PART 1 of Spring Black Bear Season 2016: Three Weekends, Two Bears, One 1995 Chrysler Intrepid

Spring black bear season on Vancouver Island begins on April 1st each year, and runs until June 15th.  I normally wait until Victoria Day long weekend, near the end of May, before I begin my bear hunting efforts for the year.  This gives the bears a chance to get active and moving around a lot, feeding out in the open during the day.  I haven't observed a whole lot of action in April the few times I've been out that early in the season; there isn't much going on in the way of vegetation yet by that point in the year.  By the time late May rolls around, the grasses in the clearings and on the sides of logging roads and trails have grown long, and the salmonberries, salal berries, and oregon grapes are ripe and tasty; for both the bears and myself.  All three are typically on the tart end of the spectrum, which I enjoy in a berry.  Black bears also begin mating in May, which increases the likelihood of sightings appreciably.  There is also a fall season for black bears, which runs from early September until early December; I have come to avoid this season, because at that point, the bears are much harder to predictably find anywhere other than on the side of a salmon river, eating fish.  Bear meat tends to take on the flavor of whatever it is they've been eating lately, and while rotting fish may be to the bears' tastes, it's not to mine.  Even in the spring, there's a chance the bear you shoot could have been snacking on lots of shellfish, or maybe an old deer or elk carcass he found.  But generally speaking, black bears in spring have been feeding on a ton of two things: grass and berries.  That adds up to a whole lot of great meat, similar in flavor and appearance to beef.

I have a fairly specific area that I like to comb for bears each spring, and it produces very reliably.  It's a stretch of secondary logging road, starting about 15km off of a main, and around 45 km from pavement.  There are a series of old spur roads that split off from this roughly 8km length of secondary, and run out into nowhere in all directions.  These spurs vary in length from 1 - 10 km, and their condition can be summed up as generally rough and overgrown.  They haven't been used for logging in decades, and it's impossible to imagine, given their current state, that they were ever fit for large vehicles.  The logged areas the spurs once led into have long since regrown, and now consist largely of young, thick-as-hell secondary forest.  Grass and berries grow along the sides of, and often right down the middle of, all these spur roads.  The secondary logging road that the spurs originate from runs alongside a large inlet on the west coast of the island; the spurs generally split off and lead inland from the inlet, basically straight up a series of mountainsides.  It's absolutely perfect habitat for bears.  There are a huge range of elevations they can choose to travel through quickly, up and down the mountains, allowing them to follow the ripening vegetation as the season progresses.  And at the bottom, there's the inlet, its beaches filled with shellfish,  and the countless rivers draining into it, seasonally packed with fish.  Generally speaking, they start the season at the highest point, eat their fill of grass and berries, and work their way down toward the ocean, arriving at the river mouths in the late summer or early fall to gorge on fish.  Of course, they can also be all over the map at any time during the season, too.  Each bear seems to have its own personality and preferences when it comes to food, and there's nothing stopping any given bear from just deciding to camp out on the beach all year long and eat nothing but mussels.  And I've seen the poo evidence of this.  It's not like they shell the mussels before they eat them, either; I can't imagine how it must feel to pass a three-pound dump consisting almost entirely of shellfish shrapnel.

This season, like a couple before it, I decided to start off by going somewhere completely different from my money bear spot, in an effort to try to nail down a location to hunt them closer to home.  I've had black bear success near Port Alberni before, which isn't a terribly long drive; but last year, we had a perfect stalk on a huge boar blown by other hunters on ATVs roaring through the area at exactly the wrong moment.  I wanted to find a place with less human activity, but I ended up taking my wife, Sandra, and I to a place that was even more lousy with people than that spot.  This was how we started, on May 20th, out near Ucluelet.  This is an area I had never been to before, and did not realize fills to bursting with campers and dirtbikers in warm weather, especially on a long weekend like it was.  We camped overnight Friday, then spent one wasted day there, trying in vain to get far enough out into the bush to lose the crowd, but kept bumping into people no matter where we went.  At the end of that Saturday, before it even started getting dark, we packed it in and headed further up the island to the tried-and-true black bear nirvana.  Day one of spring black bear hunt 2016 had ended with us seeing exactly one bear, and that one was a cub on the side of the highway having his picture taken by passersby.

We arrived in my favored area at about 2am Sunday morning, and immediately set up camp in a clearing and went to sleep; we'd have some gnarly hills to hike in the morning.  We got up around 10am (which is one of my favorite things about bear hunting: no early wake-ups!) tore down the camp, and drove to the first spur we wanted to try.  My basic strategy is to drive to a spur, hike it up and down, then drive to the next one and repeat.  The first trail on this day was one that I had seen many bears on before, and was probably the most overgrown and narrowest of the bunch.  When you spot a bear in this situation, it's normally at less than 30 yards, and it can sometimes come as a surprise to either you or the bear, or both.  I had my old Husqvarna .30-06 with me, and Sandra had her Savage .308.  The first trail turned up nothing, sighting-wise, but there was plenty of bear crap all along it; some of it quite fresh, with mostly salmonberries in there.  We drove to a second trail, which was the longest of them all; I went up it solo.  I hiked it way up into the high country, to an elevation where you could tell the bears had already passed through and had moved along downward since.  Basically, this information is inferred by the relative age and composition of the bear dumps seen along the way.  On the way back down, though, I caught sight of a decent-sized boar poking his head out onto the trail.  He walked halfway out from the brush on the side of the track, stopped, looked to his left, where I had halted and frozen still, and promptly walked backward right back into the brush from whence he had come.  Like, "Alright!  Time for some tasty berries!  Except, hey, is that a dude with a gun?  OK, nevermind, I'm out."  I walked the rest of the way down, and proceeded to try the next spur road, solo again.  That's the one that ended up paying off.

I spotted a bear, on my way back down the trail after walking all the way up it, and this one was oblivious to my presence.  It was headlong into a salal bush; butt end on the trail, front end obscured.  After creeping up from 60 yards to within about 20, I could see that it was a smaller adult, but it was definitely over three years of age, which is the cut-off for legality when killing bears.  You can tell when a bear is a bit too young, because they look like a teenager that's grown 12 inches in six months; they're all legs, with a skinny body that's way up off the ground.  Once a black bear has reached maturity, the body fills out to match the legs, and their gut almost reaches the ground.  This bear was clearly at that point, and after having observed it for a sufficient time to rule out there being any cubs in the area, I fired a shot which dropped the bear straight to the ground in its tracks.  I am a huge fan of instant-kill shots.  I've lost a bear before, after shooting it and having it stagger over a steep, loose-rock cliff edge and die somewhere deep in a ravine absolutely choked-off with brush.  I tried to recover that bear for hours, and almost ended up falling to the bottom of the ravine myself a couple times.  So every time I shoot an animal and it drops where it stood, with no need to track a blood trail through the rainforest, I'm a happy guy.  I hiked back to the car, got Sandra, rounded up the knives, the sharpener, the game bags, and the packs, and we returned to the bear ready to process a critter!  We laid a tarp out, hauled the bear on top of it, skinned it out, and cut off the four quarters, the backstraps, the neck meat, and the head, and packed it all back to the car in one trip.  We fired the meat into our 100 litre cooler, drove an hour to the nearest town, bought some blocks of ice to keep the meat cold on the trip home, and closed out day two of our bear season successfully.

We emptied out the bottom half of the fridge when we got home, and just piled the game bags full of meat in there until the next day.  By that point, it was already late at night, and I was ready to sleep for as long as I could.  The next day was dominated by all the less-glamorous parts of hunting for your own food that non-hunters might not think about.  Hours of picking bear hair and pine needles off of meat, slicing it up into the cuts that you want, and packing it with a vacuum sealer into manageable portions for the freezer.  I also buried the bear's head whole, fur and all, in the garden.  In three months, it can be dug up, and after a spray-down, and a little detail work with a toothbrush, it'll just be a nice, clean skull for display.  The butchering job on this bear was pretty simple; I cut the hams off, which are essentially the entire thigh portion of the hind legs, and packed those whole, with the bone in.  I'm going to brine, smoke, and roast those, pork-ham style, and I'll post the process on here at a later date when I finish doing that, so you can check it out.  All rest of the meat from the bear, I cut into chunks small enough to fit in my grinder, and packaged it in one- and two- pound portions, a couple dozen of each, and froze it like that.  That way, it can be taken out of the freezer as needed, and either put in a stew, or ground up and used in the same way you would use ground beef.  If you can shoot two black bears in one season, which is the limit for a hunter on the island, your whole family is basically set for ground meat for the entire year, assuming pretty generous use, of about three pounds a week.  That, plus the four 10-pound hams you get from two bears.  So at this point, I was halfway to that goal, and in the second part of the story, (spoiler alert) I'll detail how we almost didn't get the rest of the way there. . .  but then we totally did!  Yesss!  (To Be Continued).