Feed The Beast Bears Over Bait

Here in Idaho, spring bear hunters have three good options: Hunting with hounds, spotting and stalking, and baiting, which is my first choice.

- Tom Claycomb

People who don’t know better may think all you have to do is hang a donut in a tree and bears will come in droves. Not so. It took me a lot of springs to learn how to bait properly. Hopefully, I can save you about 10 years of experimenting.

It may sound obvious, but first and foremost you must place baits in areas where there are bears to find them. The surest sign that bears are in an area is to see said bears. I’m in the mountains I hunt year-round camping, back-packing, and fly-fishing through the warmer seasons. If I see a big bear or a lot of bears on any of these ventures, I mark the location as a potential baiting site.

Bears eat a high fiber diet, and they leave a lot of scat, another reliable indicator. If you’re not seeing bear scat, then there are not many bears around. They don’t wear diapers. The same goes for tracks. Bears are big animals, and they can’t fly. So if you don’t see any tracks, there probably aren’t many bears, either.

Once you find the requisite sign, you need to put out a bait barrel. This is done before the hunt, and you need to check the regulations where you hunt to make sure you do it right. Do you have to use a barrel? Not most places. But in a barrel the bait won’t get wet and spoil as quickly.

It also slows down ravens, coyotes, wolves and to a degree bears carrying off all of the goodies. Once when maintaining two bait stations, I stuck a large plastic bag full of kidneys in a snowdrift on the side of the trail and trotted down to check the first bait. It couldn’t have been 10 minutes later when I came back, and the ravens already had carried off two-thirds of the kidneys.