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Serving Northern St. Louis County, Minnesota

Average bear harvest expected

With typical levels of natural foods, wildlife managers expect few surprises

Marshall Helmberger
Posted 8/25/16

REGIONAL— About one-in-three bear hunters who take to the woods, beginning Thursday, Sept. 1, are likely to bag a bruin this season, according to the Department of Natural Resources.

“There …

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Average bear harvest expected

With typical levels of natural foods, wildlife managers expect few surprises

Posted

REGIONAL— About one-in-three bear hunters who take to the woods, beginning Thursday, Sept. 1, are likely to bag a bruin this season, according to the Department of Natural Resources.

“There was average natural food production this summer,” said DNR Tower Area Wildlife Manager Tom Rusch, who notes that hunter success is usually closely tied to natural food abundance. Bears feed heavily on wild fruits, like blueberries, raspberries, chokecherries, and plums, as well as hazelnuts, acorns, and mushrooms. When such natural foods are relatively abundant, hunters’ baits are less attractive to bears. Last year, when food abundance was limited, hunters did well, with 39 percent registering bears.

“We probably won’t have that kind of hunter success this year,” said Rusch. “It will probably be more like two years ago.” That’s when 33 percent of hunters with a permit bagged a bear.

This year, blueberry and raspberry crops were relatively strong, thanks to abundant rainfall, although those crops were more limited in areas hit hardest by this year’s early June frost. The rain has also fed an excellent crop of clover, which is another important bear forage, said Rusch.

Udovich agreed that the availability of natural foods may have limited interest in the baits he’s been putting out since mid-August. “It’s started a little slow, but it seems to be picking up a little bit now,” he said. Udovich, who focuses his bear guiding in the Cook and Orr area said some of the berry crops, particularly chokecherries, are quite strong this year. “And the plums are really something, like we haven’t seen in quite a while.”

But Udovich noted that the conditions are pretty variable. He said natural foods aren’t as abundant near the Vince Shute Wildlife Sanctuary, and that’s kept bear numbers at the sanctuary pretty high for this time of year.

The DNR will be issuing 3,850 permits this year, up just slightly over the past few years. “We’re still managing for a slight increase in bear numbers,” said Rusch. The DNR estimated a bear population as high as 28,000 about a decade ago, but an aggressive effort to trim bear numbers, through an increased harvest, reduced the population in half, to the current estimate of 12,000-15,000. While the DNR doesn’t have a specific bear population goal, most department biologists prefer a bear population closer to 20,000.

It’s always a balancing act, says Rusch, between maintaining a healthy population and keeping bear nuisance problems at a reasonable level.

Locally, hunters took more than 530 bears in the Tower work area last year, or well over a third of the statewide harvest of 1,441 bears. In some areas, however, where natural foods were down significantly last year, more than half of hunters were successful.