A beginners guide to bear hunting

The following is a response I posted to a forum post from a first time bear hunter. You may find some tips helpful for a reasonable way to launch your bear hunting challenge. Of course as you get more experience you will surely want to expand your techniques, but for now this method has proved priceless in achieving an affordable way to get your bear.

Welcome to a special breed of hunters. Once you do connect with a bear then you belong to us. Deer become second rate game animals. At the point you do harvest your first bear,  you live eat and breathe bruins.

To start out let me mention a couple of articles that can help with overall prep.

http://www.technology-for-hunting.com/pr02.htm

http://www.technology-for-hunting.com/pr01.htm

And the second half of this ad http://www.technology-for-hunting.com/bear lure.htm for bear scent has some very helpful ideas.

Now for my thoughts on your hunt and where.

The area you are asking about does indeed have bear but they are far ranging and scattered. Your best bet is to look a little further north to Mackinac State Forest area. They have a higher concentration of bears. Since a bear can be gone for up to 4 days from your bait site before returning, you would want to have as many bears around as possible to hopefully always have a bear visiting your site.

However if you cannot do this then look along the Jordan River area near the headwaters between East Jordan and Mancelona. Thick, wet and better suited than the pine forest area of Mancelona-Kalkaska area. Bears travel through that area but do not really call it their home range.

Now the easiest way to do this is to find a likely spot for a bears home range is to look in the deepest darkest pocket of thick growth (if you worry someone else will find your spot, well then your not in a thick enough area.) and dig a deep but narrow hole into the ground. If you can line the hole with some 1X6 boards to keep it from collapsing in then that is best. In Canada where I hunt (but not live, I am a Michigan resident) on my own property, we can use barrels and this really works best.

Now get some bags of shelled whole kernel corn and dump it right into the whole, then take 5-gallon barrel of restaurant grease and pour it over the corn. Do this early enough in the year and you will not have to use many other scents for the bear to find your spot. You can supplement with other foods as you can get them but trust me, once they start on corn and grease little else is needed. They also trail off that smell on their paws and that brings others in. Corn will not rot or go bad or get soft and mushy. Therefore, you can pile a load in and know it will stay in good shape.

The best style whole is about four foot deep and no more then 6 inches in diameter. You want the bear to only grab small amounts and not be able to reach the bottom, this way there is always some food the bear knows is there but just cannot get to. Now, the bear is eventually going to dig this whole out but even after he does he will keep visiting it to see if he missed anything. Next time you visit the site, start another whole. In Canada we use stove pipes to line the wholes and stop them from digging the hole up. In Michigan I don’t think you can do that. If you could use barrels, then what you would do is drill small one-inch holes to let the corn dribble out, the bear roll the barrel around only getting small amounts at any one time. This makes your bait last longer which is a bonus for you if you cant get back to your site often to refresh it.

Then one week or preferably three days before your actual hunt, make sure you have several holes dug and maxed out with corn. Make sure to cover the wholes so other animals cannot get your corn before the bear does. You want there to still be corn there when you come back to hunt. The worst thing that can happen at this point is you have a dry bait and the bear has moved off it for a few days. If you only have a long weekend then you could miss your bear altogether. So top off 3 days before you hunt and hopefully the bear wont leave as long as there is free food at your site.

The thing you want to do while you are doing the baiting ritual is read the site article about scent use and control. There is vital information on how you can make the bear accustomed to your scent before you ever hunt the spot.

Hope this helps. Feel free to e-mail me for more ideas.  jerry@mtechlaptops.com

Follow up note to this article. I want to clarify that the hole in the ground is pretty much a post hole size hole dug too deep for the bear to clean out the contents. Lining the hole by dropping a stove pipe down it can be useful to keep the bear from digging out your hole.

The barrel when used is not buried but just tied to a tree. When the barrel is capped the bear can only roll the barrel around and get the corn as it dribbles out of the one to one and a quarter inch holes.  The idea behind both methods is to slow down how long it takes the bear to empty your bait site.

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