This was in the weeks prior going through gear getting ready for the season. As you can tell i like my meat hence the two freezers:
This is my primary bait site at the back of a large chain of beaver ponds and accessed via canoe. Shot taken from the climber. Distance to the barrel varies from 22 to 27 yards depending on where the bears roll it to:
This is the backup bait accessible by canoe or Zodiac but is on a larger body of water - lake is actually the lake my place is on. This site was hunted by me for 2 days while my son-in-law hunted the primary site:
Standard view on the walk back to the canoe at the end of legal light:
So i hunted 5 different days from Sep 2nd to the 7th at a combination of both sites. Both sites had good sign with the beaver pond showing the most sign. My son-in-law hunted 2 of those days as well. During that period we had one day shut down due to high winds. A side effect of the wind storm was a large acorn drop. Acorns are the preferred and favorite food of bears in the area and it is almost impossible to get the bears to the bait when the acorns are in easy abundance. So made the call to press pause for a week while the bears liked up all the acorns.
Friday morning (12th) i headed back up with my oldest son in time to hunt the afternoon/evening. I sent my son to primary site (beaver pond) and i went to the backup. Well low and behold he texts me at 632 pm saying he put an arrow through one. I have 100+ hours this season including baiting, pruning and actual hunting. Kid shows up, sits for 2 hours and fills a tag. The things we do for our kids. I headed over to his location and arrived at about 710 pm. The recovered arrow:
Good blood on the arrow so initially we were pretty optimistic. We got at it as there was only an hour of light left. We picked up blood about 30 yards from the climber and started tracking. Trail almost immediately went into a thick overgrown swamp. Slowly but surely we followed the blood through 600 yards of nasty swamp. By this time it was pitch black and we were getting concerned about what kind of shot he made and whether we were going to find the bear. Interval between blood drops was now stretching out to almost 15 yards suggesting the hole was plugging off. We cleared the swamp finally into a more open type of woodlot. The last 5 blood drops were spread far apart and moved us ahead another 150 yards when bam there he was. It was 10 pm at this point so 3 hours of tracking and mostly in the dark. Next problem was he ran basically 800 yards away from the canoe and 600 of that was through a nasty swamp. Where he dropped he was actually closer to one of my ATV trails than the canoe - ATV trail was 400 yards in a straight line bush whack.
Entering the swamp with 1 hour of light left:
The bear as found:
The happy 30 something after a 2.5 hour team effort drag through 400 yards of bush:
Bear was a good size (250 to 300ish) but not the beast that i know is back there. During the post mortem field dressing phase we determined the shot was too far back and only caught the back of one lung before entering the guts and nicking the liver as well.
So on Saturday i was stiff as hell and decided to do chores with my son's help instead of climbing a tree. Sunday morning we refilled the baits as i plan to get back at it in the next bit but really wanted to get my son's bear cut and squared away before i start on the next one - finished that today. Ended the trip on a perfect note while finishing up the last bait refill - my glasses fell off and landed on a pile of bear poop:
2025 Fall Bear Report - Bear Down!
