Spring Black Bear 2025

Shooting a black bear isn’t as easy as it sounds. On a technical side their dark, rippling hide makes it difficult to pick a spot. Constantly on the move, bears rarely stand still, setting up for a shot needs to be quick and efficient or you lose the opportunity. Top it off with the fact that they are armed for retaliation, a misplaced bullet isn’t what you want, never mind the poor blood trails and ethics behind an animal left suffering. A few years back I put two bullets into one and did not find a speck of blood, luckily I did find the bear, one hundred yards away while grid searching.

Of course the black bears hang out on the side of the highway.

Spring black bear hunting for me is an excuse to get outside and walk around. The blacktail deer are out feeding giving me a chance to see how they made it through winter, often finding new beta for the fall. I also love watching bears do their thing, over the years I’ve passed on many bears for a variety of reason, in the end it’s usually because I really didn’t feel like killing one that day.

This past spring I had a hunger for black bear meat in the freezer again. Hunting around home had been less than productive, it was a different story an hour away. From the first week of May, through the end of the season the last day of June I had been seeing bears every time I hunted there. Over the course of day trips and camps I chased what I am certain was the same bear for three months.

Checking out the freshness of the bear sign.

Five times I put a stalk on a jet black boar that was clearly boss of the area. The first time I spotted him we had just parked up on an adjacent hillside. It wasn’t ten seconds after putting the binos to my eyes that he was there standing up in a clear cut close to a kilometre away. At first I thought it was a small bear, after a rainstorm and a stalk to 250 yards I’d changed my mind.

The closest I came to the boss was seventy-five yards, he never stopped moving and I wasn’t comfortable with the off-hand, severe quartering away angle. After that I lost out due to wind, darkness and shots further than I wanted to take. I was obsessed with this bear, to the point I passed shots on others because it was all or nothing. It wasn’t the biggest black bear I’d seen, what I was doing wasn’t trophy hunting, I had built up a series of memories with this particular one.

On the last day of the season it was stinking hot and he didn’t show up, he won. I doubt he knew he triumphed that day, he didn’t know he was part of a cat and mouse game with me, he was just doing what wild animals do, avoiding humans. I was happy that I’d had a full season with him, even though I wanted the meat, I am more than fine with the animals winning too, that is part of hunting. Long after the meat would have been gone, the memories of the hunt whether I killed or not remain.

See you on the water or the mountain.

-Matthew Mallory