Welcome to the bear hunting magazine Hunt Cash with me Koby Morehead. We're gonna nerd out on bears hunting in the outdoors. We'll tell stories, talk biology, tactics, gear, and the fight to protect the pursuits that we hold dear. So, grab your bino's, lace up your boots, load up your barrels, and gather the hounds. We venture on this journey together. Today on the podcast, we're gonna continue a similar conversation to the last one. We were talking about keying in
on fall bears. This time we're talking to Josh Kershner from Arizona. We're gonna talk about what he looks for and how he scouts for fall bears in Arizona. There's a lot of things we can learn from Josh and other people that hunt in harsh, extreme environments. We've seen time and time again that Josh really learns and has figured out how to overcome obstacles in his way and have the ability to adapt in and.
Find the bears.
Most years, Josh writes a couple of articles every year for Bear Hunting Magazine, and we've seen just how passionate he is about bear hunting and whether you live inside of a similar environment or not. There is stuff to learn about bear behavior inside of this and good ways of thinking. So even if it's not something that you're into, there's always something to learn. We're starting out this episode with Josh telling us a little of his background.
Here's Josh been bear hunting down here. Mostly. Bears really got me into hunting a lot, he said, Deer hunting my dad kind of like an annual deer camp every year, which was amazing as a kid. But I got older for some reason. Dude, I don't know what it was, but the bear thing just kind of got to me.
So that's what really I just decided. I was like, man, I'm gonna learn how to do this, you know, And I just dove headfirst into bears, which is super unique for where I live because we're not necessarily considered a bear state Arizona. Like a lot of people that live here don't even know that bears exist here. Started learning how to bear hunt, and through doing so, that was the thing that kept me in the field the most.
So I decided to try to do a kind of an online journal about it, which turned into a blog called dialdon Hunter, and I think that was about a decade ago. At this point, I didn't know anyone was reading it. I just wanted to be transparent, kind of have an online journal for myself to reflect back on and see where I messed up, see where I succeeded. I got a message from Clay about a bear that my first bear that I got, and he was asked me if to write an article, and that's the first
article I ever had published. So nowadays, ten years later, I am a writer, videographer and photographer in the hunting industry and I'm due this full time. I've written a couple of books too, So yeah, that's me in a nutshell without getting too far into the weeds.
I really like the quality that Josh has where he was starting an online blog, but he was doing it a lot for just himself and not knowing if anyone was reading. And then out of the blue, he gets a call and he was first published inside of Bear Hunting Magazine, which is cool. You never know where Clay Nukelemb's name is gonna pop up. But if you want to learn more about Clay, check out episode one. That's episode uno of the Bear Hunting Magazine Hunt cast to
hear more about Clay. So since Josh brought up his first ever article that was published inside a bear hunting magazine, I asked him to go ahead and tell us that story real quick.
So here's Josh.
That was a roller coaster of the season. Ended up kind of all over the state, bouncing around. First bear I was on, ended up getting run out of the country by dogs. I actually shot a bear in August, tracked it for two days, couldn't find it, almost quit bear hunting that year. It was just a nasty deal. And then returned that following October and found this big, old jet black boar with my brother and he walked out and there was two other bears with it. We
saw nine and bears that morning. I think I was wild and I shot that bear and that was my first bear. And that's so that's the article that I wrote, the first one for Bear Hunting magazine. Through all of the looking around I've done for bears because so like, one of the hardest things about the bear thing here is food isn't consistent from year to year. So you can't be like, oh, yeah, I saw nine bears here last year and then go back the following year and
guarantee that they're going to be there. So because of that, you bounce around a lot, and through doing so I would find good deer spots and stuff too. So yeah, I along with the bears. Man, I absolutely love Coos deer hunting. Black bears are my number one love out in the mountains, but Coos deer is number two for sure. I hunted meals for a couple of years and was successful, but ever since I got my first coups, I haven't hunted one meal deer in Arizona since I'll go out
of state Colorado, Utah or whatever to hunt meal deer. Also, obviously, we have great elk hunting here. You know, it's kind of a blessing and a curse to live in a trophy state like Arizona, because pulling a tag is like incredibly difficult, but I do, I do get after the late archery bull hunts are like fairly easy to draw, so like, I do that quite a bit and then have alinair are super fun too, and we got good turkey hunting here as well, so awesome.
Yeah, I think there's a lot of value that comes from the struggle. I wonder if Josh would have been able to have an easy chip shot ride at the first day break of day kind of luck with a bear if he'd be the same hunter he is today. I think sometimes the struggle makes us a lot better hunters. Well, I know it does. There's one particular story I asked Josh to share, and we're gonna be talking about the
bears and the pears. It's an article he wrote a while back that talks about how plan a plan be doesn't always come into play and that you have to be able to adapt. So here's Josh talking about the bears and the bears.
Every year it's I mean, some years it's absolutely arid, and some years it's like a monsoon, and some years it's kind of in between. All of that has an effect on food, on what food, on how fast food is growing, what food is growing, and where it's growing. So it's incredibly vital as a bear hunter, more specifically as a fall bear hunter, to go out and actually
find that food. So what I do in a lot of scouting is I'm out there looking around for acorns and stuff like that to make sure that stuff is there. That story, I was predicting that there was going to be a lot of acorns, and I was right, but I also was wrong. So let me I'll elaborate on that. So we have different species of oaks here. Okay, so we have one called a scrub oak and another one called a gamble oak. Those are the two main ones that I focus in on for black bears. The scrub
oak is an early season a corn august. The gamble oak is a later season a corn that happens in October. On that particular year, we had a good early season acorn crop, but not a good later season a corn crop. The struggle was I was going to these areas where I thought bears were gonna be at based on the
early season acorns, and I was finding old sign. Okay, this is in October, by the way, When I was out here looking around, and I was assuming, and this is like growing pains of a bear hunter, right, I was assuming that we would also have a good October acorn crop. But it just wasn't the case. I found that out once I got into the field, saw old sign but no new sign. So after three or four days, I mean, I packed into the back country pretty far
on that hunt, went back in there. I found one young bore way up high, but I think I saw three acorns when I was hiking in on the trail. You know. So for people that don't know, like, if you do not have the food, you do not have the bears, Like if you're wasting your time. Really Like, I'm a guy that likes to think that no day is wasted in the field. Okay, but if you're out there looking for bears, you best be you best have
the food located. Okay. So I pulled out of there and I went to a different area to look at because another thing that will happen as acorns will occur in pockets. So I was like, oh, I wonder if it's better over here. So I pulled out, went to a different area, same kind of scenario. The early season
sign was there, but there wasn't any newer sign. So after a couple of days of looking around, I was like, you know what, if there's no acorns, I'm gonna go check this other food source, which another main food source for us is prickly pears. There's a big berry that is about two three inches long that grows on a prickly paired cactus, and those bears, it's like candy to them. Okay.
So I went to a different spot lower in elevation this occursion, and the first evening I was there, we found a giant bore going through the prickney pears and it's like, okay, now we're talking. So we never got a shot on that bear that evening. He ended up betting up in a spot that was just we just couldn't get a shot on him where he was. He
ran out of light. Return the next morning, knowing that a bear is not going to leave an area if he doesn't have to, particularly a big boar, If he has food and water where he's at, he will completely clear that area out before he leaves on his own unless something pushes him out, which a something pushing out a big board the only thing that's gonna do that. As a hunter, I feel like or another big boar. So we came in the following day in three point
thirty pm. He comes walking out. He was beneath us the entire time and we never saw him. He was betted up all day long, comes walking out and feeding on prickly pairs, and I shot him at four hundred yards. What I didn't say that fought that morning though we found another bear that was in the same area. So what I'm getting at here is we found the current What's important is finding the current food source, like what
they prefer right now, not a month ago. And once we got that, we saw bears regularly, okay, and it was only a matter of a couple miles okay, and the spots that I was in to start out with, these are areas have I'm not I've seen in upwards of twenty bears in like within like three four hundred yard area on certain years. Not this year though, it was different. Which is the hardest part about black bear hunting in Arizona to me is it's a moving target.
You can't just guarantee things. So yeah, just a prime example of yeah, you need to go out and you need to actually spend the time proofing the food source, and you can't bet your money on what you saw last year.
A lot of the things that Josh was talking about made me think to the last episode with Myron Means talking about natural foods and kenn On bears, for one, like, we weren't talking about the same types of things. I mean, we were both talking about acrons, but we weren't talking about the the ones on scrub oaks and gamble oaks. We were talking about white oaks and post oaks and black oaks, and we weren't talking about prickly bears. We were talking about other soft masks here, like cherries and
black gumberries and muscadions. I think it's a good reminder to always know that the same spot won't always work you after year. All right, let's start talking about scouting for bears.
Here's Joshua.
Time is money Cooby with Arizona in particular, how our bear season works is it opens on a Friday, and our units they're open based on South Quota limits. If a unit hits South Quota, that will close the following Wednesday at sundown. So what I'm getting at is you might only have six days to hunt a certain area, okay, because it might shut down you don't know. So in the spirit of that, in my opinion, it's very important to scout ahead of time so you're not wasting days
during the hunt finding what you need to find. The beauty about on X and using something like the terrain X feature is that is really just how important elevation is. So I'm doing this literally right now, like I just got back less than a week ago from a scouting
trip in any unit I've never been to. And what I'm trying to do is I'm trying to key in on a certain elevation band between you know, forty five hundred feet six thousand feet, like right in there, like that that area, because in the past, I know that that is kind of the area where food is going to be ripe during laid off. Okay, where in that is it going to be ripe? I'm I don't know.
Within on X, I will use that terrain X feature to block out everything that isn't forty five hundred to six thousand feet, So basically everything will go like to like a dark shade of gray or something like that, and everything that I want to see will be in color. Super beneficial, Okay, cut a lot of the weeds out on a country. There's also the view shed tool on
there where so I'm a glasser, Okay. You can only tell so much from a glassing point on a computer as to what you're like, what you're going to actually see when you get there. There's been many times I'm looking at a topple map and I'm like, oh yeah, this looks like a good glassing spot. And then I
get there and I'm like, I can't see anything. So the cool thing about that terrain X in the view shed is you can actually drop a pin on wherever you're thinking about glassing and it will highlight what you can see the view from that point, So you can have a really good idea of what you're gonna be
able to see before you even get there. But once those areas are located on the map and I've I've my ONYX looks like a Christmas tree with with all the pins all over it, the water sources, the potential glassing positions, which I try to do stuff like I try to find like like an ideal scenario would be like find like a big main ridge where I could walk along kind of like like shimmy along the top and I can look down off of both sides, down into the basins beneath that right and and fingers crossed
that there's water down on both sides. For Arizona, that's incredibly vital. I won't even hunt an area if there's not water around. I won't even like I won't even go look at the food if it's not there. People in like the PNW and stuff like that. They like like with water, water is everywhere, dude, I'll tell you what. Like down here, the desert water is gold. Okay. So once I have areas of interest on on within my ONYX, then it's time to go prove them. And that's what
I just did. I went. I went about a week ago. I went, and I hit all these points, not glassing at all. Okay, Like I'm not sitting down and glassing because the reason being is because I know that they're not there yet. The bears aren't in those areas yet that I know where I could go see bears right now. But the food source changes and the bears move with that. Okay. So what you're trying to do is you're trying to
you're trying to alley up them. Basically, you're trying to find where they're going to be, not where they are, Okay. So and that's that's where finding that food, those food sources all come down to, uh, it comes into play. So that's what we did. We went, we proof water. We found lots of food sources, found a lot of good stuff, found a lot of bad stuff. Stuff like that I'm looking at on a map and I'm like, oh, this looks really good. I got there and I'm like,
you know, I'm a little disappointed. That's what That's why it's so important to actually go and see it. So, yeah, that's that's what I do.
And you're not glassroom for bears, but I'm assuming that you take your optics to be able to see the food sources, so you're not having to walk all the way over there.
Yes, yes, let me yeah, let me let me back up there. I was being more specific towards black bears. I have binoculars with me, and I also have a spotting scope, and I have done this in the past where I've actually used my spotting scope to zoom in on like prickly pair of cactus from a long ways out to see how the berries are looking and stuff. I do it in oaks because some of our so the early season acorn that we have a scrub oak.
It's a smaller acorn. I mean it's only about the size of your fingernail, okay, so so when it's coming in, it's really small, all right. And like said, like sometimes like it's like a pe. So having optics to be able to sit there like even if I'm looking at something from less than one hundred yards away, you can't see them. Okay, so you need you actually need your optics to glass down into the food to see the acorns,
butting and stuff. So yeah, another thing I'm glassing for Kolbe is the water, because the water will naturally pull up in the bottoms of our canyons, and I can oftentimes see that from above. So when I do see that, I'll use So a really cool tool that recently came out on within on X is there the compass mode
on there. So with that I can actually pinpoint. I can like point my phone at the water, pinpoint where that is, and drop a pin right on that water is from where I'm standing, and then I have that there for future reference. Well.
I wish we had time to do a deep dive into pre scouting and scouting inside of on X and on the ground, but Josh did a good job of bringing it down to the key things that he looks for and not getting too much into the weeds. I will say that there's some good resources on the on X YouTube channel. They call them masterclasses, and there's some pretty good resources in there regarding looking for bears, and you'll get some good information from those types of resources.
The next thing that I want Josh to share with us is what kind of intel is good for him whenever he's in a season. So if him and a hunting buddy are in a similar area, what kind of information would he like to know about bear behavior here? And I think that it gives us some good questions so that whenever we just see a bear, it gives us a good list of questions when we're out there hunting to really begin to try to understand what it is that the bears are actually up to.
Here's Josh.
If you find one black bear, and let's say you're like, oh, yeah, I found that bear. He's at he's at he's at forty seven hundred feet okay, and he's doing this. I always ask people that, like people that send me like oh yeah, I saw a bear. I'm like, well, what was he doing? It's like if he was just walking, maybe he was going to a different elevation band, it was he feeding? Okay? What was he eating? Okay? So then you know that okay, which which then means it's like,
don't look at that. It's just one bear. Now you have this valuable piece of the puzzle, Okay, to be like, Okay, I saw this bear forty seven hundred feet he was eating this type of acorn, and he was on this facing slope, so he was on like a south facing slope. He's not west facing slope. Whatever that is. You can take that information and transpose it to different areas in where you're hunting, which then is gonna make more bears.
Like I always tell folks like, if you see a black bear in an area, that bear is there for a reason. Okay they and chances are there's more than that bear around, Okay, So just yeah, So I always look at someone finds one bear, I'm like, there's more than that around for sure. That bears there for a reason.
So when it's time to go on a hunt, how long do you give a spot before you move on to another spot that you've keaten on?
So I like to give a spot at least in evening and the morning, you know, sit from like three o'clock or something two o'clock until dark in glass, and then the following morning be in your spot before daylight. With black bears, I think that's so important, like being late to your glassing spot when you're bear hunting is just man, you're just doing yourself a disservice. Man. Those bears really like to operate in twilight, in those like
gray light hours. So yeah, like glass evening last morning, you know, first light to I don't know, ten eleven o'clock in the morning. And if I haven't seen anything in an evening in the morning unless I know, like I've walked through the area and I'm seeing a bunch of sign. If you're seeing fresh sign, okay, I'm just not seeing what's here, right, That's a good thing to key in on. I killed a bear two years ago at this point. I never saw that until I shot him.
And I hunted for probably over a week before I actually saw him, and I put the puzzle together of how to play this bear what I was seeing. I would walk this canyon bottom up, and then what and there was a spring. It was a beautiful spring, and then I would I would sit that spring, okay, and I would wait for the bears to come into water.
Along my route, I noticed there was pine needles that were simply moved, like if you took your fist put it down in the dirt and you push the pine needles forward, and so it makes a you that's what I was seeing. I never saw any paw prints. I just saw that going through the pine needles, and I'm like, man,
that's a bear. One hundred percent. That's a bear. Once I got the wind figured out, which is also a super interesting situation, this was this was like one of those moments where I was like super just good hunting, you know. I was just super proud of how I figured this area out. There's water. I sat on the side of the spring where the wind was hitting me in the face. Okay, that sounds pretty good, right, the
wind's going away from the water, it's sitting me in face. Well, what was happening is in the morning, like first thing in the morning, the wind would parallel the water, so it would actually go down the trail that I was hiking in on. And my thought was, oh, there's should be bears walking all around here. I don't know exactly when this bear is coming down this way. So I
sat there and I never saw anything. What I ended up doing is I ended up getting up on the other side of the drainage, which would have meant that my wind was blowing towards the water, but I was up higher, so I sat it in the evening. It was an evening spot, and because of the thermals, my wind was blowing towards the water, but it was blowing over it. And then if when it did blow down the trail, it would parallel the trail, not blow on
the trail. So essentially it was blowing over where I thought the bears were and to the left of where the bears were. The first evening I did that, that bore walked in and I shot him at thirty yards. So it's just like one of those things. It's like they are a ghost, okay, and if they don't want to be seen, they're not going to be seen. So putting together these these this puzzle, these puzzle pieces, that's how you that's how you have success out there. You
got to pay attention to that stuff, you know. Ever since I got my first one, it just it was just a different experience than anything else, any other deer hunt or anything like that. It was just different. Man, Like we the first bear I ever packed out. Dude, I tell you what we were. We were leap frog and bear parts up a cliff to get it to get it out of where we were, Like, it was unreal.
It was it was a big adventure. It was awesome and at and during the time of doing it, I was like, oh, man, I'm uh, I don't know about this, you know, like feeling super sketchy about the situation. But like once I got back to the truck, I look back on that, dude, and I was like, that was awesome, you know, like I can't wait. I can't wait. I can't believe we did that. I can't wait to do that again. It's just like so far removed from what from our city life, you know, It's.
All right, it's uh, we're getting to that time. We need to wrap it up. But Josh, tell everybody about your new book.
Been out for about a month at this point. It's called Becoming a Bow Hunter. It's a complete beginner's guide to archery hunting. I wanted to write it from the ground level, man, like you don't even have a bow yet. Like I start out, like, how do you buy a bow? How do you do that? Right from from that point all the way to your packing an animal out and putting it in your freezer, And there's a lot in between.
There's a lot of stuff on gear. There's a lot on technique, like how to shoot, how to shoot all the different releases, multiple ways to shoot the different releases, different styles of hunting. There's a couple there's a couple guest pieces in there from Jace Bowserman and Brad Brooks. They contribute to that, to that book, And I did that because you know, there was areas within the book where I wasn't super confident in talking about, Like like
Brad writes a piece on calling. I do calling, but like not like him. You know, he's like mister l hunter. You know, he does a lot of calling and stuff. Jace Jase writes this great piece on ambush hunting. Again, like I'm primarily a spot in stock Hunter. You know, do I ambush hunt? Yes, I use it as a tool.
But Jace does it all the time, you know. So like having him put his wisdom into that, I just thought it was gonna bleed through more wisdom, you know for people I think I was writing a book to my younger self is really what it was, really what you know, because everything in it, I truly believe that if you're new to bow hunting and you pick this, but whether you're new to bow hunting, or maybe you've been like a bow hunter for a while and you
haven't experienced success yet. I really believe that this is going to help you fill your first tag. And the reason for that is because everything in it helps me fill tags. Okay, these are just all the things that I've learned through the years and learned not only from my own experiences, but from talking to like veteran bow hunters and guys that are way more experienced than I am. So yeah, I'm super proud of how it came out. Man. If anyone wants to check it out, it's on Amazon
Becoming a bow Hunter. Check it out if you're new. Man, I think I really wish I had it when I started, you know. Yeah, thank you for listening. The Bear Hunting Magazine Hunt Cast is recorded by Bear Hunting Magazine and produced by Mountain Gravity. Me be sure leave us a five star review on iTunes and keep reguarding the gate