Wade’s Double- This Alberta hunt was my most exciting ever. He ran only 25 yards in plain sight and did a forward roll. The arrow passed through his chest and into the Alberta dirt behind him. Once there he glanced at me again, but this time I was watching him through my 3-pin sight. Once he got to the dirt I let down and watched him walk over to the bait. He looked me over and began his climb down. Out of ideas, I screamed like a girl and stomped my boot. I had brief visions as me as a piñata tethered above my stand and getting batted around. Somewhat panicked, I noticed I didn’t have a good shot. The bear stopped at 18-inches below my stand. That’s more difficult than you think, especially when you consider the full -body-harness I was tied to the tree with and intervening limbs. Although I had some bear spray with me I drew my bow instead and tried to aim down past my boot. His climb didn’t seem driven by curiosity. I’m a veteran bear observer and this wasn’t the first bear that climbed my tree but this one climbed as if it were the Olympic tree climbing championships. He climbed with the agility of a 250-pound squirrel….with teeth and claws. Looked directly at me 18 feet up in my tree and charged my tree and not stopping to change directions began huffing his way up to my tree stand. I got my bow ready and focused on this unusual bear. What a special wilderness experience.Īn hour in I spotted something blonde in color moving my way from inland. The tree stand was a short ten yards from the brown swirling river. The bait had never been hunted and it was miles from nowhere. My guide had set up a bait 40 yards from the river bank. We had to be 20 miles from our island camp when we landed. My guide carried me downstream in a flat-bottomed river boat for nearly an hour. I think it was day four and I’d passed on some nice black bears. I set out to tag one with my bow a few years ago, and chose a region in northern Alberta on the Great Slave River. The blonde color phase bears are less common than the others, even where they are most common. Although this bear was in America’s southwest, cinnamon bears range up the Rockies and into Canada. When he figured us out he took off like a bottle rocket for another part of New Mexico. Being from Alaska and used to seeing brown bears this color, I had to remind myself that this was a color phase black bear. His fur rippled with each lunge as he closed in on us. It was my first look at a cinnamon black bear and he was a big one. Jerry got busy sounding like a fawn in distress and within one minute I spotted a bear rapidly climbing toward us from below. The area was striped with rocky hogbacks and yellow grass. We were on a steep mountain side dotted with big Ponderosa pine. Years ago, a friend Jerry Peterson and I were calling and filming bears in New Mexico near Arizona. This color is a beautiful hue which is more common in desert and mountainous regions. Some bears out West are cinnamon colored. Even when color phase bears are part of the population they make up only a percentage of the bears. This is an area with a notable percentage of color-phase bears. On one Saskatchewan wilderness bow hunt I saw over 14 different black bears and all were black. In some areas, up to 25% of the bears are color phase bears. Brown and Coco bears are quite common in Alberta, Manitoba and Saskatchewan and south onto Americas great plains states. This one is from Alberta.īrown and chocolate bruins, sometimes even dark chocolate coat colors and can be found mixed in with totally black bears as one travels west. Dave Samuel has taken at least three B&C chocolate bears. Dave Samuel- Good friend and avid bear hunter, Dr. States west of Ol’Miss still host a lot of “black” bears but the color phase begins to emerge as you travel west.ĭr. These bears are found along the southern and eastern coast then inland to the Mississippi River and north across all of Canada. These bears are uniformly black and occasionally have a white blaze on their chest. With a little travel, you can see them all too.Ĭolor phase bears are grouped into four major categories. No North American animal has more color variation than black bears. If you use these criteria on black bears you will be mistaken, as black bears come in at least four major colors. We often identify animals by their color.
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