He only traveled 25 yards, after the one shot through both lungs.This is an awesome bear..... But with my personal experience in bear hunting, butchering the bear ASAP after the kill is very important for top quality bear meat. What bothers me is how stiff his front legs are.... How long was he down before they recovered him? With the 3 to 4 inches of fat that this aninal would have been hauling under his coat, it takes forever forthe bear to cool with the hide on...
The best bear meat I have ate, was skinned and quartered in under an hour... This meat will be all right but it won't be the best tasting.....
Heck you could tackle them at that distance.We don't have bear around us. We are in an urban area of central Maryland, but with enough green space around us that deer population can get to be a problem. The state regularly licenses hunters to thin the population, either with bow & arrow in populated areas or by sharpshooters in places like the state parks.
As an illustration, here is a picture I took in the late afternoon in August out of my front door. The crabapple tree was dropping its fruit, and the deer loved it!
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Follow me here!.... this is an awesome bear... great shot placement... a bear I would love to have taken, but what I'm saying is don't expect the meat to be top notch!!He only traveled 25 yards, after the one shot through both lungs.This is an awesome bear..... But with my personal experience in bear hunting, butchering the bear ASAP after the kill is very important for top quality bear meat. What bothers me is how stiff his front legs are.... How long was he down before they recovered him? With the 3 to 4 inches of fat that this aninal would have been hauling under his coat, it takes forever forthe bear to cool with the hide on...
The best bear meat I have ate, was skinned and quartered in under an hour... This meat will be all right but it won't be the best tasting.....
It probably took them (13 guys) a good part of the day to get him out of the woods. 535 pound bears don't usually hang around the back of your pickup truck, waiting for a ride, and they don't drag too easy. Pike County, PA is full of swamps, so I would guess this one was shot a ways back, along the swamp. And if you know anything about swamps, you almost always have to walk down hill to get to them, and up hill to get out of them.
I don't know about other states, but PA Game Commission has done miracles building the number of Black Bears in the state.
One of the ways they do this, is by having a Game Commission Biologist carefully gut the Bear at one of their numerous check-points, so he can inspect the sexual organs, the teeth, and other biological happenings. Gary Aldt was the foremost authority in the country on Black Bears, and he was instrumental in this whole plan. It is illegal to gut your own Bear in PA.
So it would be kinda hard to get a 500+ pound bear from a few miles from the nearest road, to a check-point maybe 20 to 40 miles from your hunting spot in an hour. You just gotta do what you gotta do, and hope for the best.
All things considered, just getting him there in the same day is an accomplishment.
Bear
I I understood what you meant. I didn't think you were picking on my buddy or PA. I just stated what the rules were, and that we had to do what we had to do. Since you got me thinking about it, I looked it up, and that rule of "No Gutting" that they had when I used to hunt Bear, has been changed. Now you can gut them. Maybe they had too many complaints about spoiled meat. Other than that, the time is a factor, and I didn't ask how long it took, but in the picture of the Bear on the fork lift, it is still day time, so it was a shorter time than many.Follow me here!.... this is an awesome bear... great shot placement... a bear I would love to have taken, but what I'm saying is don't expect the meat to be top notch!!He only traveled 25 yards, after the one shot through both lungs.This is an awesome bear..... But with my personal experience in bear hunting, butchering the bear ASAP after the kill is very important for top quality bear meat. What bothers me is how stiff his front legs are.... How long was he down before they recovered him? With the 3 to 4 inches of fat that this aninal would have been hauling under his coat, it takes forever forthe bear to cool with the hide on...
The best bear meat I have ate, was skinned and quartered in under an hour... This meat will be all right but it won't be the best tasting.....
It probably took them (13 guys) a good part of the day to get him out of the woods. 535 pound bears don't usually hang around the back of your pickup truck, waiting for a ride, and they don't drag too easy. Pike County, PA is full of swamps, so I would guess this one was shot a ways back, along the swamp. And if you know anything about swamps, you almost always have to walk down hill to get to them, and up hill to get out of them.
I don't know about other states, but PA Game Commission has done miracles building the number of Black Bears in the state.
One of the ways they do this, is by having a Game Commission Biologist carefully gut the Bear at one of their numerous check-points, so he can inspect the sexual organs, the teeth, and other biological happenings. Gary Aldt was the foremost authority in the country on Black Bears, and he was instrumental in this whole plan. It is illegal to gut your own Bear in PA.
So it would be kinda hard to get a 500+ pound bear from a few miles from the nearest road, to a check-point maybe 20 to 40 miles from your hunting spot in an hour. You just gotta do what you gotta do, and hope for the best.
All things considered, just getting him there in the same day is an accomplishment.
Bear
I'm not dissing the hunt or the hunter but when you drop a trophy bear and take most of the day pulling it out of the woods the meat WILL have a taste to it more so than one that was skinned and butchered in an hour...
Like I said personal experience....
What I should diss is the PA. game commission's laws, they are enforcing game laws that force you to run the risk of destroying the meat of this awesome bear by not properly cooling the meat down after the kill...
All I read on this forum is food safety... temps in the safe zone in your smoker,and proper handling of raw meat...... sorry this don't qualify!
While I have never seen a bear of this size in Minnesota their DNR allows you to harvest your bear and gut on site, yes it has to go to a check station for the removal of a tooth and a chunk of a rib for examining. But you can begin with cooling asap....I have seen guys haul in bags of ice to cool down the body cavity on site....I have also seen guys drive around for hours with an unskinned bear in the back of their truck(showing it off). I know what meat I wouldn't eat.....
Again awesome bear!
Bears is Iowa?? Nope...might hear of one a year roaming the country side but no bear season here... We have done all of our bear hunting up in northern Minnesota around the International Falls area... But yes we have some of the best whitetail hunting in the country! All of our whitetail are raised on corn and beans and browse very little on anything else 8 months out of the year...
Glad to hear that you can gut it on site... That would help tremendously. And like previously stated bears can carry tric. so cook well just like pork...
Yeah, I think as of last year, the New PA State Record is 879 pounds---Shot with a Bow & Arrow!Thats real nice black bear. Wasn't there a new state record set this year?
awesome pics and a great time-congrats on that experience
That's a big'un! never ate bear meat, but hear it's awfully good. Did you end up getting a roast or something from that one?
A few months ago, a member of the Acrobats of China brought me a pair of huge Grizzly claws he wanted set with silver and Turquoise for necklaces. The puppies were just over 3 1/2 inches long!