Bearpaw Season -Spring 2013

[Killmore]

Boy do I miss not having that tag up there!!  Good job

[bearpaw]

This morning we went back after the cinnamon bear we saw yesterday afternoon but we couldn't find it anywhere and there were campers, motorcycles, and people all over the mountains due to the holiday weekend. I've been worried about this hunt because the guy is a teacher and only has 3 days to hunt, he has to go back home Monday afternoon. We saw a nice gobbler that was gobbling his head off but we didn't see any bear this morning so we came back to the house for lunch and to relax for a bit. We headed back out after lunch and in a different area right off the bat we spotted another cinnamon bear, not as big as the bear yesterday but a solid adult bear so Dustin wanted the bear. He made a great 70 yard one shot kill, bear only went 10 yards and dropped for good. About average size, nearly a 5 1/2 foot rug and very thick long hair. The yellowed canines were worn on the tips and the incisor teeth were well worn off too, I bet this bear was 7 to 10 years old. Dustin is getting a bear rug made and we are going to bone out the meat in the morning after it chills overnight. Congrats to Dustin and Thomas on a fun hunt and a great shot. 

[Ridgerunner]

Sweet pics, I really hope to draw a spring tag next year up there.

[bearpaw]

Dustin, Thomas, and I decided to get up early this morning and go after that gobbler we saw yesterday. The gobbler was not where he was supposed to be, in fact he wasn't anywhere near where he should have been, at least he wasn't gobbling. Finally after an hour we located another gobbler that would talk pretty good so we moved in and set up, the bird was talking pretty good and moving closer, I think there were two or three toms/jakes traveling together coming from our right. I was worried because I could hear 1 or 2 hens from our left and it seems the real hens usually win out. Just as I suspected the real hens went to the toms/jakes, they had a quick popcorn popping festival and then the hens proceeded to take the gobblers away from us. HHMMMM, instant replay of a thousand foiled hunts in the past. 

Back out the truck we go and guess what, we intercepted a jake and one hen, Dustin put a quick shot on the jake running through the brush and he had a successful spring bear/turkey combo hunt. Fantastic shot Dustin! 

A saying I like: "Sometimes it's better to be lucky than good!" 

Looking forward to seeing you next spring for the youth turkey hunt for your daughter.

[Ripper]

Nice job Dale, I'm glad your clients are already knocking down some nice bears.   

[h20hunter]

What Ripper said. Nice job all the way around.....cool bear.

[bearpaw]

The hours have been a killer, out hunting till after 9pm, to bed by 10 or 11 pm, then back up at 3 to 3:30. I finally feel human after sleeping in for 3 mornings. Hunting is an addiction that I cannot deny, for what other reason would a human maintain such hours and then say they enjoy it. 

After Dustin and Thomas went home my next hunter was Scott. This would be Scott's 3rd bear hunt with Bearpaw, my son Brian had guided Scott to 2 previous fall bear. It would be nice for me to get to know Scott a little better and with these hours you certainly have time to do that. 

Scott arrived in the late afternoon, we had 3 hours till dark so we went hunting, saw lots of game but no bear. We were back up early in the am and headed back out in the twilight. We hunted hard all morning, took a couple hours off for lunch, then back out till O-dark-thirty. Wow no bear, we saw mule deer, whitetail, moose, elk, but only bear scat.

I told Scott we were going back to the same area the next morning, if there is that much bear scat, there has to be numerous bear working the area, after all, one bear can't adjust his scat "shooter" to that many different sizes. 

At daylight we were in the prime of it and excited to see a bear, but within 30 minutes it started pouring down rain and once again we saw muleys, whitetails, elk, and moose, but no bear. Finally about 11 or 12 it quit raining. I asked Scott if he was up to staying out all day and he was so we kept hunting. Finally after warming up for a change we spotted our first bear of the hunt but the bear didn't stick around for a shot. We glassed the grown up clear cut from several angles but came up empty, so we moved on. Finally at 3:30 we spotted another adult bear on the edge of another nearby clearcut grubbing around for insects. We moved in closer for the kill but lost sight of the bear in the process. I knew we had to be within 100 yards so we waited, suddenly the bear popped out of a little thicket into the wide open clear cut, I said there he is, Scott pulled up and I "barely" (pun intended) got to see the bear drop as I hoisted my binos to position. Wow, Scott removed any doubt I may have had about his ability to get on an animal quickly or to shoot offhand. The 338 Marlin Express barked and that bear dropped and never even twitched that we could see. Bear down instantly at 90 yards. We crossed the creek and made our way over to his bear, took photos, gutted and drug out the bear to where I could get the truck backed up and loaded.

I love it when a plan comes together. 

This bear appeared to be black, but he was actually chocolate brown underneath the black tipped hair. Scott is having a rug made.

[bearpaw]

I noticed a few things as I hunted the first week of June, first was that the cold weather and rain in the mornings was affecting the bear, they were not moving much until mid day when it warmed up, second was that we stopped seeing bear in the grass and that insects seemed to be more of interest as stumps were being ripped up and logs turned as bear began searching to add protein to their diets. I was hoping to see boars courting females, but it just wasn't happening yet. The only bear accompanying any of the females were cubs.

While I was hunting with Scott I had two unguided bear hunters at camp. Eric the dad had bought the hunt for his son Jessie's high school graduation present. They hunted hard for 3 days and on the 3rd day, the same day Scott killed his bear, the dad, Eric killed a bear while hiking back in a gated road that is in a good area. He had hiked in a few miles and on the way out just a short distance from the gate the bear popped up on top of the log pile you see in the background. They're pretty sure this bear had been grubbing around in the rotten wood for insects too. The bear popped up and Eric took no time in placing a .300 Win Mag bullet where it counts, the bear dropped.

So that was a great day, Eric and Scott both killed bear. Eric had his bear skinned and boned out by the time Scott and I got back with Scott's bear so I'll try to post a photo of Eric's bear from my phone that Eric had sent by text. Congrats to Eric on the kill, his first bear ever! 

[bearpaw]

I asked Jesse and Eric if I could tag along for the rest of Jesse's hunt. We hit it hard for a couple days, the first day was one of those days, mule deer, whitetail, elk, moose, but only bear scat, we saw no bear hair. 

That night I told them we needed to concentrate on the poop, we'll hunt the poop. On the second day we saw 5 bear and Jesse missed a nice boar. That poor kid was bummed out to the max about that, his dad and I both told him he had to shake it and quit worrying about missing. They were running out of time, but I talked them into hunting another day, the next day it seemed like we were going to get skunked again, deer, elk, and moose, but no bear, now Jesse was really bummed. I pounded the poop, literally we spent all our time where we saw the most poo. It wasn't looking good, we hunted all day, finally in the last 2 hours we spotted a lone bear with no cubs and Jesse planted a .308 silvertip into the vitals, hooray bear down.

I have never seen two happier hunters as we took photos of Jesse's first bear. I love it when a plan comes together. 

(I almost forgot to mention, during their hunt they got to see two wolves, one black, one grayish red, no collar on either, at 80 yards. The black one was 1 1/2 tmes the size of the gray, probably male and female, this was only about 10 miles from Colville.) 

[270Flat]

Nice work!

[HUNTINCOUPLE]

That's supper good huntin right there!!!

[Killmore]

Good reading! Are you out of bear hunters?

[92xj]

Congrats on the hunts Dale! 

[bearpaw]

We're done hunting now, but there was one last hunt to tell about before we were finished. Radsav came over in early May to stay at our place and do an unguided hunt, he had hunted a couple days but the bear weren't out very good yet and he only saw a couple small bear, meanwhile his wife was quite busy with their business so he decided to go back home and work for a couple weeks.

Right after he left we started seeing more bear, we exchanged a few messages in which I could see his anxiety to get back. While I was busy with my last hunt Radsav was able to break away and come back over. For a couple days he hunted an area that held some good some good sized bear, he was seeing sows with cubs but the bigger bear were not showing themselves. After I finished my last hunt I asked Radsav if I could tag along and we'd check out a few areas where I had recently seen bear, plus it would be a chance to get to know each other better. So the next day I went with Radsav, we hunted hard saw deer, elk, and moose but could not find any bear, all we did that day was solve a few of the world's problems. 

Pretty much the same story on day two that we hunted together, we were closer to creating world peace but we had not reduced the northeast bear population. I had seen good bear twice in one location, I'm not sure it was the same bear but I figured sooner or later a good bear was going to be seen again in that location so the next morning we headed there first, as luck would have it right at daylight we spotted a good bear as he dashed behind some trees, he had seen or heard us first and was getting out of there.

Radsav got a good rest and we waited, hoping for a shot, after a few moments the bear came into view from behind the trees, he was walking toward the thick timber, Radsav was on him, just before disappearing into the thick forest the bear paused and looked back at us, Radsav's 325 WSM instantly responded and the bear dropped like a sack of potatoes in his tracks. We watched closely, the bear kicked with one foot and then nothing, he was done.

I congratulated Radsav on the 200+ yard shot as we kept an eye on the bear for what seemed like a minute or two, we finally took our eyes off the bear to grab a few things off the ground, Radsav happened to look back up again and the bear was gone. After a momentary period of concern we spotted the bear again, he must have kicked again and had rolled down the hill a couple yards just out of sight. But we could see he wasn't moving so all was good. We made it to the bear and confirmed that the bear was a nice boar, not a huge bear but a good solid bear and he was older than Moses, his teeth were all worn down, probably the oldest bear we've killed in many years, I would guess at least 15 to 20 years old. As we were taking photos a tom turkey was working it's way closer to us gobbling every few minutes, too bad turkey season was over. Then a nice bull moose walked into view, you can see the moose in the background of some of the photos.

When we skinned Radsav's bear we found it had previously been shot in the left shoulder years ago. When he butchered it he found old lead and copper fragments everywhere.  Looked like someone took a frontal shot at him from below or while he was sitting up eating berries.  You could see the path of the bullet as it hit the ball joint and glanced up through the shoulder blade. Radsav found a couple nodules on the hide probably had lead in them too as that is about where the bullet would have exited.  Fractured the leg from the ball joint to the knee joint in a twisting pattern.  Plus the bottom half of the shoulder blade was twisted and broken up too. Probably more than a dozen fractures in total, it's amazing that leg worked at all. One tough bastage!

Now, the rest of the story...

While piecing up the bear we found a couple worms in the bear's neck. I see these worms often in bear around the spine area, they look similar to angel hair spaghetti, but even smaller in diameter. Radsav spent a good bit more time after he got home playing with the bear as he butchered him and noticed more worms in the area damaged by the bullet just in front of the heart and where I cut the heart and lungs loose. So he decided to take one of those worms to the vet.  Sure enough - Heart worm!!!  Can not be transferred through contact or ingestion.  But the vet said I should keep my dogs up to date with heart worm medication as heart worms are moving into the northeast, they are also getting more and more reports of human infection in the northeast area of the state. So if you develop cough and/or fever ask your doctor for a chest film.  The first diagnosis may seem like you have lung cancer, but upon biopsy they find a worm in the node instead of cancer cells. Apparently the human body does not allow for the large infestation of these worms as they will not reproduce in the human body.  But the worms can create these nodes that lead to uncomfortable issues. Not life threatening in humans, but the vet said to remember these six words - Bug dope, bug dope, bug dope!!!

Radsav had the vet test five worms from the bear of different shape and size just for kicks. Only one of which was a heart worm. Guess it's really, really rare for heartworm to be found in bear. So rare the vet says she could only find reference to it in NC and Florida. Seems in all cases it was found in old bear and similar progression of development to that of human infection.  Said finding the one we did would be like winning the lotto.  Radsav figures we should go buy a lottery ticket.   

The vet suspects that this old bear combined with the fact the bear probably fought infection for quite some time due to the old bullet wound just didn't have the ability to kill the worms as fast as an average bear would.  They figure 8% of bear actually get infected, but almost none ever develop issues getting rid of the worms similar in the way that humans do. The rest of the worms were what she called "bear filarial worm' Connective tissue worm' or 'D-ursi worm".  These are the worms I commonly see in bear around the spine area. Completely harmless to humans other than unsightly.  Apparently the vast majority of bear have those.  The vet said, "Cook them up and eat them without worry!"   

[Skyvalhunter]

Looks like a good time!!