Black Bear Hunting
in Massachusetts
| Part one | Part Two | Part Three |
Hunting black bear in the state of Massachusetts with a bow is very hard. The state of Massachusetts doesn't allow hunting bear over bait or with dogs. The bears that are killed by hunters are ones that are killed near food plots or by calling. Bear hunting is very hard. With 3000 hunters only 146 bears were killed last year. That is a success rate of 4.8%, a very poor rate.
Scouting is the most important part of bear hunting in Massachusetts. According to the Department of wildlife most hunters that kill bears will kill them from stand near natural food or farms. The bear season has been split into two parts with 17 days in early September and 18 days in November. 90% of the bears that are killed are killed in the September season. I will be trying both hunting from stand and also spot and stock.
Scouting for bears is a lot harder the scouting for deer. First bears need to eat a lot more food then deer. In order for bears to get the food they need to survive they must take advantage of any available food source. This means that bears are moving to different food plots depending on which will give the best supply of food. A bear can move 30 miles in one day looking for food. This makes patterning bears very hard. Bears will also eat anything that they can find. The above photo shows where a bear has ripped into this log looking for ants. When scouting for bear a hunter must look for signs of an active bear. Bear droppings are over an inch thick, and tubular. The scat varies with diet, which can be 90% vegetable matter. Bear scat is a good sign of the number of bears and their size. The bigger the scat the bigger the bear.
Bear will claw at trees to sharpen their claws to mark their home range. Big bores (male bear) will go to the same tree once or twice a week to mark a tree. When there is a good food source the bore will mark the tree every day. When looking for trees that are marked by big bores most of the time that tree will be dead. A hunter that walks around this tree will most times find other trees that are marked by smaller bears. This spot can be a good spot to setup if there is a food source near the trees. Food is the key to killing a bear in the fall. As with the scat, the higher the claw mark on a tree the bigger the bear. A bore will mark a tree 10 to 12 feet off the ground. A sow (female bear) is 6 feet tall.
Big bores will track down a smaller bore and run them out of there home range if they can catch them. Big bores will also kill cubs that they find so the sow will breed with them.
Bear prints are hard to find in the woods because they have flat feet. The best way to find track is to walk along the dirt roads.
A Bear is a creature of habit. They will enter a food plot from the same path. A bear will also look for holes in rock walls instead of stepping over the wall. Both situations are good places to setup a tree stand. A bear looks for thick woods to sleep in for most of the day. Bears will look for food most of the night and by daybreak they are in their beds. The best time to hunt bears is in the afternoon.
Good hunting
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