By Cole Porter
It’s late July, the peak of summer here in the state of Maine. While most hunters are not thinking about their fall deer hunting pursuits quite yet, it is time for the bear hunter to go to work. Bear bait is allowed to be placed 30 days before the start of the bear hunting season. For 2023, the general season opened on Monday, August 28th.
I have been bear hunting since the fall of 2013. I had sat on bear baits with friends while in high school and really enjoyed helping carry bait into the woods to help out. I was in my first year of college in the fall of 2013 at the University of Maine at Fort Kent. The bear bait site that I was baiting was in my hometown of Sherman, roughly a two-hour drive one way. As a result, I only had a couple of evenings that I was able to hunt. I knew that I would need to find a place closer if I was going to bait in the future. I ended up hunting a public land bear site on the Eagle Lake Public Reserve Land for the next few years. I saw a few bears, sows with cubs, and small yearlings, but…never shot one.
After my failed bear-hunting attempts, I knew that I wasn’t going to give up. I was lucky enough to be offered an established bait site by a friend to use during the 2018 season. I ended up sitting for 12 evenings and only saw a sow with two cubs. My bait quality was better than in past years, an important aspect of having success hunting fall bears in Maine. The next fall, persistence paid off, and I shot a beautiful 200+ pound sow on sit number 8 or 9 of the season. I had hunted over bait +/- 90 days before taking my first bear. Don’t ever let someone get away with saying, “It’s like shooting fish in a barrel…”. I did take a bear on the same bait in 2020 the first week of the hunt, my bear-hunting luck was really starting to make a turn in the right direction.
For the 2021 season, I decided it was time to establish a bait site on my own. I scouted out a good-looking spot on a parcel of private land that happened to be only 5 minutes out of my way on my way to and from work. Luckily, I was able to get permission from the timber company to bait there. I had high hopes for this new bait site, it had everything needed to be a real producer. Some of these key features included access off of a lightly used dead-end road, prevailing wind blowing away from where the bears would be with a steep uphill behind the stand location (hopefully keeping bears from circling downwind), thick woods behind the bait barrel, water nearby, and a couple thousand acres of land bordering it where no bear baiting is permitted. The bait had bears on it within a few days of placing the bait, a great sign for a new site. On opening night, I took a 300-pound boar that had almost no fat on him, I was thrilled. The next season ended with a nice meat bear in the freezer…the new bait site was going to be a good one.
Going into the 2023 bear season, I knew I wanted to try to finally trap my first bear. I had about a week’s worth of trap nights with an Aldrich-style snare thrower while baiting on the public land site back in college. I had a couple of misses, but I knew at the time that I would try again someday. During the fall of 2021, I had a nice bear that learned that it could dig up my homemade bear snare tube and get the bait without reaching into it. That turned into a week of remaking the set every day only to find it all torn up the next, the bear had won. In the off-season, I modified my bait tube with a piece of rebar that would be buried in the ground and would prevent it from being pulled out as easily.
Pre-baiting started off great with a nice bear hitting the fresh bait within 12 hours of filling the barrel. One bear had a white V on its chest. In Maine, a bear with a “V” is somewhat rare and substantially increases the trophy value of a bear. The first week of the hunt, I shot a young boar, and off to the freezer he went! Just what I wanted. My wife and I really enjoy our bear meat, and at this point, I can’t imagine not having some on hand. When I checked my game camera app that afternoon while getting ready up at the road, I realized that a bear had beat me and was already on the bait. I decided to sneak in for a look and ended up watching the bear work my snare setup through the brush at about 40 yards. He reached into the tube and pulled the trigger. The spring-loaded snare snapped closed around the bear’s arm. Just as quickly the bear lunged forward, pulling free of the snare, and took off barreling into the woods at full speed. (I had a stopper on the snare set to allow smaller bears to pull out) I quickly got into my treestand and got settled in, I knew the bear would likely be back. It wasn’t long before I caught a glimpse of black sneaking through the woods, the bear was in full stealth mode. It began circling the bait area, just out of range of my trusty Ruger M77 Ultralight .308. He soon got on my trail and followed it up towards the road with his nose to the ground. He knew I had been there, but as young bears often do, he was making fatal mistakes. A little bit of time passed as the bear continued to make another circle. This time, he entered my trail about 6 yards from the base of my stand… “POWWW”! No tracking job for this one.
After shooting the bear, I decided to pull my snare until another bear showed up that I would be happy with. A couple of weeks passed without much bear activity at the bait. Eventually, the bear with the white V started hitting the bait on a nightly basis. I got the snare set back on the baited tube and started cutting back on the amount of bait going into the barrel. On September 30th at 7:33 PM, the bear finally committed to reaching down into the snare tube. I was lying in bed watching TV when my phone started getting notifications from my cellular game camera. I called my dad for some help with the drag uphill to the road and tried my best not to forget anything that I would need, gun, ammo, headlamp, a sharp knife, and a bag and string for tying off the gallbladder. (We can legally sell bear gallbladders here in Maine, sometimes getting over $100 for a large one) We had to hurry to get the bear to a butcher’s cooler, luckily the butcher I was using was very accommodating and was willing to receive the bear late into the night. It was a great feeling to finally trap a bear here in Maine, the only state in the country to allow it. This special bear will be going on the wall as a ½ mount and the meat will feed us for the year to come.
Bear-baiting season is one of my favorite times of the year. It can be a lot of work carrying hundreds of pounds of bait into the woods in search of the black ghost. Despite what you may have been told, bear meat is great table fare if handled correctly. Bears need to be cooled off quickly in order to preserve the quality of their meat due to the thick hide and fat that they have. I think everyone who enjoys hunting should spend a little bit of time hunting bears over bait. It might turn into a hobby you never thought you would be interested in.
Cole Porter grew up and lives in the small town of Sherman, Maine. He has dedicated his life to the outdoors and enjoys hunting, fishing, trapping, and anything else that gets him in the woods. He graduated from the University of Maine at Fort Kent in 2017 with a Bachelor of Science in Environmental Studies. He has since worked as a fish culturist for the Maine Department of Fish and Game.