Judging Black Bears for Dummies

or for more information, visit Interstate Batteries dot com. My name is Clay Nukeleman. I'm the host of the Bear Hunting Magazine podcast. I'll also be your host into the world of hunting the icon of the North American wilderness. Prepare. We'll talk about tactics, gear, conservation, but will also bring you into some of the wildest country on the planet,

chasing batters, h boys and girls. Spring bear season is upon us and despite despite the best efforts of a global pandemic, most places that have bear seasons are still having bear seasons. And it's it's go time. It's go time. May and June always compared to the months of October and November for white tails. So May and June are that for bears, and this is when we hunt them in the spring. So what we're doing this week is we're re releasing an episode called Judging Black Bears for Dummies.

And I think this is the most comprehensive conversation, for sure, that I've ever had, where we talk about all different methods of judging bears from sex and bears, aging bears, well I'm not really aging bears, but trying to term with their mature. But I'm joined by Klobe Moorehead and Ryan Greb and we go through the nitty gritty nerd out stuff about judging bears, some of the most tough

animals of all the big game animals to judge. So this is a technical you learn the stuff in this podcast, you're gonna you're gonna learn something and uh then you may be able to add something to this. But hey, it's also time for those of you guys and states where you can bait bears to start baiting. Check out our buddies at Northwood's Bear Products also du Hunting Supply. They started a new podcast their hound supply company, but you can search for the w W podcast and lastly

Western Bear Foundation. They're putting out some good content these days through social media on judging bears as well, and they're a membership driven nonprofit hunting conservation organization standing up for bear hunters out west. You're gonna enjoy this podcast

and hey we're bear hunting. I mean, when you're listening to this podcast, I am somewhere in a wild place chasing a bear and you'll hear where that is at some point and U but that's part of the reason we're having to rerelease some stuff, um, just with the timing and the COVID stuff. So man, I hope that you get into some wild places and find a bear hunter bear and man, yeah, be safe, be careful, and

good hunting. We are going to have another one of our technical, nitty gritty nerd out Bear sessions about judging bears in the field. Judging bears, trying to tell if a bear is a male or female, if it's a older man your male, or if it's a juvenile male. Basically judging bears just like we would white tails, judging what you judge of whitetail by all these different characteristics. We're gonna talk about bears bears are one of the

hardest animals to judge in the field, for sure. I mean I think you could talk to guys all over the country that have hunted all over and they would say, the hardest animal to judge in North America, it's a black bear. I have with me again, Ryan Grab also known as flint Face Grab flint Face. Yep, Ryan is Colby. You wouldn't know this. Ryan is was notorious for taking pictures with animals and just having this like flint face, just like just flint face. So I started calling flint Face.

Now he's now he smiles more on these big trophy photos. We've got Ryan Grab here with me. Yeah, now he grins like a girl scout. I got so Ryan Grab is here rides been on the last couple of podcasts, and I've got to say it just in case you haven't listened to the podcast before, but Ryan is an expert bear hunter. Troubled with me many places in Canada. But you've you have done your bear business here in Arkansas. And that's how I know you as being a expert

Arkansas bear hunter. Been hunting. I mean, you've killed a ton, you've killed a pile of bears here in Arkansas. And as I've said in the last three podcasts, you were killing bears. Well, my mama was still wife of my nose. Would you agree with us if you say so? All right? All right, So that's Ryan Grab. I've got Colby moorehead with me. I've introduced Colby to Colby works for Bear Hunting magazine. So Kobe is you don't really even have a job title, do you know? It's just like Kobe.

Koby does all kind of stuff for me, Bear Tech, bear Tech. Colby is a bear hunting magazine, Bear Tech, Mr Ken do Attitude, can do. That's all right. Koby is doing a ton of stuff for me, including getting Bear Horizon on Amazon. I don't know when this podcast is gonna be released, but you can be looking for it. We're gonna have our Bear Horizon show on Amazon. That's one thing that he's done for me. But anyway, he does a whole lot of stuff. But that's neither here

nor there. Let's talk about Judge and bears. We're gonna try to just jump right into this thing. Toughest big game animal in North America to judge by many standards, Um, bears don't have antlers do they Have you ever killed a bear with antlers? No, I've only seen a couple on trail Kim, But bears don't have antlers. And this is just the truth of it. A hundred pound bear has this has a lot of fairly similar to characteristics as a four hundred pound bear, and that again, we're

gonna get into the nuances to disprove that. But I mean, if you were to see a hundred pound bear on a hillside five yards away, you could be deceived into thinking that that was a big one because of what we're gonna talk about scale. But what what we're looking at is we're fine, We're we're we're nitpicking the nuanced features of a bear to try to understand what makes a trophy bear. And we're gonna use that term. Let's let's let's let's not use the term trophy. Let's use

the term mature, mature male. That's what we're after inside a bear hunting. The target animal and almost any situation is going to be an older class, mature male animal. That's what we're after. Okay, traditional methods, what would you say, Ryan? Are the traditional statements that people use to describe big males. I'd say the most notorious would be small ears yep, creased head yep, um, you know, bigger risk pads for sure.

Probably the small ear myth. Yeah, that's that's what you hear people say all the time, Like you could google search small eared bear and it would be there being articles all over the place. But let's go ahead and just jump right into this. Is that I have seen you have seen times when that didn't characterize the characterizing

older mature male at all. Um. Definitely, the classic big bore is gonna look like he has small ears that are on the side of his head, you know, because his skulls so big, head so big that it's like those ears as he gets older just kind of moves down his head. But I've also killed some whop or bears that to me had mickey mouse ears. For instance, the bear I killed this year in Oklahoma, I called him Batman because of how big his ears were. He

had these big, curled ears. I have also found that bears have different shapes and looks based upon what part of the country they're in. I mean, I've never seen in Arkansas, correct me if you think I'm wrong. I personally have never hunted a really big giant bear in Arkansas or Oklahoma that I would have categorized as having

small ears. Would you have, no, You know, I think there's almost to me a difference and the way they look in the Washingtaws here and you know, mid Arkansas compared to the Yeah, it seems like they've got distinguished facial features. Maybe even hide is a little different. Yeah. Well, then there are two separate populations. I mean they really are.

In Arkansas, we've got basically to what they call ala Patrick populations of bears, which means they're kind of independent of one another based upon some geographic and man made barriers of the Arkansas River which is not man made to Kolbe, but the Interstate forty which runs by the Arkansas River is man made, so that it separates these two populations. And very few bear bears are crossing over to breed into these different places, and so there's even

slight differences in between ninety miles. You know. Um, there's some generalizations like for instance, um, well these aren't generalizations, these are true. Uh. Newfoundland is known for having big skulled bears. Uh. Prince of Wales Island is known for having large sculled bears. There's other places that are known for not having big skulld bears. But you still might have a big bear that is huge body wise, but his skull would be smaller. Um. There are definitely different

characteristics of bears, just like white tails. I mean, you have some places where white tails are gonna have express this big, massive, heavy horn deer, like Canada, and they have other places where they're not as much. UM. That being said, bears are not affected by the um is it Bergman's law that states that the further you get away from the equator, the larger body sized mammals are to retain heat. That's why Canadian white tails are bigger

than white tails. In the Florida Keys bears are exempt from that law that because they hibernate during the winter, they technically don't hibernate, they go into state of torpor, but they they are exempt from that law because they are not enduring the cold temperatures, just taking it right in the face like all these other animals. So bears in Florida, bears in Arkansas, bears in Oklahoma, bears in North Carolina could be as big or even bigger than

Canadian bears. Okay, let's just separate that out. There's just some bared knowledge, bare nerd technoledge. I wish we had the buddy size of the Carolina bears. That's amazing, no doubt. I mean, we've got big bears, but they've got some monsters. They do they do. Some of the biggest bears in the world are on the Eastern Coast. Some of the biggest skull bears in the world, though, are also in Pennsylvania. Some of the top five bears skulls in the world

have come come out of Pennsylvania. And part of that probably has to do with their age structure, because they've got a lot of older bears because they don't hunt over bait or with hounds. They're just spotting stock or drive hunting these bears, so they're really not taken out a big percentage of their bears every year. But so, okay, we've established that there are bears in different places are

going to be different, They're gonna look different. Um, we've established that ears and a crease on the head are sometimes that's what somebody might say small ears and a crease on the head. That's the only bear you shoot well, if that had been the way that I judged bears my whole life, i'd have very few bears. A lot of the big bears that I've killed. As a matter of fact, the only Boone and Crockett bear that I have ever killed, Ryan, I would say, didn't have either.

One of those didn't have a crease on his head, and I would say he had big ears. Um and well, I don't want to get into body weight yet, but let's just talk about those two things. Um. My good buddy Heath Martin, expert bear hunter here in Arkansas, has a story of going to Canada and shooting a color face bear that had, I mean just a ripple crease down its forehead. They were hunting the big color phase mail. This color phase bear comes in. They think it's the

big male, has a big crease. He shoots it and it's a sal Sal with a crease. And I've been noticing that more and more. The more I see bears, the more I'm like, man, sALS will have a crease on their head too. Have you have you seen that before? Ryan? Not so much here in Arkansas probably no. Uh, I've seen some big sales. I think a lot of The determining factor on the sales is it seems like they're muzzle wants to blend in even where they have the

blonde brows. Have you noticed that? And probably the total length of the bear. The boars will always have lankier, longer bodies versus a sale. They're more compact. Yes, yes, I've heard people describe it that a sal is pear shaped like a narrow front end, big back end. Uh. So, let's see where do I want to go? There's so many different places we could go here. Let's go Let's go ahead and just describe the characteristics of older mature

mail as we would just say it now. We're not saying that ears increase are not indicators of an older mature mail. For instance, one of the first years I spring bear hunted, we went to Alberta. We killed six poping young bears in five days in our camp. One of those bears I would have considered as a traditional style big older male who's straight up had small ears, straight up had ears on the side of his head, straight up had a crease. One of of six. Well,

I mean I said we killed six bears. The bears that the two bears that I killed which were nineteen inch but nineteen inch plus bears, which are that's a big bear, well above the pope and young minimum Um probably weighed in the three hundred three fifty pound range in the spring, which is a big bear. These are big bears. They all had what I would describe as mickey mouse ears, and they were tall and looked like

race horses. Okay, um, they but the the defining features of them that made me know that they were older mature males was that they were tall, they were very tall, and that they were long, and that they had their front legs the front leg of a boar. A big boar, he's gonna have like stove pipe, lay eggs like a bulldog, Like a bulldog, big ankles, and big pads, as in contrast to a sow, which is gonna have thinner legs, thinner ankles, smaller pads. To me, almost every big bear

I've ever killed ryan I have noticed his feet. I mean, like, if you were to show and I'd almost go to that more than the head. Like I see some pictures of sALS and get trail camera pictures of sALS, and I was like, if you just showed me the head of that bear, I couldn't tell you. I mean, I would assume it would just be a big boar, But to be a sal I would almost rather look at

the bear's feet than anything. It seems like the back feet also want to sail as not as long as a boar's you know, in length, the pads just don't. A sal's a lot shorter. Yeah. So when I when I'm looking at a boar or they're looking to determine if a boar as trophy size, looking at his feet, looking at his front shoulders, looking at his height, that's that is a massive factor. And when you're hitting over bait,

typically you've got a fifty five gallon drum. This this rule could be applied anywhere on the earth where there's black bears, which early in North America. But a bear that is as tall as a thirty six inch tall drum, if his shoulders, not his hairline, but his actual shoulders come up to the top of that barrel, that's a that's a big bear, is it not? Run? Yeah? Usually shooter. Yeah, I mean, you just don't see an immature bear or even a a salve that's gonna be as tall as

a barrel. Do you every once in a while, like the say, the sal I had trouble with in Canada, was it two years ago? You know, my first glance of that, I thought, boy, there's a shooter. And she was probably three hundred maybe bear, but big head, she just short. Yeah, I mean that would have been a tough one. Yeah. Yeah, she had a cup with her though she did. That's probably the only reason you knew it wasn't a born Yeah. I mean you might have

figured it out after a while. Yeah, it takes you know, if you studied it for a minute or two, you could probably do you think she was truly as tall as a barrel like her shoulder, I don't know barrel. There was a barrel there, but it was laying down, you know, it was chained a tree. But it was

a tall bear. Yeah, it was so. Yeah, that's a tricky one because inside the barre world there's different variants of height and well there's different there's all these different shapes like you could here in Arkansas have a sal bear that way hundred and eighty five pounds and she might be eighteen years old and be fully mature, and maybe she weighs a hundred pounds. Heath Martin four or

five years ago shot a bear here in Arkansas. Turned out it was a soal weighed three hundred and forty pounds on scale in the fall, And there's just all this variation, just like in humans that ere a bit. Nope, she didn't. She was a big dry sow and uh, she didn't have a cub with her. I mean, they've been getting pictures of this bear and uh, and she was a prime animal to take out older female and but it was just a big bear and uh, and he kind of thought maybe it was a sal but

it was just you know, he took her. Um weighed three pounds on a scale. That being said, there's all this variation, So you can't just always say that a sow is just gonna be a whole lot smaller, because you could very well have a older age class male board that weighed three and forty pounds. And I'd take that bear anywhere in the world. I really would. If I went to Canada. I mean, most most of the time,

I'm gonna shoot that animal. Um so the boars, but the one place, and and your deal would be an exception, I would say, I would say the one place that you could almost always tell a boar is his height and lengthy. I mean, you're just never gonna have a sou bear that is just this freight train long, tall, big animal. You're just not gonna see it. And the

first time bear hunter might not distinguish that. You know, yes, the more time you've spent bear hunting and get to see tens upon hundreds of bears, it'll be easier for a guy. And so that goes to the second thing here we want to talk about is determining the sex of a bear. When I was in Saskatchewan last year, we watched bears for eight hours a day for five days. We were just watching bears like crazy, and I realized that these older seals were sometimes hard to distinguish from boars.

The first thing I looked at, though, was ankle size and pad size. Second, it was the first thing. The second thing once they came in is some And the reason I'm saying this is these seals were really mature, Like I mean, you totally would have said that these cells had small ears down the side of their head. I mean really they were like like if you had just taken a picture, I think you could have almost

convinced anyone that it was a mature male. So this animals coming in, there's not really anything to scale the bear by trying to determine is this is this a nice male? Because in the spring, the males are smaller I mean not physical, not the bone structure obviously, but I mean they're they're less weight. They've been a then for six months, they're thinner, So in the spring a male and a female might be harder to distinguish. And

the second thing I look for was a penal sheath. Yeah, Like I mean, a boar is gonna have these these sheath hairs that hang down and they're four or five inches long, sometimes hanging down right in the middle of the belly. You can't see there. You can't see the sheath. Really, it's not like something big hanging down, you know, but you can see those sheath hairs hanging down. And when you see that, all of a sudden, part of your

equation is solved. This is a male. I mean, that's the first thing that I do anytime i'm bear hunt anywhere, is that a boar or sow and that that sal's gonna be pear shaped, she's gonna be smaller. She's gonna be shorter, she's gonna have thinner ankles, she's gonna have

smaller pads, she's gonna have a more feminine face. And that's kind of a hard thing to describe, but just like in a dog, like a big old male, right while there's gonna have this boxy, beefy nose and head and a female, a sow bear kind of has a more feminine feel to the face and head most of the time. Agree with that, Ryan, I agree. You agree with that, Kolbe. From what I've seen, I think you're older bears too, And you know this works with sales. Also is the scruff the beard under the chin. As

a bear gets older, it seems to have that little guiltee. Yeah, you see that with Arkansas bears sometimes, Yeah, kind of that do lap like kind of yeah, like you got going on? Yeah, yeah, kind of like me now that it is their behavior change, like the way they come in on a date, the salve versus the boar. That's a that's a good one. Yes, I mean I have seen. I wrote an article and this last issue Bear Any Magazine that was called five thoughts on judging Black Bear.

One thing that I have noticed is that the mature boar that's coming into a bait site, and we're talking about a bait site here, you can't always predict what he's gonna do. You can't just say, well, the mature board is gonna just barrel in and run everything off the barrel, or you can't say, the mature boar is gonna be the one that's hanging back, and it's really cautious. You don't know what they're gonna do. But one thing I have noticed is that they almost always act different

than every animal at debate site. That's not gonna play true in every situation. But either he's gonna be like the bull of the woods and it's just gonna roll in there, and you're just gonna be like that animal is the king. I would use my example of when I shot that color face bear in Canada that came in and touched into my earraw. He was the boss of those woods and he just barreled in there and was the king. The next well, in the same in the same hunt, a bear that was actually bigger than

him was the most timid bear. You remember the one I missed, right, man, He just tiptoed around, and he was a monster bear. So those two mature animals, they acted different than every other, and all the other ones just kind of came in, I mean, like a sal And this is why I don't understand even a mature salve that's been around the planet and knows the system, she might just walk in and just go right over to the bait and just start eating. You know, She's

So they're just gonna act different. So you can't say that they're always gonna be dominant. You can't say that they're always gonna be super skittish. It could be either one. But when I see a bear that is acting different than all the other bears that I'm saying, that's what I'm like, he's special. I mean like he's he's probably a target animal. Would you agree with that? Yeah, it seems like you know, they're the ones that's gonna sit out there on their button sixty yards from the bait

and check the wind. That's these Arkansas bears for sure. Yeah. Or he could be the one that you know, you could have other bears on the bat and all of a sudden they wolf and take off running and you see one coming, you know that's going to be more mature bear, right. I mean, there's no way that that bear I got last year in Minute Toba didn't smell us. He just didn't care, That's right. He came right under our stand and just ran everything off, and he he

didn't care. It's a different ball game, I think, and Canadian provinces where they don't get pressured as like we do. You know down here, I think Saskatch, Like when we're at Saskatchewan. I mean, then bears don't know you from any other animal. They don't have any fear. Then they're not trying to be dangerous. They're curious. But down here the bear usually don't do that unless it's them like white tails down here. Yeah, yeah, there's there's spooky. They're skittish.

I think Canada they're typically less skinniesh There's an inverse relationship between the amount of exposure to humans and there fear of humans. So in places where they never encounter humans, there's less fear. In places where they encounter humans all the time, there's more fear. It seems like I would be the opposite. You'd think they just get used to you down here, and so they would be different, but

it's it's inverse. Yeah, So that's something that's confusing to people because most people don't have the view of bears like somebody would have that has hunted down here, but it's also hunted a lot up there. So a lot of guys, you know, you write an article about using sent control for bears, and the guys in Canada are like you, guys, don't know what you're talking about. Sin control doesn't mean a thing. And I'll be honest with you.

In Canada, I believe sent control basically means nothing. Now, if I had the choice of being clean and having the wind in my favor, for sure, you're better off if they don't know you're there. But every big bear I've ever killed Canada knew I was there and didn't care. But in Arkansas, and Ryan, you're an expert here in Arkansas at pulling these big bears out of the out of the haystack. You gotta do a lot of things

right down here to kill big bear. I think I've been fortunate though, with locations being you know, I've been lucky to have places where bears already living, you know, uh, they don't have to travel far to get to me. I'm actually in places that have water, have shade, they're

thick and don't have any human disturbance. So that's probably been my key, you know, to harvesting being picky on you're also you're I mean, most of these big bears that you've killed, if they would have straight up smelled you, they wouldn't come in during daylight. I wouldn't think so very few that's spend. What I've seen here in Arkansas is that if you were hunting, let's say eight years hunting big bears, maybe one maybe two of those eight years, you would get lucky and if a bear knew you

were there, he would come in anyway. I keep going back to my friend Heath Martin, who's a great bear hunter in Arkansas. He killed a big bear, one of his biggest bears ever, Boot and Crock a bear, uh several years ago, and that bear knew they were there. It had just set out there for a long time winding them, and it just kind of about dark. It just it's like, well, I'm just gonna ease in there, and that bear just eased in. I would look up at him and he kills a bear that's an exception.

Most of the time you're not gonna kill that animal. But again two and eight or two and ten, you're gonna if a bear knows you're there. Now, what you've been able to do is you know these locations, well, you're hunting, these stands, you're getting up and so these bears you're killing just don't know you're there. Got good setups, You're in places where the bears want to be. I don't mess around in the woods either. You know, when I go in and bait, I'm not walking across the fence.

I'm not walking out bear trails. You know. I'll go in, bait quick, get out, you know. And I think a lot of people too, are hanging their stands or two days before season. I do that in summer. You know, some of these older bears will come in and before they get to the bait, they want to send check that tree that has stand in it to see if you've climbed it. So and over the years it's kind of crazy. I've piled dead brush around the actual tree. I have a stand in kind of as as a barrier.

I mean, a bear could go through it, and but it looks like a rat's nest around the base of this tree. They can't get to that tree and really sent check whether I've climbed up not. Yeah, yeah, but I'm a little crazy. But just man, you've got every right to be crazy because, like I said, and a couple of other podcasts, I think you've killed You've killed a ton of big bears in Arkansas seem to keep pulling them out. What would you say if you were

judging bears in Arkansas? What are you looking for? We're hunting bar bears in the fall, which we've We've also said there's a difference between judging spring bears up north or in Montana versus hunting a fall bear here in Arkansas. And I mean, and we're when we're hunting around here, we're really after an older age classman. What would what were the defining characteristics? You know, they don't have thick fur up in that time of the year, you know,

late summer, but you know frame length. Uh, you know, like I said, you want to look at their pads, the risks characteristics as how they respond a lot of times to the bait. But I think you'll you'll know, I mean, especially if if a person is running trail cams,

which you know, I guess everybody does. Uh. You'll give you a general idea on what to look for distinct markings, maybe a crest on the chest or a notched deer, you know, something that you have a target bear that you've evaluated on trail camera and then you just got to make sure that's the bear you're shooting and he's

coming in. Yeah. Yeah. Well, for these big, big fall bears that we're hunting here in Arkansas, a lot of times what we're looking for is weight, you know, I mean, that's what you're looking for in these big bears here are gonna have not always but sometimes sagging bellies, sometimes flat bellies, but they're gonna not have a lot of air in between the ground and their belly. They're gonna be tall. They're gonna look like an angus bull. I mean, but even even in big bears, right, if you have

two five pound bears, they look different. Like you could have a short, fat bear that was a little bit shorter squatti or fatter, or you could have a huge frame bear like Batman who squared eight foot and was seven ft something from nose to tail, I mean, he was he had a frame man um, but you could also have a five hundred pound bear like rock slide the spear that they've gotten out in the office. He was only six ft six from nose to tail really, so I mean he was six inches shorter from those

to tail. But I believe that he would have weighed in the same class as that other killed him late in the year or two, probably when he had been feeding on masts, so he was blown up from way

I think on a baited hunt. Also, you could say if you've been baiting for a month and you've got a mature bear that's been eating doughnuts taken in thousands and thousands of calories for a month, versus a bear that just showed up four days before season, which is gonna be lank here may have a big head, be a boone and crocking, but he won't have the belly sake, you know, as the one that's been camped out there

for a month. Well, the largest skull bear that I've ever taken was a boar bear that only weigh three or sixty pounds. Yeah, the bear that I killed this year wade five dred and fifty pounds and had a smaller skull than a three and or sixty pound bear. That's a good segue into the different ways different people in the country gauge the size of a bear. There's three ways pretty much. The people gauge bear skull size, weight, and square all very very different. You it's hard to

determine skull size by any characteristic. I mean, like, I keep going back to this bear. Five fifty pound bear that killed this year in Oklahoma is going to score on the high nineteens. Yeah, he's not gonna make twenty. The biggest bear I've killed was over five hundred and

it was only nineteen. The biggest weight bear, the bigges bear, weighed over five hundred pounds and had under a twenty skull that I killed a four four or forty bear that actually made booner twenty five eighths sixteens excuse me six. So that's a great example I want people to hear that is that body weight has very little to do with skull size. The biggest skulled bear that I've ever taken was a six year old bear. My big bear

was six years older. The no name six years old. Um. The this bear right here, this rock slide bear that I believe Wade five hundred pounds um he was nine years old. Now in in Batman, the five fifty pound bear this year, that's not gonna score twenty inches, that's right there, Ryan, We hadn't tooth aged him, but I would be shocked if that bear wasn't over ten years old. What did he score? Well, I've green scored him under twenty I mean like nineteen and fourteen, sixteens, I mean

just right there. You know, he green scored right at twenty, I mean twenty and zero sixteen. Well, he had the body to make up for it. Yeah. And and see that's the thing. And as we're talking about trophy side, you know, judging the sparits, I could care less with that bear scored twenty. It would have been cool if he'd scored one. I mean I would have been thrilled. But in my mind, and for the way we're hunting down here, Ryan, we're just after we're after a big, older,

heavy bear. On top of that, you had history with him for what three four years? Yeah, about five years? We had it probably for five years, and he was one of the first bears that was over there. You know, he had been tagged at some time in his life, but was missing the tags. You know, he had holes in his ears and that's been really found. That, didn't you. Yeah, that had been interesting to little no no more about his story. Yeah, he had a hole in his ear, Kobe,

I wouldn't have never known it. Ron was just looking at the bear and he's, okay, this thing has been tagged. There was just a perfect hole. Rutting Zeer Tagger pulled out the game of fish, asked me if he had a lip tattoo. And I could not discern a lip tattoo. No, I look myself, didn't didn't see anything. Yeah, but there's another another bear that's out there that Oh go ahead, go ahead, it's in the video. Man, I'm busted now,

go ahead. Yeah. The other bear has two tags, right, yeah, Yet we got the same history with the yellow Tag and Brian without my influence, was yellow Tag bigger than Batman? I think so. I'd say at least pounds probably, yeah, at least forty pounds yeah, probably six pound bear for real. I mean, when I saw Batman coming in, I recognized that it was Batman. My heart kind of went, oh, man, it's not Yellow Tag, which is ridiculous. Because this is a but that just shows you how big the other

bear was. He he was visibly fatter and heavier, how much how much he made you think he was a hundred pounds more. And that's the thing that really we're not I don't think we're even qualified to yes, because if you just looked at like body volume and mass, me and Dad believed that he weighed a hundred more pounds.

But it could be scale though, because maybe Batman had a frame like a bull elk, and maybe Yellow Tag was just a little bit more compact, so he just looked fatter, So maybe he was the same weight, but just kind of like a heavy guy that a short, fat guy that weighs a hundred ninety pounds versus a tall, skinny guy that weighs a hundred pounds, you know what I'm saying. Um, So, I don't know, but what we're looking for in Arkansas is these big, heavy bears. That's

what we're after. Um, but let's let's go to a spotting stock hunt out west Man. You're not gonna kill a five pound spring black bear in Montana. You're probably not gonna kill a five pound bear in Montana. Ever. Uh, those bears out western arid regions with less nutrients, they're just not as big. That being said, you can still kill a boone and crocket bear. You could still kill a bear with a great big frame. But what I have this goes back to on a spot stock hunt,

when you're judging a bear from a long distance. You're not getting to watch this bear from traill camera. You have no experience with this bear. You're looking for. You're looking for all these characteristics, you know, big front shoulders, stove pipe legs, big pads, um, flat belly. Typically a big spring bear is gonna have a flat barrel belly, where a sow is gonna have more of a pear shaped like an angled belly that drops down from a smaller chest down into a bigger butt. Okay, a boar

is often gonna look like a big bull. You know. A good way, a good practice test for somebody that's trying to understand how to judge bears. I would say, when you're driving past cattle fields. Now we're in a part of the world we have a lot of cattle. Your eyes scan a whole pasture of cattle, and you can immediately pick out the bull based upon his length and just his square, boxy shape. It's almost like that with bears. Would you agree he's a good analogy. But

you could tell. I mean, like you could teach your five year old son what the bull is not just by looking at his gear. It's rigging, as James Lawrence says, uh but uh, but you're just his body shape, you know. I mean you can teach your kids to do that. It's almost like the same thing. And it's much easier to determine the trophy class of a bear if it's older. Like when you get a juvenile male and a juvenile female,

that's a hard one to determine, Am I right? I mean that's that's like splitting hairs sometimes, Like if you got a hundred and eighty pound bear out there on the side of the mountain, You're like, is that a male or female? Boy? Would be hard to tell. When you really can tell the difference is is just when

you get a big, guerrilla like black bear. Like when we were in Montana two years ago, we did see two big boards that like a thousand yards and they were trailing a sow, And I mean almost with your naked eye, you could tell that the animal behind that was trailing this animal. It was either a cub that was leading in a big fat south following a cub, or it was a sow with a big, heavy boar fall. And so it's like when you put the scope up and you're like, that's not a cub, that's a board.

Like it was easy to tell that board kind of had a sway walk. I hear a lot of people talk about the way they walk, which that's a That is one of the factors. Before I forget it, though, let me say this, which is probably the most important factor in UH judging bears, is that you've got to use multiple factors to determine this bearer. You if you

use one thing, you'll mess up. And that was the whole point of this article that I wrote in the March April issue Barony magazine, is that if you just use ear size, you're gonna let a whole lot of big bears walk off that we're probably shoot your bears

if you just use um sagging belly. Like if you just say I'm not shooting a bear unless there's only eight inches of daylight between the ground and the bottom is belly, you might end up shooting a sow because you know, some of these sALS have pot bellies and are short, and if you don't understand scale, you might shoot her. So you gotta do multiple things. Look at his pads, look at his box, he head, look at

his length, look at his height. And when you get three two to three things that are pointing your two towards older mature mail, that's when I can say, Yep, that's an animal that I want to take. I think that's the best piece of advice that's ever been said about black bears. The pads on that bear you killed in Ontario, you remember them front pads, was that it was like it was like he was made to like swim like huge pads and some polar bear whatever or something. Yeah,

I do. I don't think I kill the bear with pads that big sense, I don't think so. I think, y'allow tech, it's probably God, you know what, the these these bears around here, I just don't see him. Even the big ones have feet like that. Though. It was like it was just yeah, it really was. It's almost like a grizzly bear. And that would be just like a human. Somebody might have big hands, somebody might have average sized hands. Okay, so we've talked about Uh wait, square,

let's talk about square real quick. Square is the most to me, like inaccurate way to judge bears between people, because everybody kind of does it different. You hear outfitters all the time talking about seven foot bears, and in my Canadian hunting career, which is not I've not been doing this for twenty years. Don't get me wrong, but I've been in quite a few bear camps the last six years. I have yet to see a seven foot square bear come out of Canada in a camp that

I have been in. And I have been in some camps with some fantastic bears that were killed. Um dog on it. I'm gonna have to recount what I just said. No, no, no, no. My big bear that weighed four and thirty five pounds from Ontario. Uh, I squared him after he was skin though in tan and he only squared six ft eight but green, I have a feeling he would have been pushing seven. Yeah, he would have had another four inches.

I think you would. I think you would. That's my point is is that everybody always says that, I mean, you'll hear outfitters and not to knock my my good outfitters. And I'm not knocking my good ones because the good ones are doing it right. But like everybody's like seven foot bear, seven footbear man, seven foot bears are hard to come by, and that's not the standard of what

is in my book a trophy quality animal. I mean, in my book, if I if I've learned this, if I see a bear that is six and a half foot square, and I'm not determining this in my mind before I shoot it, I've just learned when Clay Newcom sees a bear and shoots it a lot of times it's about six ft six, you know, I mean that's a big bear. Uh In. A six ft six bear might have a ton of weight on him. He might

be boot and crock an animal. Um, But anyway, square size is the distance between the base of the tail to the tip of the nose on a green hide, combined with the distance between claw to claw measurement. Then the average of those two numbers. Okay, Um, Lots of the Canadian bears I've killed have been in that six and a half to six ft eight range, And that's a monster bear, monster bear. A lot of guys say a six ft bear is a shooter bear. I mean that's kind of a number that's stunning around as a

nice six ftbear, you know. Um, you get into the five foot bears and you're you're you're you're looking at a smaller animal. Um, but so square weight, skull size spring bears are typically going to be lean lean. I mean, you might kill a whopper spring bear that weighs three pounds. Man. I hear it all the time on the phone. Rund guys call and they're asking me about spring bear hunting and they're like, you know what I mean, Like they kind of build up like they're they're willing to take

any you know. It's like I'd just like to kill a decent bear. You know, I'd probably even shoot a three hundred pound bear if I went up there. And when they say that, I realized they don't really know what they're talking about, because like they're like the minimum I would shoot would be about a three hundred pound bear, as if that were a small bear. But what I want to say to him is, man, three hund pounds

spring bear is a pretty big bear. He may look three hundred pounds when he's got four or five inches the hair, you know, winter coat on him. But once you get that hide off of him, there's not gonna be much fat, not in the spring. Yeah. Yeah, well and all these things do that Is it relevant to the region you're hunting? For sure? Yeah? For sure. I mean, but spring bears all, let's just say, all over Canada. I mean, no doubt every year there are outliers. There's

always outliers and anything. So you could kill a ring brothers five pounds. I never have done it. I've never seen it done in the camp that I've been in. The Biggest spring bears I've ever seen killed were probably something that you've killed Ryan, that weighed in the three to three fifty range. Biggest spring bears I've ever seen. I mean, I've never seen one any bigger than probably uh well, I'm I'm thinking of that bear you killed

in Saskatchewan two years ago. I mean, they just don't get that much bigger Jared Summers killed was Okay, that was a big one. That was Yeah, that was a nice bear, very nice bear. What would you say that having a way, man, I don't know. Probably in the threes, so you know, I think I remember you saying between three fifty and three seventy five or something, And I

mean that's a whopper spring bear. So point being, don't go to don't go into the spring really with weight as your way to qualify whether bears and shooter, You'll be disappointed. Um I would go into a spring hunt just looking for an older, mature male, you know. And so three things skull size, wade, square scus. Talk about skull size just a minute. We we've already touched on it.

You can't determine skull size by almost anything. Five hundred fifty pound bear that doesn't make Boone and Crockett, and the three hundred and sixty pound bear that does. Um, eighteen inches is the minimum for Pope and Young. So once I made a graph and put it in Bear Hunting magazine that did like a comparative scale between using Pope Young minimums for white tail, which people are really

familiar with. Like if you say hundred white tail, people are like, okay, I know what kind of deal that is. And then when you say hundred seventy inch white til, they go, oh, that's a big one. Um. So if eighteen inches was equivalent to a hundred twenty five inch white tail and twenty one inches was equivalent to a hundred and seventy inch white tail. A nineteen in bear would be equivalent to a hundred and forty two hundred

and fifty inch whitetail. So if you think of it like that, I mean a hundred not many people are gonna be passing a hundred forty hundred fifty inch white tails. Drop that down into bears and you see that a nineteen inch bear is a nice animal. Um. I mean, like you said, you've killed five hundred pound bears that scored in the nineteens, as have I. Uh, Kobe, what did your bear score in the fall in Manitoba? We

refted out of eighteen and something. I think. Okay, So Colby killed a bear that was in the three or fifty pound range in the fall. In the spring, that bear would have weighed under three and pounds most likely, so, I mean, but by August and put on some weight was probably the three fifty pound ran three and fifty pound range. Um. I actually thought the bear would probably have scored more. To me, it looked like it would be. I I probably would have said, man, that's got to

be a nineteen inch square. But it scored just over the pope young minimum. Yeah. I think Corey said that his bears don't typically have a larger skull in that in that area. I mean like they have good schools, but compared to their body weight, like that ratio is big. They do, and they do have some big body bears up there in the fall. I mean they're killing some four pound bears Saskatchewan with it two years ago. Head looked big, but once we got the hide off of it,

he didn't have a occipital protruded back. It's like it was just gone. Man, I'll never forget that one, because that taught me a lot. Ryan, when I recovered that bear, I was with you when you we recovered the bear. The bear had canines that were war I mean, it had every indication of it being an older male. I mean an old warrior, big head, big feet, big body, I mean, square head. And I told Ryan, I said, I'll bet you my tri uck that that bear scores

over twenty Do you remember me saying that. I mean, it was like that bear is going to score over twenty inches. And when we got back and I brought my calipers and we scored your bear and my bear Ryan, my color bear was a much It was a lesser bear, I mean big time, body, size, length, everything, but that color bear had a bigger skull than yours. And and it was because you know, you measure bear skull based on the length and the width of the dried skull.

And uh, the occipital bone is this wing bone that sticks off the back of the skull. In Ryan's bear, it was just like flat back there. And most of these bears that score good have this big wing that flows off the back like a pterodactyl head or you know how many tarodactyls if you killed and I mean you scared to score those, Yeah, that's a good way. I mean it's yeah, it's it's just like point off the back of the head. So that's a good example. So bear skulls are all over the place. A lot

of it all has to do with genetics. I've asked some of the best bear biologists in the country their thoughts on whether a bear skull actually grows over time, and the best answer there, to my knowledge, there's been no real scientific studies because does a ten year old bear like batman, would he have kept growing? Let's just say he's ten years old. If I had killed him when he was twenty years old, would he have scored more?

Here's my philosophy, maybe a little bit. I think these older bears add some bone mass to to to the skull. But I do not believe that he would have ever been a twenty one in bear. I just don't think he was gonna add an inch. It seems like they get them little calcified growths. You know a lot of

these little ridges. And have you noticed that an older air is gonna have a lot of calcification on the skull where where a young bear is just smooth like butter, just smooth all over the skull, old bear is gonna have ridges and fissures and little bumps. And that's where I think that they might add some bone mass that

may account for some growth. But I keep going back to my the one Boone and crocketbear I've ever killed that had a he was six years old and had a twenty and eight sixteenth centch skull like he he He may have been Boone and Crockett when he was four years old, but he had a smooth skull. I mean,

maybe he would have grown a litit over time. But it's genetics, just like, is a seventeen year old boy all right, let's say eighteen nineteen year old boy, he's got the frame that he's gonna carry his whole life. He's not growing still, you know. So I've never really been able to find a real concrete scientific answer about that because they've just never is not something that they're studying, Uh, that I found yet. Maybe somebody's got a better answer. But I'd like to find a bear that had a

a skull like Brent Reeves has Scott's Man. Brent Reeves, Yeah, I agree, Brent would be like, uh, he would be like one of those like big wristed, big hand meaty kind of squatty bears. Yeah. He's even got the small ears too. He's got small ears. Yeah. Oh, Brent Reeves. I'm glad he's not here right now. Me too. Brent Reeves never listens to the Bear Honey Magazine podcast. That joker, Brent. When you hear this text me, Oh okay, guys, difference

between spring and spring and fall scale. Let's hit one more thing. Scale is everything. Guys make this mistake all the time, is that they see a bear, they shoot it. They go up to it. They think it's a big bear, but it's a small bear. Scale So if you're spotting style hunting out out in Montana, you need to have a general understanding of the plants around that. And I mean like, when I was in Montana, I knew that there were these certain bushes they were about thirty inches tall.

And if I was looking at the bear a thousand yards away and those bushes were everywhere, you know, and he was walking through that, I was like, dang, his shoulders are way up above those bushes, or if they were below it. And man, if that bear was just out on a barren hillside, it would have been almost impossible quickly to determine. But so you gotta have scale. So if you're hunting over a bait site, you've got

to understand what size barrels there are. I've got a story when I was in Saskatchewan the first year, I had in my mind that you could you would shoot a bear if his if he was as tall as the barrel. That was the one factor that I was looking for. Well, a bear came in the first day that was as tall as a barrel. I shot him and it was a lesser bear, and it was because the barrel had been dug into the ground by the

bears digging grease out from underneath it. So the barrel was sitting in a six inch hole, and so this average bear looked like a bear that was big. And that goes back to you gotta have more than one factor, but you gotta understand scale. So whether it's trees, whether it's bushes, whether it's a bait barrel, whether it's a mark on a tree that indicates you know, a thirty six inch tall bear, you gotta have scale because a hundred pound bear walking through the woods can look real

similar to a two fifty pound bear. It's all about scale. We talked about, Uh, Paul's to me, the biggest thing of a of a big boar is height. I can't get away from that height and Paul shape. That's the way I personally determined. There's gonna be things that different people probably pick up on. Uh. We talked about determining the sex of bears, which is an important part, and we talked about the they're not necessarily myths, but they're not the whole truth. So small ears is not a myth.

A crease on the head is not a myth when you're determining a big bear, but it's not the whole story. If that's all, you know, you're gonna make a mistake a few times out of ten, you know. And uh again. As we close down the podcast, I go back to this thing about we're not just talking about trophy hunting from an aspect of we just want to bring home the biggest animal possible. Trophy hunting is pretty cool because we're after older mature males. That's the best thing to

take out of the population. It's the best thing for the population to extract older mature males that have already contributed to the gene pool. And trophy hunting, my friends, is actually what saved North American big game by taking the emphasis off the young and the females and putting it on the older mature males. So man, I will take zero flat from anyone on the planet saying that we're trophy hunters because we want to kill big bears

and not little ones. Who is the conservation hero my brothers, the guy that shoots the first juvenile bear to the barrel and post a picture on Facebook and brags about how he's not a trophy hunter, and he's extracted this animal out of the population before it could contribute to the gene pool or the brethren like in this room. Wait, but the big ones take out the big, older mature male, it's already contributed to the gene pool, and we hang

his high on our walls. We eat his flesh, and we revel in the glory that he had while he was on the earth for such a long time because he was an older butture male. Are you with me? Yeah? Uh? Is it not true though? Yeah? I mean guys that like sometimes people feel like they there's some honor in shooting smaller animals and claiming not to be a trophy hunter and get it. Like, like trophy hunting as it's

understood in the general hunting populace, it's bad. I mean, like somebody that would, for just ego purposes, want to shoot a big bear. I mean, do I want to shoot a big bear? Yes, sir, I do. Why because I like big bear bear hides on my wall. I like more bear meat rather than less bear meat. But I also understand the macro goals of bear hunting, and it is better to take out an older mature male

than it is to take out a juvenile female. You've got your weekend warriors though that you know, don't bear hunt much, and they're happy just to kill a bear and there's nothing wrong with them. And I don't want to you. I appreciate you saying that because I don't want to trash that guy, which I'm not. But where are we going with that? I want to kill the next hundred pound bears. There's a fine lote. Let me. Like with youth hunters or everybody does have to evaluate

their opportunity. And I'll be the first to say that for the I mean, I have opportunity to hunt bears, and so I would hope that I'm select. But you may go on one bear hunt in your life and on the final day of the hunt of juvenile bear comes in shoot it. So I really I appreciate you saying that, right, because I don't want to have an elitist mentality. But I also don't want to give somebody

too much credit. Who is dogging somebody that kills a bunch of big bears because they don't have that opportunity. Is that is that fair? Yeah? Yeah? But well, I mean starting out, we killed smaller bears and after so many years, you don't want to kill, you know, a smaller bear. Just just like deer hunting. I guess here guys looking for that next big deer and you don't. You don't want to make the standards so high that

you take the joy and fun out of hunting. I mean, like, if you don't have big bears, then there's no sense and setting your goals that high. I mean really here in Arkansas, I mean there are places where you're just not gonna kill a big bear. So if you're trying to kill five hundred pound bear, you're just not everyone kill one. So I mean, you know, put that standard down. Laura, Man,

that's cool. You go to Canada on a once in a lifetime trip, Uh, you you just want to evaluate the situation and not kill a hunter pound bear on the first day, when if you'd wait until day three, you could have taken a a nicer, older, mature male. Yeah. I mean, that's that's kind of where I fit inside of it. When I take my kids hunting, it's different

when I take I mean everything, everything is different. But I feel like bear hunters need to have the knowledge in the ability to articulate even what I just said about older mature males and not being picked on by people who say you're a trophy hunter because you kill big animals. I mean, I won't take it for a second. Um so that there's this, But at the same time, hunting is about enjoyment. It is about I mean, a

young bear. It's arguable, Batman, his meat tastes incredible, but it's arguable that a young bear might taste better than an old bear. Not always the case, but could be. So. I mean, maybe your goals are different. The main thing is,

whatever your goal is, just stick to it. The guy that I kind of, you know that I feel the liberty to rib would be the guy that claims to be wanting to wait for an older bear but then just shoots one the first day just because he's impatient, when he had all this opportunity for another one, you know. But anyway, I don't want to I don't want to hit on anybody. But these things are true that we say. Do you guys agree? Sir? What closing comments flint face Grib?

I don't know, man, you've kind of covered everything. We've covered it. Kobe. Well, I was just thinking about whenever I got the bear last year and man, it's old. But how we couldn't measure his height because the barrel was on the side, And so the thing we used was to, uh, it's like, will he fit in the barrel? No, he's a good one. You know that's true. Yeah, yeah, I've heard it. Fitter told me that as as he said, one thing he used to tell his clients was would

that bear fit into a gallon drum? I've used that analogy myself while bear has been on the site. Yeah, looking, man, if I pop the top off that barrel with that bear fit in there, yeah, and a and a bear over three hundred pounds, it's gonna you're gonna be like, man, if you fit, he'd barely fit, right, I mean, if if it's just like for sure, yeah, it's probably under

a three inner pound bear. But now, every part of the country is different, everybody has different standards, and and again, the hunt is all about the experience and the adventure and the goals that you've set for yourself. So but these, hey, guys, these principles will help somebody judge bear and uh, hey, awesome, this is this has been I think a lot of in formation inside of this podcast, and thank you guys

for being here, and thank you Ryan, appreciate it coming up. Man, Kobe, you were here and we'll be here when this podcast is over, so you didn't really have to go anywhere, but thanks for being here at Kolby. All right, Keep the wild places wild because that's where the bears live.