Judging Black Bears for Dummies

American wilderness. We'll talk about tactics, gear conservation who will also bring you into some of the wildest country on the planet Chasing the Battery. Thanks for checking out the Bear Hunting Magazine podcast. I want to relay some news to you guys that is very much so related to the podcast. If you remember, several weeks ago, on episode twenty one, we interviewed a man named or A Lee Province. It was the title of the episode was Old Mountain

Hunter or Lee Province. We received word this week that Mr Or passed away on April fourth. It was really a shock because we were just at his house. He was full of life, years old, was in great mental health, and just we had an incredible conversation with him that I'm so so glad that we were able to record, and we were grieved to hear the news. But I'll tell you what, Mr Or lived a heck of a life and he was he maintained his health throughout his

life and passed away at the age of nine. And I'm just so grateful that we were able to record some some of his oral history just as we sat down with him and talked, and so I wanted to I wanted to let you guys know that, and just the Province family, all the Bear Hunting magazine folks, and

our our deepest condolences to you. But also we just want to celebrate the life of an old mountain hunter who he wasn't just a mountain hunter or to his family, was known as an incredible patriarch, a man of great faith, a leader, a man who maintained a strong biblical value system his entire life and it never swayed. And that's that's the kind of man that I like to tip my hat too. And so hey, our condolences to the

Province family onto this episode. This episode is the third in our series about all things related to Spring Bear Hunter. We wanted to bring some really relevant content. The first was about spring bear hunting for Dummies, where we just went through the ins and outs of wind, where, how and why spring bear hunting. The second was about shot placement. And this episode is about judging bears. Black bears are

some of the most difficult animals to judge. We're gonna go through multiple, multiple things and have a really in depth conversation, not just about stuff that we've searched on the internet, but these are things that we have seen in the field that we that I use, that Ryan Grab uses to to truly judge bear. And honestly, I've seen a lot of information online and in different places that I just I don't think it's applicable everywhere, and

some of it just isn't isn't always dependable. So we we give some insight into judging bears that I think will be really good. I want to bring up one more thing today. We released a video called Alaska Wild on the Bear Hunting Magazine YouTube channel. It's a it's a brown bear hunt in Alaska where Billy Moles and his hunter take a massive bear that they predator called in It's incredible video. We even have some footage on there of a big nine and a half foot bear

breeding a soal incredible, incredible video. Go to our YouTube channel and check it out. While you're there, check out

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able to offer before. So check out the Bear Hunting Magazine T Spring account t Spring Store on our YouTube channel. When you check out Billy's video on our YouTube channel, use code b h M to get off all your Bare Hunting Magazine Tea Spring purchases through April. Let me say that again. Use code b h M at checkout on the Bare Hunting Magazine Tea Spring Store to get off all your purchases through April, and again you access

to t Spring Store through our YouTube channel. It'll be like right down below the YouTube channel you click on it all kind of awesome stuff. And trophy hunting, my friends, is actually what saved North American big game by taking the emphasis off the young and the females, 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, or the brethren like in this room, who wait for the big ones. Welcome to the Bear Hunting Magazine podcast. 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 mature male, or if it's a juvenile male. Basically judging bears just

like we would whitetails. Judging you judge a 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 Kobe. 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. Ryan's 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 bare big in this 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

when my Mama was still wifing 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, uh, you don't really even have a job title, do you know. It's just like now, Kobe. Kobe does all kind of stuff for me, Bear Tech, bear Tech. Koby is a bear hunting magazine, Bear Tech.

Mr can 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 jo 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 the 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 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. A mature male. That's what we're after. Inside of 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 risks 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 ear bear and it would be there'd 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, and 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. 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 right 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 Bergmann'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 body size of the Carolina bears. This gap. That's not 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 the 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 judge 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 phase 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 seems like they're muzzle wants to blend in even to 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 body 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 of five days. 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 look like

a 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 legs, 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 it, and I'd almost go to that more than the head. Like I see some pictures of sALS and get truil 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 sell as not as long as the boar's you know, in length, their paths just don't. Sal's a lot shorter. Yeah. So when I when I'm looking at a boar or looking to determine if a boar's 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 hunting 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. Was 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? Ruyan 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 at that, I thought, boy, there's a shooter. And she was probably three hundred maybe three pound 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. That's probably the only reason you knew it wasn't a born Yeah. I mean you might have figured

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 the tree. But it was a tall bear. Yeah,

it was. Sayah, that's a tricky one because inside the bar 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 weighed hundred and eighty five pounds and she might be eighteen years old and be fully mature, and maybe she weighs a hundred and eighty pounds. Heath Martin four or five years ago shot a bear here in Arkansas. Turned out it was a sal weighed three hundred and forty pounds on scale

in the fall. And there's just all this variation, just like in humans. Nope, she didn't she was a big dry sow in 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 just a big bear and uh. And he kind of thought maybe it was a sow, 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 in 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 sow 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 soals were sometimes hard to distinguish from boars.

The first thing I looked at, though, was ankle size and pad size. Second was the first thing. The second thing once they came in is some And the reason I'm saying this is these cells 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 this 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 in. 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 on bear hunting anywhere, is that a borrs sow and that that sal is 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 paths. She's gonna have a more feminine face. And it'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, You agree with that, Kolbe. From what I've seen, I think you're older bears too, And you know this works with sALS. Also is the scruff,

the beard under the chin. Now, as a bear gets older, it seems to have that little guilty Yeah. You see that with the Arkansas bears sometimes, yeah, kind of that do lap like kind of yeah, like you got going on? Yeah yeah yeah, kind like me. Now, that is their behavior change, like the way they come in on a date, the salve versus the board. 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 boar 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 phace 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 am 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 bat 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, 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 seeing, 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 bat and check the wind. Or that's these Arkansas bears for sure. 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 gonna be more mature bear, right, I mean, there's no way that that bear I got last year and minute Toba didn't smell us. He just didn't care. Yeah, 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. They're not trying to be dangerous. They're curious. But down here the bear usually don't do that unless it's a hind them, like white tails down here. Yeah, yeah, there's there're spooky, they're skittish. I think Canada they're typically less skittish. There's an inverse relationship between the amount of exposure to humans and their fear of humans. So in

places where they never encounter humans, there's less fear. Places where they encounter humans all the time, there's more fear. It's SEMs like could 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 in verse. 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 he's hunted down here, but he'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 in 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 at 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 been 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 have come in during daylight.

I wouldn't think so very few. That's been 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 was like, well, I'm just gonna ease in there, and that bear just eased in and 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. You 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 scent 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 it or not ye, 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 seemed to keep pulling mount 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 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 is 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. So you have to 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. 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 could look different. Like you could have a short, fat bear that was a little bit shorter, squatty 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 I've gotten out in the office, he was only six ft six from nose to tell 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 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 donuts 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, boone and crocking hound, yeah, but he won't have the belly sack, you know, as the one that's been kemped out there

for a month. Well, the largest skulled bear that I've ever taken was a boar bear that only weighed three or sixty pounds. Yeah, the bear that I killed this year weade five hundred 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 hundred fifty pound bear that I killed this year in Oklahoma, is gonna 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 biggest bears weight over five hundred pounds and had under a

twenty skull. Then I killed a four four or forty bear that actually made Booner twenty five eighths sixteenths excuse me, five sixteenths. 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 old. The name Oklahoma Bear, six years old. Um. The this bear right here, this rock slide bear that I believe wade five 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 in 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 trophies, uh, you know, judging these bears, 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'd 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 had 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. Royan was just looking at the bear and he's like, hey, this thing has been tagged. There was just a perfect hole running his ear. Tagg had

pulled out the Game of Fish. Asked me if he had a lip tattoo. And I could not discern the lip tattoo. No. I look myself and didn't didn't see anything. Yeah, but there's another another bear that's out there. Oh, go ahead, go ahead, it's in the video. Man, I'm busted now, go ahead. Yeah. No, the other bear has two tags. Yeah, yellow, yellow tag, and 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 at least forty pounds, yeah, probably six pounds beer 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 deather 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 scaled 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 nine 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 d pound um 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 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's gonna have a flat bearre 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 that 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 you 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 boar 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 bear, 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 boxy 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 by bears. Fair 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 what have or something. Yeah, I do. I don't think I kill the bear pads

that big sense, I don't think so. I think y'all aw teg that's probably got you know what the these these bears around here, I just don't see them, 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. But 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 gone it. I'm gonna have to recount what I just said. No, 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 have.

That's my point is is that everybody always says that, I mean, you'll hear outfitters and not to have knocked 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 stuwn 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. Runde 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 hundred pounds

spring bear is a pretty big bear. 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 in anything.

So you could kill a spring bears 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 beer, very nice beer. What would you say that in 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 the point being don't go to don't go into the spring really with weight as your way

to qualify weather bears, the 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, weight, square. Talk about skull size just a minute. We we've already touched on. You can't determine and skull size by almost anything. Five hundred fifty pound bear that doesn't make Boone and Crockett and a 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 Barre Hunting magazine that did like a comparative scale between using Pope and young minimums for white tail, which people are really familiar with. Like if you say hundred in white tail, people are like, okay, I know what kind of deal that is. And then when you say hundred seventy inch white tail, 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 inch bear would be equivalent to a hundred 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 eighteen and something. It was low eighteens, I think. Okay, So Coby killed a bear that was in the three in 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 rang 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 plus bear. But it scored just

over the pope young minimum. Yeah. I think Corey said that his bears don't typically have a larger scoll in that in that area. I mean like they have good schools, but compared to their body weight, like that ratio is they have some big they do, and they do have some big body bears up there and fall. I mean they're killing some four pound bears. The bear I killed 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 truck that that bear scores over twenty inches. 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 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 up 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 I mean 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 aye 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 older bear 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 ask 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 cent 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 it's just 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 skull like Brent Reeves has, Scott 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. 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. 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 animal. 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 sized 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 the 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 six inch hole. 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've got to

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 termined in 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 he's not a trophy hunter and he's extracted this animal out of the population before it can contribute to the gene pool or the brethren like in this room. Wait, but the big ones take out the big older mature male has 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 but sure 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 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 that. 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 bearrassy, there's a fine line. Let mean, 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 bearss and so I I would hope that I'm selective. But you may go on one bear hunt in your life and on the final day of the hunt a 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 to credit who is dogging somebody that kills a bunch of big bears because they

don't have that opportunity. Is that is that fair? YEA, 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 gays looking for that next 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 lower 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 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 it 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 barrel last year, and manu, it's told 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, that's yeah. Yeah, I've heard it told me that is is he said. One thing he used to tell his clients was would that air 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 in 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 information inside of this podcast, and uh, 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. Yeah, but thanks for being here, Kobe. All right, keep the wild places wild because that's where the Bears live. H