bear is coming down this way. So I
(25:35):
sat there and I never saw anything. What I ended
up doing is I ended up getting up on the
other side of the drainage, which would have meant that
my wind was blowing towards the water, but I was
up higher, so I sat it in the evening. It
was an evening spot, and because of the thermals, my
(25:55):
wind was blowing towards the water, but it was blowing
over it. And then if when it did blow down
the trail, it would parallel the trail, not blow on
the trail. So essentially it was blowing over where I
thought the bears were and to the left of where
the bears were. The first evening I did that, that
bore walked in and I shot him at thirty yards.
(26:16):
So it's just like one of those things. It's like
they are a ghost, okay, and if they don't want
to be seen, they're not going to be seen. So
putting together these these this puzzle, these puzzle pieces, that's
how you that's how you have success out there. You
got to pay attention to that stuff, you know. Ever
since I got my first one, it just it was
just a different experience than anything else, any other deer
(26:39):
hunt or anything like that. It was just different. Man,
Like we the first bear I ever packed out. Dude,
I tell you what we were. We were leap frog
and bear parts up a cliff to get it to
get it out of where we were, Like, it was unreal.
It was it was a big adventure. It was awesome
(26:59):
and at and during the time of doing it, I
was like, oh, man, I'm uh, I don't know about this,
you know, like feeling super sketchy about the situation. But
like once I got back to the truck, I look
back on that, dude, and I was like, that was awesome,
you know, like I can't wait. I can't wait. I
(27:20):
can't believe we did that. I can't wait to do
that again. It's just like so far removed from what
from our city life, you know, It's.
Speaker 1 (27:27):
All right, it's uh, we're getting to that time. We
need to wrap it up. But Josh, tell everybody about
your new book.
Speaker 3 (27:34):
Been out for about a month at this point. It's
called Becoming a Bow Hunter. It's a complete beginner's guide
to archery hunting. I wanted to write it from the
ground level, man, like you don't even have a bow yet.
Like I start out, like, how do you buy a bow?
How do you do that? Right from from that point
all the way to your packing an animal out and
(27:56):
putting it in your freezer, And there's a lot in between.
There's a lot of stuff on gear. There's a lot
on technique, like how to shoot, how to shoot all
the different releases, multiple ways to shoot the different releases,
different styles of hunting. There's a couple there's a couple
guest pieces in there from Jace Bowserman and Brad Brooks.
(28:17):
They contribute to that, to that book, And I did
that because you know, there was areas within the book
where I wasn't super confident in talking about, Like like
Brad writes a piece on calling. I do calling, but
like not like him. You know, he's like mister l hunter.
You know, he does a lot of calling and stuff.
Jace Jase writes this great piece on ambush hunting. Again,
(28:41):
like I'm primarily a spot in stock Hunter. You know,
do I ambush hunt? Yes, I use it as a tool.
But Jace does it all the time, you know. So
like having him put his wisdom into that, I just
thought it was gonna bleed through more wisdom, you know
for people I think I was writing a book to
my younger self is really what it was, really what
(29:01):
you know, because everything in it, I truly believe that
if you're new to bow hunting and you pick this,
but whether you're new to bow hunting, or maybe you've
been like a bow hunter for a while and you
haven't experienced success yet. I really believe that this is
going to help you fill your first tag. And the
reason for that is because everything in it helps me
fill tags. Okay, these are just all the things that
(29:24):
I've learned through the years and learned not only from
my own experiences, but from talking to like veteran bow
hunters and guys that are way more experienced than I am.
So yeah, I'm super proud of how it came out. Man.
If anyone wants to check it out, it's on Amazon
Becoming a bow Hunter. Check it out if you're new. Man,
I think I really wish I had it when I started,
(29:46):
you know. Yeah, thank you for listening. The Bear Hunting
Magazine Hunt Cast is recorded by Bear Hunting Magazine and
produced by Mountain Gravity. Me be sure leave us a
five star review on iTunes and keep reguarding the gate
Welcome to the bear hunting magazine Hunt Cash with me
Koby Morehead. We're gonna nerd out on bears hunting in
the outdoors. We'll tell stories, talk biology, tactics, gear, and
the fight to protect the pursuits that we hold dear. So,
grab your bino's, lace up your boots, load up your barrels,
and gather the hounds. We venture on this journey together.
(00:41):
Today on the podcast, we're gonna continue a similar conversation
to the last one. We were talking about keying in
on fall bears. This time we're talking to Josh Kershner
from Arizona. We're gonna talk about what he looks for
and how he scouts for fall bears in Arizona. There's
a lot of things we can learn from Josh and
other people that hunt in harsh, extreme environments. We've seen
(01:04):
time and time again that Josh really learns and has
figured out how to overcome obstacles in his way and
have the ability to adapt in and.
Speaker 2 (01:14):
Find the bears.
Speaker 1 (01:15):
Most years, Josh writes a couple of articles every year
for Bear Hunting Magazine, and we've seen just how passionate
he is about bear hunting and whether you live inside
of a similar environment or not. There is stuff to
learn about bear behavior inside of this and good ways
of thinking. So even if it's not something that you're into,
(01:37):
there's always something to learn. We're starting out this episode
with Josh telling us a little of his background.
Speaker 3 (01:43):
Here's Josh been bear hunting down here. Mostly. Bears really
got me into hunting a lot, he said, Deer hunting
my dad kind of like an annual deer camp every year,
which was amazing as a kid. But I got older
for some reason. Dude, I don't know what it was,
but the bear thing just kind of got to me.
(02:05):
So that's what really I just decided. I was like, man,
I'm gonna learn how to do this, you know, And
I just dove headfirst into bears, which is super unique
for where I live because we're not necessarily considered a
bear state Arizona. Like a lot of people that live
here don't even know that bears exist here. Started learning
how to bear hunt, and through doing so, that was
(02:26):
the thing that kept me in the field the most.
So I decided to try to do a kind of
an online journal about it, which turned into a blog
called dialdon Hunter, and I think that was about a
decade ago. At this point, I didn't know anyone was
reading it. I just wanted to be transparent, kind of
(02:47):
have an online journal for myself to reflect back on
and see where I messed up, see where I succeeded.
I got a message from Clay about a bear that
my first bear that I got, and he was asked
me if to write an article, and that's the first
article I ever had published. So nowadays, ten years later,
(03:08):
I am a writer, videographer and photographer in the hunting
industry and I'm due this full time. I've written a
couple of books too, So yeah, that's me in a
nutshell without getting too far into the weeds.
Speaker 1 (03:28):
I really like the quality that Josh has where he
was starting an online blog, but he was doing it
a lot for just himself and not knowing if anyone
was reading. And then out of the blue, he gets
a call and he was first published inside of Bear
Hunting Magazine, which is cool. You never know where Clay
Nukelemb's name is gonna pop up. But if you want
(03:50):
to learn more about Clay, check out episode one. That's
episode uno of the Bear Hunting Magazine Hunt cast to
hear more about Clay. So since Josh brought up his
first ever article that was published inside a bear hunting magazine,
I asked him to go ahead and tell us that
story real quick.
Speaker 2 (04:11):
So here's Josh.
Speaker 3 (04:17):
That was a roller coaster of the season. Ended up
kind of all over the state, bouncing around. First bear
I was on, ended up getting run out of the
country by dogs. I actually shot a bear in August,
tracked it for two days, couldn't find it, almost quit
bear hunting that year. It was just a nasty deal.
(04:41):
And then returned that following October and found this big,
old jet black boar with my brother and he walked
out and there was two other bears with it. We
saw nine and bears that morning. I think I was
wild and I shot that bear and that was my
first bear. And that's so that's the article that I wrote,
the first one for Bear Hunting magazine. Through all of
(05:03):
the looking around I've done for bears because so like,
one of the hardest things about the bear thing here
is food isn't consistent from year to year. So you
can't be like, oh, yeah, I saw nine bears here
last year and then go back the following year and
guarantee that they're going to be there. So because of that,
(05:23):
you bounce around a lot, and through doing so I
would find good deer spots and stuff too. So yeah,
I along with the bears. Man, I absolutely love Coos
deer hunting. Black bears are my number one love out
in the mountains, but Coos deer is number two for sure.
I hunted meals for a couple of years and was successful,
(05:45):
but ever since I got my first coups, I haven't
hunted one meal deer in Arizona since I'll go out
of state Colorado, Utah or whatever to hunt meal deer. Also, obviously,
we have great elk hunting here. You know, it's kind
of a blessing and a curse to live in a
trophy state like Arizona, because pulling a tag is like
incredibly difficult, but I do, I do get after the
(06:07):
late archery bull hunts are like fairly easy to draw,
so like, I do that quite a bit and then
have alinair are super fun too, and we got good
turkey hunting here as well, so awesome.
Speaker 1 (06:16):
Yeah, I think there's a lot of value that comes
from the struggle. I wonder if Josh would have been
able to have an easy chip shot ride at the
first day break of day kind of luck with a
(06:37):
bear if he'd be the same hunter he is today.
I think sometimes the struggle makes us a lot better hunters. Well,
I know it does. There's one particular story I asked
Josh to share, and we're gonna be talking about the
bears and the pears. It's an article he wrote a
while back that talks about how plan a plan be
(07:00):
doesn't always come into play and that you have to
be able to adapt. So here's Josh talking about the
bears and the bears.
Speaker 3 (07:12):
Every year it's I mean, some years it's absolutely arid,
and some years it's like a monsoon, and some years
it's kind of in between. All of that has an
effect on food, on what food, on how fast food
is growing, what food is growing, and where it's growing.
(07:32):
So it's incredibly vital as a bear hunter, more specifically
as a fall bear hunter, to go out and actually
find that food. So what I do in a lot
of scouting is I'm out there looking around for acorns
and stuff like that to make sure that stuff is there.
That story, I was predicting that there was going to
(07:55):
be a lot of acorns, and I was right, but
I also was wrong. So let me I'll elaborate on that.
So we have different species of oaks here. Okay, so
we have one called a scrub oak and another one
called a gamble oak. Those are the two main ones
that I focus in on for black bears. The scrub
(08:15):
oak is an early season a corn august. The gamble
oak is a later season a corn that happens in October.
On that particular year, we had a good early season
acorn crop, but not a good later season a corn crop.
The struggle was I was going to these areas where
I thought bears were gonna be at based on the
(08:39):
early season acorns, and I was finding old sign. Okay,
this is in October, by the way, When I was
out here looking around, and I was assuming, and this
is like growing pains of a bear hunter, right, I
was assuming that we would also have a good October
acorn crop. But it just wasn't the case. I found
(09:00):
that out once I got into the field, saw old
sign but no new sign. So after three or four days,
I mean, I packed into the back country pretty far
on that hunt, went back in there. I found one
young bore way up high, but I think I saw
three acorns when I was hiking in on the trail.
(09:22):
You know. So for people that don't know, like, if
you do not have the food, you do not have
the bears, Like if you're wasting your time. Really Like,
I'm a guy that likes to think that no day
is wasted in the field. Okay, but if you're out
there looking for bears, you best be you best have
the food located. Okay. So I pulled out of there
and I went to a different area to look at
(09:45):
because another thing that will happen as acorns will occur
in pockets. So I was like, oh, I wonder if
it's better over here. So I pulled out, went to
a different area, same kind of scenario. The early season
sign was there, but there wasn't any newer sign. So
after a couple of days of looking around, I was like,
you know what, if there's no acorns, I'm gonna go
(10:08):
check this other food source, which another main food source
for us is prickly pears. There's a big berry that
is about two three inches long that grows on a
prickly paired cactus, and those bears, it's like candy to them. Okay.
So I went to a different spot lower in elevation
(10:28):
this occursion, and the first evening I was there, we
found a giant bore going through the prickney pears and
it's like, okay, now we're talking. So we never got
a shot on that bear that evening. He ended up
betting up in a spot that was just we just
couldn't get a shot on him where he was. He
ran out of light. Return the next morning, knowing that
(10:55):
a bear is not going to leave an area if
he doesn't have to, particularly a big boar, If he
has food and water where he's at, he will completely
clear that area out before he leaves on his own
unless something pushes him out, which a something pushing out
a big board the only thing that's gonna do that.
(11:15):
As a hunter, I feel like or another big boar.
So we came in the following day in three point
thirty pm. He comes walking out. He was beneath us
the entire time and we never saw him. He was
betted up all day long, comes walking out and feeding
on prickly pairs, and I shot him at four hundred yards.
(11:37):
What I didn't say that fought that morning though we
found another bear that was in the same area. So
what I'm getting at here is we found the current
What's important is finding the current food source, like what
they prefer right now, not a month ago. And once
we got that, we saw bears regularly, okay, and it
(12:00):
was only a matter of a couple miles okay, and
the spots that I was in to start out with,
these are areas have I'm not I've seen in upwards
of twenty bears in like within like three four hundred
yard area on certain years. Not this year though, it
was different. Which is the hardest part about black bear
(12:24):
hunting in Arizona to me is it's a moving target.
You can't just guarantee things. So yeah, just a prime
example of yeah, you need to go out and you
need to actually spend the time proofing the food source,
and you can't bet your money on what you saw
last year.
Speaker 1 (12:43):
A lot of the things that Josh was talking about
made me think to the last episode with Myron Means
talking about natural foods and kenn On bears, for one, like,
we weren't talking about the same types of things. I mean,
we were both talking about acrons, but we weren't talking
about the the ones on scrub oaks and gamble oaks.
We were talking about white oaks and post oaks and
(13:05):
black oaks, and we weren't talking about prickly bears. We
were talking about other soft masks here, like cherries and
black gumberries and muscadions. I think it's a good reminder
to always know that the same spot won't always work
you after year. All right, let's start talking about scouting
(13:28):
for bears.
Speaker 2 (13:30):
Here's Joshua.
Speaker 3 (13:37):
Time is money Cooby with Arizona in particular, how our
bear season works is it opens on a Friday, and
our units they're open based on South Quota limits. If
a unit hits South Quota, that will close the following
Wednesday at sundown. So what I'm getting at is you
might only have six days to hunt a certain area, okay,
(14:03):
because it might shut down you don't know. So in
the spirit of that, in my opinion, it's very important
to scout ahead of time so you're not wasting days
during the hunt finding what you need to find. The
beauty about on X and using something like the terrain
X feature is that is really just how important elevation is.
(14:28):
So I'm doing this literally right now, like I just
got back less than a week ago from a scouting
trip in any unit I've never been to. And what
I'm trying to do is I'm trying to key in
on a certain elevation band between you know, forty five
hundred feet six thousand feet, like right in there, like
(14:50):
that that area, because in the past, I know that
that is kind of the area where food is going
to be ripe during laid off. Okay, where in that
is it going to be ripe? I'm I don't know.
Within on X, I will use that terrain X feature
to block out everything that isn't forty five hundred to
(15:13):
six thousand feet, So basically everything will go like to
like a dark shade of gray or something like that,
and everything that I want to see will be in color.
Super beneficial, Okay, cut a lot of the weeds out
on a country. There's also the view shed tool on
there where so I'm a glasser, Okay. You can only
(15:35):
tell so much from a glassing point on a computer
as to what you're like, what you're going to actually
see when you get there. There's been many times I'm
looking at a topple map and I'm like, oh yeah,
this looks like a good glassing spot. And then I
get there and I'm like, I can't see anything. So
the cool thing about that terrain X in the view
(15:55):
shed is you can actually drop a pin on wherever
you're thinking about glassing and it will highlight what you
can see the view from that point, So you can
have a really good idea of what you're gonna be
able to see before you even get there. But once
those areas are located on the map and I've I've
(16:18):
my ONYX looks like a Christmas tree with with all
the pins all over it, the water sources, the potential
glassing positions, which I try to do stuff like I
try to find like like an ideal scenario would be
like find like a big main ridge where I could
walk along kind of like like shimmy along the top
(16:39):
and I can look down off of both sides, down
into the basins beneath that right and and fingers crossed
that there's water down on both sides. For Arizona, that's
incredibly vital. I won't even hunt an area if there's
not water around. I won't even like I won't even
go look at the food if it's not there. People
(17:01):
in like the PNW and stuff like that. They like
like with water, water is everywhere, dude, I'll tell you what.
Like down here, the desert water is gold. Okay. So
once I have areas of interest on on within my ONYX,
then it's time to go prove them. And that's what
I just did. I went. I went about a week ago.
(17:21):
I went, and I hit all these points, not glassing
at all. Okay, Like I'm not sitting down and glassing
because the reason being is because I know that they're
not there yet. The bears aren't in those areas yet
that I know where I could go see bears right now.
But the food source changes and the bears move with that. Okay.
(17:42):
So what you're trying to do is you're trying to
you're trying to alley up them. Basically, you're trying to
find where they're going to be, not where they are, Okay.
So and that's that's where finding that food, those food
sources all come down to, uh, it comes into play.
So that's what we did. We went, we proof water.
We found lots of food sources, found a lot of
(18:03):
good stuff, found a lot of bad stuff. Stuff like
that I'm looking at on a map and I'm like, oh,
this looks really good. I got there and I'm like,
you know, I'm a little disappointed. That's what That's why
it's so important to actually go and see it. So, yeah,
that's that's what I do.
Speaker 1 (18:16):
And you're not glassroom for bears, but I'm assuming that
you take your optics to be able to see the
food sources, so you're not having to walk all the
way over there.
Speaker 3 (18:25):
Yes, yes, let me yeah, let me let me back
up there. I was being more specific towards black bears.
I have binoculars with me, and I also have a
spotting scope, and I have done this in the past
where I've actually used my spotting scope to zoom in
on like prickly pair of cactus from a long ways
out to see how the berries are looking and stuff.
(18:45):
I do it in oaks because some of our so
the early season acorn that we have a scrub oak.
It's a smaller acorn. I mean it's only about the
size of your fingernail, okay, so so when it's coming in,
it's really small, all right. And like said, like sometimes
like it's like a pe. So having optics to be
(19:06):
able to sit there like even if I'm looking at
something from less than one hundred yards away, you can't
see them. Okay, so you need you actually need your
optics to glass down into the food to see the acorns,
butting and stuff. So yeah, another thing I'm glassing for
Kolbe is the water, because the water will naturally pull
(19:28):
up in the bottoms of our canyons, and I can
oftentimes see that from above. So when I do see that,
I'll use So a really cool tool that recently came
out on within on X is there the compass mode
on there. So with that I can actually pinpoint. I
(19:52):
can like point my phone at the water, pinpoint where
that is, and drop a pin right on that water
is from where I'm standing, and then I have that
there for future reference. Well.
Speaker 1 (20:14):
I wish we had time to do a deep dive
into pre scouting and scouting inside of on X and
on the ground, but Josh did a good job of
bringing it down to the key things that he looks
for and not getting too much into the weeds. I
will say that there's some good resources on the on
X YouTube channel. They call them masterclasses, and there's some
(20:36):
pretty good resources in there regarding looking for bears, and
you'll get some good information from those types of resources.
The next thing that I want Josh to share with
us is what kind of intel is good for him
whenever he's in a season. So if him and a
hunting buddy are in a similar area, what kind of
(20:57):
information would he like to know about bear behavior here?
And I think that it gives us some good questions
so that whenever we just see a bear, it gives
us a good list of questions when we're out there
hunting to really begin to try to understand what it
is that the bears are actually up to.
Speaker 2 (21:15):
Here's Josh.
Speaker 3 (21:27):
If you find one black bear, and let's say you're like, oh, yeah,
I found that bear. He's at he's at he's at
forty seven hundred feet okay, and he's doing this. I
always ask people that, like people that send me like
oh yeah, I saw a bear. I'm like, well, what
was he doing? It's like if he was just walking,
(21:48):
maybe he was going to a different elevation band, it
was he feeding? Okay? What was he eating? Okay? So
then you know that okay, which which then means it's like,
don't look at that. It's just one bear. Now you
have this valuable piece of the puzzle, Okay, to be like, Okay,
I saw this bear forty seven hundred feet he was
(22:10):
eating this type of acorn, and he was on this
facing slope, so he was on like a south facing slope.
He's not west facing slope. Whatever that is. You can
take that information and transpose it to different areas in
where you're hunting, which then is gonna make more bears.
Like I always tell folks like, if you see a
(22:32):
black bear in an area, that bear is there for
a reason. Okay they and chances are there's more than
that bear around, Okay, So just yeah, So I always
look at someone finds one bear, I'm like, there's more
than that around for sure. That bears there for a reason.
Speaker 1 (22:52):
So when it's time to go on a hunt, how
long do you give a spot before you move on
to another spot that you've keaten on?
Speaker 3 (23:00):
So I like to give a spot at least in
evening and the morning, you know, sit from like three
o'clock or something two o'clock until dark in glass, and
then the following morning be in your spot before daylight.
With black bears, I think that's so important, like being
late to your glassing spot when you're bear hunting is
(23:23):
just man, you're just doing yourself a disservice. Man. Those
bears really like to operate in twilight, in those like
gray light hours. So yeah, like glass evening last morning,
you know, first light to I don't know, ten eleven
o'clock in the morning. And if I haven't seen anything
in an evening in the morning unless I know, like
(23:44):
I've walked through the area and I'm seeing a bunch
of sign. If you're seeing fresh sign, okay, I'm just
not seeing what's here, right, That's a good thing to
key in on. I killed a bear two years ago
at this point. I never saw that until I shot him.
And I hunted for probably over a week before I
(24:05):
actually saw him, and I put the puzzle together of
how to play this bear what I was seeing. I
would walk this canyon bottom up, and then what and
there was a spring. It was a beautiful spring, and
then I would I would sit that spring, okay, and
I would wait for the bears to come into water.
Along my route, I noticed there was pine needles that
(24:30):
were simply moved, like if you took your fist put
it down in the dirt and you push the pine
needles forward, and so it makes a you that's what
I was seeing. I never saw any paw prints. I
just saw that going through the pine needles, and I'm like, man,
that's a bear. One hundred percent. That's a bear. Once
I got the wind figured out, which is also a
(24:52):
super interesting situation, this was this was like one of
those moments where I was like super just good hunting,
you know. I was just super proud of how I
figured this area out. There's water. I sat on the
side of the spring where the wind was hitting me
in the face. Okay, that sounds pretty good, right, the
(25:15):
wind's going away from the water, it's sitting me in face. Well,
what was happening is in the morning, like first thing
in the morning, the wind would parallel the water, so
it would actually go down the trail that I was
hiking in on. And my thought was, oh, there's should
be bears walking all around here. I don't know exactly
when this bear is coming down this way. So I
(25:35):
sat there and I never saw anything. What I ended
up doing is I ended up getting up on the
other side of the drainage, which would have meant that
my wind was blowing towards the water, but I was
up higher, so I sat it in the evening. It
was an evening spot, and because of the thermals, my
(25:55):
wind was blowing towards the water, but it was blowing
over it. And then if when it did blow down
the trail, it would parallel the trail, not blow on
the trail. So essentially it was blowing over where I
thought the bears were and to the left of where
the bears were. The first evening I did that, that
bore walked in and I shot him at thirty yards.
(26:16):
So it's just like one of those things. It's like
they are a ghost, okay, and if they don't want
to be seen, they're not going to be seen. So
putting together these these this puzzle, these puzzle pieces, that's
how you that's how you have success out there. You
got to pay attention to that stuff, you know. Ever
since I got my first one, it just it was
just a different experience than anything else, any other deer
(26:39):
hunt or anything like that. It was just different. Man,
Like we the first bear I ever packed out. Dude,
I tell you what we were. We were leap frog
and bear parts up a cliff to get it to
get it out of where we were, Like, it was unreal.
It was it was a big adventure. It was awesome
(26:59):
and at and during the time of doing it, I
was like, oh, man, I'm uh, I don't know about this,
you know, like feeling super sketchy about the situation. But
like once I got back to the truck, I look
back on that, dude, and I was like, that was awesome,
you know, like I can't wait. I can't wait. I
(27:20):
can't believe we did that. I can't wait to do
that again. It's just like so far removed from what
from our city life, you know, It's.
Speaker 1 (27:27):
All right, it's uh, we're getting to that time. We
need to wrap it up. But Josh, tell everybody about
your new book.
Speaker 3 (27:34):
Been out for about a month at this point. It's
called Becoming a Bow Hunter. It's a complete beginner's guide
to archery hunting. I wanted to write it from the
ground level, man, like you don't even have a bow yet.
Like I start out, like, how do you buy a bow?
How do you do that? Right from from that point
all the way to your packing an animal out and
(27:56):
putting it in your freezer, And there's a lot in between.
There's a lot of stuff on gear. There's a lot
on technique, like how to shoot, how to shoot all
the different releases, multiple ways to shoot the different releases,
different styles of hunting. There's a couple there's a couple
guest pieces in there from Jace Bowserman and Brad Brooks.
(28:17):
They contribute to that, to that book, And I did
that because you know, there was areas within the book
where I wasn't super confident in talking about, Like like
Brad writes a piece on calling. I do calling, but
like not like him. You know, he's like mister l hunter.
You know, he does a lot of calling and stuff.
Jace Jase writes this great piece on ambush hunting. Again,
(28:41):
like I'm primarily a spot in stock Hunter. You know,
do I ambush hunt? Yes, I use it as a tool.
But Jace does it all the time, you know. So
like having him put his wisdom into that, I just
thought it was gonna bleed through more wisdom, you know
for people I think I was writing a book to
my younger self is really what it was, really what
(29:01):
you know, because everything in it, I truly believe that
if you're new to bow hunting and you pick this,
but whether you're new to bow hunting, or maybe you've
been like a bow hunter for a while and you
haven't experienced success yet. I really believe that this is
going to help you fill your first tag. And the
reason for that is because everything in it helps me
fill tags. Okay, these are just all the things that
(29:24):
I've learned through the years and learned not only from
my own experiences, but from talking to like veteran bow
hunters and guys that are way more experienced than I am.
So yeah, I'm super proud of how it came out. Man.
If anyone wants to check it out, it's on Amazon
Becoming a bow Hunter. Check it out if you're new. Man,
I think I really wish I had it when I started,
(29:46):
you know. Yeah, thank you for listening. The Bear Hunting
Magazine Hunt Cast is recorded by Bear Hunting Magazine and
produced by Mountain Gravity. Me be sure leave us a
five star review on iTunes and keep reguarding the gate
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