stickhunter
CGN frequent flyer
- Location
- Victoria, B.C.
This is a post that I wrote on a regional BC hunting site, but thought I'd share it here as well. The spring bear season on Vancouver Island ran this year from April 1 - June 15.
I always enjoy reading hunting reports, so I thought I'd share one from a recent trip that I took to the Port Renfrew area. This is my second season hunting spring bear, and I'm a very novice hunter, not having grown up in an outdoors-oriented family. Pretty much every hunting experience is a first for me, so please keep that in mind as you read on (i.e., if I sound naive, it's because I really am!)
I was lucky in my first spring season (2015) to take a friend out for his first hunting experience. We were both quite busy with work, and although we'd talked about going bear hunting, it was not until the last week of the season that we realized it was now-or-never. We were only able to get out to Port Renfrew on the last day of season, and had set our expectations very low: we were happy when we found our first scat pile and ecstatic when we found a second pile that was much fresher. If the trip had ended then, we would have called it a success, but as luck would have it, only a couple of hours into the morning, we spotted a fairly young bear and we had it down by 9:30am. We were stoked!
Flash forward to 2016 and 2017, and life had taken some turns for me and the spring bear seasons came and went without me getting afield.
This year, I was able to reunite with my aforementioned friend and we made a day trip for bear in early June. We decided to return to the same area where we had success in 2015. A not-so early morning start found us nearing Port Renfrew just before 9:30am when we spotted a good sized bear foraging on the highway. We pulled over down the road and watched the bear for a bit, hoping it might head back into the hills, but alas, it was well-committed to enjoying the fresh greens by the roadway. We moved on to our original plan, and found lots of fresh scat, but didn't sight a bear for the rest of the day. That being said, we were still glad to have gotten out and enjoyed the day, see a bear, and find some fresh signs.
My 12 year old daughter has always been keen on small game hunting, but she'd never accompanied me during a big game hunt, primarily because I was learning the ropes and wanted to build up my hunting skills in hopes that her initial hunting experiences would be more than just getting cold, wet, and bored. After talking it over with her, and buoyed by my recent bear sighting, I decided to make one more trip this season with her as company.
The original plan was for me to take her out of school on Thursday (June 14) and get a 1/2 day of hunting in, camp overnight, and spend all of the last day of the season (June 15) hunting. Unfortunately, I'd forgotten about her end of school concert/assembly on Thursday night, so the plan had to change. Immediately after the concert, we hit the road and decided to sleep overnight in the vehicle near where my friend and I had spotting the bear earlier in the month.
The next morning, we awoke early (much to my daughter's chagrin!) and decided to check out some logging roads that lead up the nearby hills. We came upon a spur road that had a large pile of scat at its entrance, so we walked it for an hour, during which I had the best time sharing with her the modest amount of bear hunting knowledge that I'd acquired and just enjoying the early morning sights and sounds. We didn't see any bears, so we returned to the vehicle and travelled up the main road as far as it went. We saw a few more piles of scat, but none particularly fresh.
Now going on to 9:30am, we headed back down the road to the highway. As we crested a rise, we saw a bear running down the road about 80 yards away. I pulled over, told my daughter to put on her ear muffs, and hurriedly got out of the vehicle before loading my rifle. Meanwhile, the bear continued to move away from us until it was just about to disappear behind a bend in the road, probably about 120 yards away. The bear stopped and turned to its left. I thought about kneeling for a shot, but didn't think I'd be able to see the bear on the decline, so I remained standing and got a sight picture. I must say, the excitement of getting a bear with my daughter was running through my mind, and I was very worried that if the bear moved one more time, I would lose sight of it, so I rushed my shot. The bear jumped up off all fours, landed and looked up the road at me before running into the bush. I thought I'd made a good shot, as there was plenty of target and I was well-practiced at the range (although, admittedly, more so from a bench or kneeling than from standing up).
I ran down the road and found the spot where the bear had been standing. There were two pairs of fresh paw marks in the gravel from where the bear had leapt up and landed back down. I looked on the road and the nearby salal for signs of fur or blood, and didn't see anything. My past experiences with seeing big game shot, once as an observer on a moose and once as the shooter on my first black bear, were all drop-right-there kills, so no tracking was involved. I was very uncertain whether I'd completely missed or had wounded the bear and didn't know enough about tracking to see the signs.
I drove back down to the bear's last position and asked my daughter to wait in the car while I did a little bush whacking, hoping to find some blood, but after 30 minutes of going around the periphery, I didn't see any sign of the bear, wounded or otherwise. I was feeling pretty terrible for a number of reasons: 1) I was still questioning whether I'd wounded the bear or missed; I was really hoping for the latter, 2) I knew that in either case, I'd let my emotions/excitement get the best of me and had taken a shot that I should have taken more time to make, 3) we saw the bear at 9:30am, roughly the same time as I'd seen the previous bears and I felt like this might have been our one golden opportunity for the day, the last day of the season no less.
I was contemplating packing it in as I was questioning my judgement and felt that if I had wounded the bear, it was the fairest thing to cancel my tag. I apologized to my daughter a number of times, to which she graciously replied that I had nothing to apologize for, but I still was feeling like I'd let both of us down. That being said, I also didn't want this to be how we ended our first hunting experience together, so I talked it over with her and we decided to check out another road before revisiting the same road where I'd shot at the bear --- we figured that there weren't a whole lot of places for the bear to go in that area, so it might just return. Perhaps wishful thinking?
After another hour of driving and looking around at some clear cuts, I took one more go at looking for signs of a wounded bear, and again found none. So we headed back up the road. By this time, my daughter was pretty tired from the late night and early morning, so I pulled back up into the first spur road that we'd walked and she had a nap in the car while I walked it again.
About 200 yards down the road, I smelled some skunk cabbage and remembered reading that it was a favourite of black bears. I found a boggy clearing beside the road and used my binoculars to peer into the tree line at the far side, maybe 75 yards away. The breeze was gusting into my face when I heard a rustling. There was a pause of silence and then more rustling. The sound was being carried by the wind and it seemed to be coming directly from the patch of trees that I was watching, but I could see nothing. After a few more rustles, but seeing nothing, I was starting to think that my focus through the binoculars was tricking my brain into thinking that the sound was coming from wherever I was looking, so I lowered the binoculars and scanned left-and-right, but still I saw nothing. I raised my binoculars towards the same trees that I'd been watching earlier and, as if appearing out of nowhere, there was a bear standing broadside amongst them. I put down my binoculars, loaded a round into my rifle, and knelt down on the road. I raised my rifle but couldn't find the bear in my scope (4x). As I lowered my rifle to get another view of the bear, it started moving out of the trees and into the clearing, turning directly towards me. It seemed like the bear had closed half the distance to me when it turned to its left, moved a couple of yards parallel to me, and then stood still. Unfortunately, a sapling by the roadside was now blocking my view of the bear, so I stood up and took a couple of side-steps to my right. I was now standing, and raising my rifle again, I found the bear immediately in the crosshairs. Like before, the thought of having a successful hunt with my daughter went through my mind just before the rifle shot cracked. The bear reacted by turning away from me and running back into the bush. I lost sight of it immediately, but could hear thrashing through undergrowth --- it sounded like the bear was moving at a good clip through the trees to my right. I thought about moving down the road towards the next clearing to see if I could spot the bear again, but decided to wait a few minutes.
After some time had passed, I walked into the bog to where I thought the bear had been standing. I was able to line myself up with the sapling that had obscured my view, but like before, I saw no sign of blood. I walked a bit into nearby bush, but still, there was nothing. My heart sank and I started to wonder if I'd somehow jarred my scope out of alignment. Feeling uncertain again, I returned to the vehicle and told my daughter that I had to go back and look for the bear and that I might be away for an hour --- she was comfortable staying in the car.
I returned to the spot where I thought the bear had been standing when I took the shot, but another scan of the area revealed nothing. I then decided to try and get another bearing on the bear's position, so I walked towards the patch of trees where it had first appeared. Just before I got there, I noticed a big tear in some ground moss and could clearly see claw marks in the pattern. I looked around the ground and, finally, about a foot away, I saw a splattering of blood on some cedar and salal bushes. This was, in fact, the spot where I'd shot the bear, and it was only a handful of yards away from tree line, and still a good 60 yards away from where I had been standing. I can only think that with my tunnel vision, what I thought was a significant amount of forward movement was in reality, just a couple of steps by the bear.
Having found the starting point, it was now a simple task to pick up the trail along some beaten down vegetation. I found blood every foot or so, and as I got deeper, the amount of blood started to increase. I also noticed that there were bubbly splotches, which I knew was a good sign of a likely lung injury. After 15 yards in a straight line away from the road, the trail turned right, and a few yards in, I heard flies buzzing and saw the bear lying on the far side of small log. There was a lot of crushed vegetation in the vicinity and a significant amount of blood. I prodded the bear, and as I leaned over it, I saw the gunshot on its right side, just behind the shoulder and in the lower half of the chest, exactly where I'd aimed. To say I was relieved is an understatement!
I returned to the car and drove back to the spot on the road from where I had shot the bear. I learned so much in that short period of time trying to locate the bear that I wanted to show my daughter. After giving her a heads up that she'd be seeing blood and a dead animal (she's not squeamish, but I didn't want her to be surprised), I took her through the steps of where I went and what I saw. She seemed to like following along and was surprised by the size of the bear.
I was feeling pretty stoked, but I also knew that there was still an awful lot of work ahead. I thought I could drag the bear to the road, but after pulling it a few yards and encountering an extended incline, I realized that I didn't have the strength to do that by myself, so I field dressed the bear and hauled the quarters and torso up to the car. My skinning technique is not good enough to make a rug, and with the heat of the day (it was now 12:30pm), I was rushing to get the bear gutted and quartered. After 2 1/2 hrs, I had the bear back at the car and was feeling mighty tired, but satisfied. My daughter was relaxing in the back of the car listening to a podcast while I was doing the field dressing; she was still really tired, so I gave her that courtesy, but I'm hoping that next time (perhaps with a deer?) she'll be able to help me.
By 7pm, we were back in Victoria and being too tired and sore to butcher the meat that evening, my friend generously let me hang it in game bags in his cool shed until I could return in the morning. I spent almost all of Saturday processing the meat into the backstraps, ribs, roasts from one of the hind quarters, and cubes for the remaining. I haven't weighed all the meat yet, but was cubing into 2lb bags, and estimate I got about 30 bags, so this bear was easily twice the size of my first one. I did notice some small white pearls, which I think are trichinosis cysts, primarily in the muscles around the joints, but they weren't throughout the meat nor where they in large numbers (I probably counted 20 or so). Aside from that, the bear appeared healthy and I didn't find any actual worms or other parasites in the gut cavity, so with proper cooking, I'm sure the meat will be safe and, hopefully as tasty as my last bear. After labouring with the butchering, I'm thinking of sticking to smaller bears in the future or learning how to make hams from the hind quarters.
Sorry for the long-winded story, but this was a big learning experience for me, both in terms of having my first experience tracking an animal and also coming to terms with my decision making process. I hope it was an enjoyable read in between hunting seasons.
Lastly, I was still feeling a little morose over the possibility that I may have wounded the first bear, but now that I look back at the second bear, and how evident the blood trail was, I'm feeling more convinced that I completely missed the shot, which is a relief to me. I'd love to keep hunting with my daughter, so I'll need to work on my mental game to keep from rushing my next shot.
For reference, here are a few pictures of the blood trail and the bear --- a nice way to end out the season.
Happy hunting and take care!
I always enjoy reading hunting reports, so I thought I'd share one from a recent trip that I took to the Port Renfrew area. This is my second season hunting spring bear, and I'm a very novice hunter, not having grown up in an outdoors-oriented family. Pretty much every hunting experience is a first for me, so please keep that in mind as you read on (i.e., if I sound naive, it's because I really am!)
I was lucky in my first spring season (2015) to take a friend out for his first hunting experience. We were both quite busy with work, and although we'd talked about going bear hunting, it was not until the last week of the season that we realized it was now-or-never. We were only able to get out to Port Renfrew on the last day of season, and had set our expectations very low: we were happy when we found our first scat pile and ecstatic when we found a second pile that was much fresher. If the trip had ended then, we would have called it a success, but as luck would have it, only a couple of hours into the morning, we spotted a fairly young bear and we had it down by 9:30am. We were stoked!
Flash forward to 2016 and 2017, and life had taken some turns for me and the spring bear seasons came and went without me getting afield.
This year, I was able to reunite with my aforementioned friend and we made a day trip for bear in early June. We decided to return to the same area where we had success in 2015. A not-so early morning start found us nearing Port Renfrew just before 9:30am when we spotted a good sized bear foraging on the highway. We pulled over down the road and watched the bear for a bit, hoping it might head back into the hills, but alas, it was well-committed to enjoying the fresh greens by the roadway. We moved on to our original plan, and found lots of fresh scat, but didn't sight a bear for the rest of the day. That being said, we were still glad to have gotten out and enjoyed the day, see a bear, and find some fresh signs.
My 12 year old daughter has always been keen on small game hunting, but she'd never accompanied me during a big game hunt, primarily because I was learning the ropes and wanted to build up my hunting skills in hopes that her initial hunting experiences would be more than just getting cold, wet, and bored. After talking it over with her, and buoyed by my recent bear sighting, I decided to make one more trip this season with her as company.
The original plan was for me to take her out of school on Thursday (June 14) and get a 1/2 day of hunting in, camp overnight, and spend all of the last day of the season (June 15) hunting. Unfortunately, I'd forgotten about her end of school concert/assembly on Thursday night, so the plan had to change. Immediately after the concert, we hit the road and decided to sleep overnight in the vehicle near where my friend and I had spotting the bear earlier in the month.
The next morning, we awoke early (much to my daughter's chagrin!) and decided to check out some logging roads that lead up the nearby hills. We came upon a spur road that had a large pile of scat at its entrance, so we walked it for an hour, during which I had the best time sharing with her the modest amount of bear hunting knowledge that I'd acquired and just enjoying the early morning sights and sounds. We didn't see any bears, so we returned to the vehicle and travelled up the main road as far as it went. We saw a few more piles of scat, but none particularly fresh.
Now going on to 9:30am, we headed back down the road to the highway. As we crested a rise, we saw a bear running down the road about 80 yards away. I pulled over, told my daughter to put on her ear muffs, and hurriedly got out of the vehicle before loading my rifle. Meanwhile, the bear continued to move away from us until it was just about to disappear behind a bend in the road, probably about 120 yards away. The bear stopped and turned to its left. I thought about kneeling for a shot, but didn't think I'd be able to see the bear on the decline, so I remained standing and got a sight picture. I must say, the excitement of getting a bear with my daughter was running through my mind, and I was very worried that if the bear moved one more time, I would lose sight of it, so I rushed my shot. The bear jumped up off all fours, landed and looked up the road at me before running into the bush. I thought I'd made a good shot, as there was plenty of target and I was well-practiced at the range (although, admittedly, more so from a bench or kneeling than from standing up).
I ran down the road and found the spot where the bear had been standing. There were two pairs of fresh paw marks in the gravel from where the bear had leapt up and landed back down. I looked on the road and the nearby salal for signs of fur or blood, and didn't see anything. My past experiences with seeing big game shot, once as an observer on a moose and once as the shooter on my first black bear, were all drop-right-there kills, so no tracking was involved. I was very uncertain whether I'd completely missed or had wounded the bear and didn't know enough about tracking to see the signs.
I drove back down to the bear's last position and asked my daughter to wait in the car while I did a little bush whacking, hoping to find some blood, but after 30 minutes of going around the periphery, I didn't see any sign of the bear, wounded or otherwise. I was feeling pretty terrible for a number of reasons: 1) I was still questioning whether I'd wounded the bear or missed; I was really hoping for the latter, 2) I knew that in either case, I'd let my emotions/excitement get the best of me and had taken a shot that I should have taken more time to make, 3) we saw the bear at 9:30am, roughly the same time as I'd seen the previous bears and I felt like this might have been our one golden opportunity for the day, the last day of the season no less.
I was contemplating packing it in as I was questioning my judgement and felt that if I had wounded the bear, it was the fairest thing to cancel my tag. I apologized to my daughter a number of times, to which she graciously replied that I had nothing to apologize for, but I still was feeling like I'd let both of us down. That being said, I also didn't want this to be how we ended our first hunting experience together, so I talked it over with her and we decided to check out another road before revisiting the same road where I'd shot at the bear --- we figured that there weren't a whole lot of places for the bear to go in that area, so it might just return. Perhaps wishful thinking?
After another hour of driving and looking around at some clear cuts, I took one more go at looking for signs of a wounded bear, and again found none. So we headed back up the road. By this time, my daughter was pretty tired from the late night and early morning, so I pulled back up into the first spur road that we'd walked and she had a nap in the car while I walked it again.
About 200 yards down the road, I smelled some skunk cabbage and remembered reading that it was a favourite of black bears. I found a boggy clearing beside the road and used my binoculars to peer into the tree line at the far side, maybe 75 yards away. The breeze was gusting into my face when I heard a rustling. There was a pause of silence and then more rustling. The sound was being carried by the wind and it seemed to be coming directly from the patch of trees that I was watching, but I could see nothing. After a few more rustles, but seeing nothing, I was starting to think that my focus through the binoculars was tricking my brain into thinking that the sound was coming from wherever I was looking, so I lowered the binoculars and scanned left-and-right, but still I saw nothing. I raised my binoculars towards the same trees that I'd been watching earlier and, as if appearing out of nowhere, there was a bear standing broadside amongst them. I put down my binoculars, loaded a round into my rifle, and knelt down on the road. I raised my rifle but couldn't find the bear in my scope (4x). As I lowered my rifle to get another view of the bear, it started moving out of the trees and into the clearing, turning directly towards me. It seemed like the bear had closed half the distance to me when it turned to its left, moved a couple of yards parallel to me, and then stood still. Unfortunately, a sapling by the roadside was now blocking my view of the bear, so I stood up and took a couple of side-steps to my right. I was now standing, and raising my rifle again, I found the bear immediately in the crosshairs. Like before, the thought of having a successful hunt with my daughter went through my mind just before the rifle shot cracked. The bear reacted by turning away from me and running back into the bush. I lost sight of it immediately, but could hear thrashing through undergrowth --- it sounded like the bear was moving at a good clip through the trees to my right. I thought about moving down the road towards the next clearing to see if I could spot the bear again, but decided to wait a few minutes.
After some time had passed, I walked into the bog to where I thought the bear had been standing. I was able to line myself up with the sapling that had obscured my view, but like before, I saw no sign of blood. I walked a bit into nearby bush, but still, there was nothing. My heart sank and I started to wonder if I'd somehow jarred my scope out of alignment. Feeling uncertain again, I returned to the vehicle and told my daughter that I had to go back and look for the bear and that I might be away for an hour --- she was comfortable staying in the car.
I returned to the spot where I thought the bear had been standing when I took the shot, but another scan of the area revealed nothing. I then decided to try and get another bearing on the bear's position, so I walked towards the patch of trees where it had first appeared. Just before I got there, I noticed a big tear in some ground moss and could clearly see claw marks in the pattern. I looked around the ground and, finally, about a foot away, I saw a splattering of blood on some cedar and salal bushes. This was, in fact, the spot where I'd shot the bear, and it was only a handful of yards away from tree line, and still a good 60 yards away from where I had been standing. I can only think that with my tunnel vision, what I thought was a significant amount of forward movement was in reality, just a couple of steps by the bear.
Having found the starting point, it was now a simple task to pick up the trail along some beaten down vegetation. I found blood every foot or so, and as I got deeper, the amount of blood started to increase. I also noticed that there were bubbly splotches, which I knew was a good sign of a likely lung injury. After 15 yards in a straight line away from the road, the trail turned right, and a few yards in, I heard flies buzzing and saw the bear lying on the far side of small log. There was a lot of crushed vegetation in the vicinity and a significant amount of blood. I prodded the bear, and as I leaned over it, I saw the gunshot on its right side, just behind the shoulder and in the lower half of the chest, exactly where I'd aimed. To say I was relieved is an understatement!
I returned to the car and drove back to the spot on the road from where I had shot the bear. I learned so much in that short period of time trying to locate the bear that I wanted to show my daughter. After giving her a heads up that she'd be seeing blood and a dead animal (she's not squeamish, but I didn't want her to be surprised), I took her through the steps of where I went and what I saw. She seemed to like following along and was surprised by the size of the bear.
I was feeling pretty stoked, but I also knew that there was still an awful lot of work ahead. I thought I could drag the bear to the road, but after pulling it a few yards and encountering an extended incline, I realized that I didn't have the strength to do that by myself, so I field dressed the bear and hauled the quarters and torso up to the car. My skinning technique is not good enough to make a rug, and with the heat of the day (it was now 12:30pm), I was rushing to get the bear gutted and quartered. After 2 1/2 hrs, I had the bear back at the car and was feeling mighty tired, but satisfied. My daughter was relaxing in the back of the car listening to a podcast while I was doing the field dressing; she was still really tired, so I gave her that courtesy, but I'm hoping that next time (perhaps with a deer?) she'll be able to help me.
By 7pm, we were back in Victoria and being too tired and sore to butcher the meat that evening, my friend generously let me hang it in game bags in his cool shed until I could return in the morning. I spent almost all of Saturday processing the meat into the backstraps, ribs, roasts from one of the hind quarters, and cubes for the remaining. I haven't weighed all the meat yet, but was cubing into 2lb bags, and estimate I got about 30 bags, so this bear was easily twice the size of my first one. I did notice some small white pearls, which I think are trichinosis cysts, primarily in the muscles around the joints, but they weren't throughout the meat nor where they in large numbers (I probably counted 20 or so). Aside from that, the bear appeared healthy and I didn't find any actual worms or other parasites in the gut cavity, so with proper cooking, I'm sure the meat will be safe and, hopefully as tasty as my last bear. After labouring with the butchering, I'm thinking of sticking to smaller bears in the future or learning how to make hams from the hind quarters.
Sorry for the long-winded story, but this was a big learning experience for me, both in terms of having my first experience tracking an animal and also coming to terms with my decision making process. I hope it was an enjoyable read in between hunting seasons.
Lastly, I was still feeling a little morose over the possibility that I may have wounded the first bear, but now that I look back at the second bear, and how evident the blood trail was, I'm feeling more convinced that I completely missed the shot, which is a relief to me. I'd love to keep hunting with my daughter, so I'll need to work on my mental game to keep from rushing my next shot.
For reference, here are a few pictures of the blood trail and the bear --- a nice way to end out the season.
Happy hunting and take care!
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...... what rifle did you use?
