All of these factors can cause a mature bear to just back off and become more cautious. If you’re driving an ATV or truck right to the bait, you’re advertising its presence and increasing the chance that someone else will find your bait and leave their scent at the site or even spook the bear. Maybe a significant change in odor from others at the bait site or a new lure made him uneasy. So if bears naturally want to feed in say, the last hour of daylight, then a nocturnal bear has had something occur that changed his normal behavior pattern.Ĭhances are he’s been spooked off the bait, or he was lying up very near the bait when you came in and did something that alarmed him. This is a scientific word that simply describes an animal that is most active in their feeding patterns in the low light hours of the day sunrise and sunset. Keep in mind that black bears are crepuscular animals. Bears that were coming in the daylight, but something caused them to change their pattern and only come in after dark. Let’s deal with the bears that went nocturnal on us first. Big bears are tough and one of the ways they get old and big is by avoiding any exposure to danger at baits. There are plenty of young and dumb bears shot every year, in fact they make up the bulk of the harvest in many states. These troubling issues usually involve the more mature bears, at least not the young ones with little life experience. I like to group the issues with nocturnal bears into two categories: Bears that have been at the bait in the daylight but cease coming in during daylight hours and second, bears that will not come to the bait in the daylight from the beginning. If they are not comfortable with their surroundings, they will choose to feed elsewhere. If bears do not get a positive reward when they come to the bait site, they will stop coming. In fact, most of them are likely to create even more problems, and possibly lead to the loss of the bears’ activity at the bait altogether. At least not often enough to consider them a viable solution to the problem. These may sound plausible on the surface, but the problem is they simply don’t work.
Here are a few common statements:Ģ) Cut back on bait to create competition.ģ) Have two people walk in and have one leave making noise.ĥ) Use a solar motion light to spook them at night So here’s the short form version of a complicated issue that nearly every bear baiter has faced at one time or another. There are no easy answers, even though there are some trite assertions and downright myths that accompany the question. The question from hunters struggling to get mature bears to appear at a bait site during daylight is one of the most common. Some of these questions have easy answers and some, not so easy. I will once again this year answer some of the same old predictable questions over and over. But there are some predictable downsides besides the travel and nights in motels. I like this time of the year because I really enjoy meeting serious bear hunters from across bear nation. Here it is sports show season again I’m doing bear hunting seminars at several large sports and hunting shows again this year.
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