It’s all about the bear

Hello friends, As I write this it has been 141 days since Doug Cibulka and I started running our bear baits in northern Juneau County and we are at a point where they have to be run every day if you hope to keep the bears coming in. Doug is now at 'Bear Camp,' my house, and we are doing some teal and goose hunting to pass the time.

Monday, Sept. 1 High 75, Low 53

As any bear baiter that has been running baits since April 25 can tell you, we are long-term tired and very excited. We run a 40-mile round trip from my house. We have four hikes into our stumps and it is a lot of work. In the 16 years I have been doing this, this summer has been incredible for baits being hit almost every time we check them and it's by big bears.

As luck would have it, in the last week all of our baits but one have had a complete shut down and that is due to lots of berries, mushrooms and acorns, new food. After running the baits today we headed out with my canoe and Red for an afternoon of goose and teal hunting as it was opening day.

Doug and I have been friends all of our lives and, now that we are both in our mid 60s, we have hit a point where if we do not fire the gun we really do not care. That is a good thing because, despite a solid effort and seeing hundreds of wood ducks and mallards, we did not get a shot at a teal or a goose. We sure did see a pretty sunset and it was good to be in a canoe together.

Until this summer, I have not put a solid effort into training Red on waterfowl. Her mother was an excellent retriever. When Michelle passed away three years ago, Red was a pup. I simply have not had it in me to do the training. Now that my pond is complete Red loves it when I pull out the dummies and we play fetch.

This spring when we started running the baits first it was ticks and black flies. I actually have had 12 ticks embedded into me this warm season and I am hoping there will be no problems with that down the road. Once May came around, we had regular battles with mosquitoes and deer flies. This was a tough year for deer flies. One day I made a mistake and forgot mosquito spray, and I ran the baits in shorts, sandals and a tank top. I was bitten so many times by deer flies that I actually became sick for a day.

The annual fall insects that can be very hard on bear baiters are hornets and ground bees. On Saturday of this week, I brought a portable stand to one of our hunting locations and unknowingly threw it on top of the entrance to a ground bee nest. I was attacked and luckily only stung once, but let me tell you, if I get stung more than once by a hornet or a bee, I have some pretty serious problems for about a week.

The next morning Doug and I did another waterfowl hunt to a different location and once again did not fire a shot. It seems like where we are hunting there are not many teal. Though there were geese all summer, they seem to have vanished and that brought us to one day and bear season opens. My buddy had his knee replaced in January so he would be in shape for this hunt. We have probably dropped $800 on bait, the same on gas and countless hours in the woods.

I feel that 'all season' bear baiters become biologists in a way we are in the woods from spring until well into the fall. We watch the wolves, deer, insects, waterfowl, green up to the leaves falling and we hope that when we are sitting in a tree when the season opens, the magnificent animal called a black bear will offer us a shot. In our case, just like not firing our guns during the waterfowl hunts, we are well aware that if we do not get a chance to harvest a bear everything will be OK and the sun will still come up in the morning.

Love this way of life! Sunset