Thanks:
D-Rock - for helping haul, holding legs, videoing, fixing flats, staying up late, bringing me bug spray when bear cleaning, taking photos and general love and support
Dinker - for saving my butt when I had a flat and two spares that didn't fit
(this is huge)
Learning:
You may disagree, but this is what I'm taking as mental note for myself
1) There are too many roads to simply walk grassy roads looking for spring bears. Most grassy roads didn't even have any poop on them. I don't love this method for the spring season
2) Bears in clearcuts are not like deer. They don't hide and stand up after 2 hours of watching. They move, they're noisey. They have big feet and are short. You'll hear them. You don't need to watch a clearcut for hours like you do for deer and elk, all you need is a quiet evening and cup your ears and listen. If you dont see anything for 15-20 minutes, move on.
3) There's no rhyme or reason to where a bear really wants to be during the spring. Everyone I saw wasn't even eating, they were just roaming around, seemingly in continuous motion, being curios or something. The places they were didn't even have food....
4) When you see bears somewhere, there might be other bears that like the same place. This seems to be true for this small sample size and the road D-Rock and I call the "Bear Road" in our Fall location. There have been like 5 bears killed on the quarter mile Bear Road. Nothing super special about it, except that bears congregate there.
5) You need to aim further forward and higher than you think you do, especially if you're used to shooting deer. I tried to aim higher and further forward than I really would have naturally liked to do (deer/elk hunter style) and I hit the heart... Maybe thats just my way of coping, but it seems to work and hold true for me. Every time I aim like i'm shooting deer or elk, I hit too far back and low.
From DFW, 7 bears have been killed at Skagit so far, and this is the first Monroe one.
