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20 1/16 green score skull, 7 ft 1 in square hide and weighing 340 lbs. Probably a 5 1/2 year old boar, maybe 6 1/2. I would have to go through last years trail camera pics on this bait to figure it out better. It’s the perfect size we like to kill. All 5 hunters in camp are sitting on baits with this class of bear or bigger on trail cam. John and his group have hunted with us several times. Hopefully more big bears to come…

Great first couple of Bears, keep em coming

And Footshooter, you are going to have an awesome hunt! That area has been barely hunted for 4 years.

If we get 5 baits done in one day that’s a great day. This year we had some days where we only got 2-3 baits setup in a long day’s work. The trails in were covered with downed trees from windstorms in the winter. We also had a few spots completely burned out from last year’s forest fires, and some of those places also got logged out to salvage what trees they could. What a mess! The guides and Tyler got it done though!

A 2 person box blind, where you sit in perfect hiding, unseen from the bears, in comfy lawn chairs out of the rain, wind and sun, set up 15-20 yards from our broadside positioning crib, beaver box and main barrels.

Each bait has 2 white topped posts, 36” tall. A shooter male bear must be as tall to the shoulders as the post, not an inch shorter. Then there is a meat barrel filled with butcher cut meat scraps, another barrel with popcorn and licorice bricks and another one with oats and used cooking grease. There is also a beaver cage so the bears have to rip it apart to get it out. We use about 300 beavers a year, very important bait. There is also a honey pot with about a quart of honey in it that they can only get their tongue inside it to clean it out. It sits at 5 ft high on a tree so only a big bear can easily reach it and it helps in sexing the bear when he is standing up.

And of course a trail camera, also sitting at 36” high so we can judge the shoulder height of the bears. We have a rigid trail camera checking system where the guides label every decent size male bear and I check their work and then store it in a file for every bait. Each guide spends about an hour or two every day checking cards at the lodge or in his truck, on a laptop, no half assing it in the woods on a card reader. I personally also spend an hour or two every day on cards, I can’t miss a single day or it piles up. Fun, fun! Haha

Your ground blinds are one the best set ups I have seen for bear hunting.

We don’t like to hunt bears that are only showing night time or early morning daylight pictures. We’ve tried to hunt them by sneaking in at first light but often you end up pushing them off the bait and making them night time only. I think they hang around the bait all night and early morning.

It works so much better than subjective big boar terms like a crease in the skull, little ears, thick ankles, hanging belly etc.

We’ve had a couple of other shots fired but no other deaths, 4th evening hunt coming up…

Thanks I this is a great post and very informative

If you draw a straight line from a bears butt to his eyes a shooter bear will be 5 ft long. A sow will never be more than 4 1/2 ft and a huge boar will be 5 1/2 ft. It actually works better than a 36” tall post because the body length differences are much more, big sow to big boar. Short and fat compared to tall and long.

If the bear won’t stop moving near the log for comparison you can just use your finger as a rough measuring tool. Extend your arm out, measure the log length with your finger, and then move it over to the broadside bear. 5 ft long? Shoot it.

(For us a 4 1/2 yr old, 280 lb upper 18 inch skull, average boar will just hit 5 ft, that’s a nice bear but we prefer to shoot the next size up 320-340 lbs. He might not be much longer, just more filled out, fatter. Subjective term I know but hopefully trail cam pics and video before the hunt help a hunter figure that out.)

Thank you for the information, you are helping me get an idea of how to judge bears.

We shot one other big bear and the guides are out searching early this morning for it, shot angled back a bit. Tracked it 200 yds in the dark last night and then called it off. Thank goodness Sunday is a no hunt day, give my guides a bit of a break, this afternoon and evening!

Great looking bear Sam shot, hope you recover the other bear.

Sam’s bear skull went 18 6/16, so a 4 1/2 yr old. John’s was 18 6/16 too. Had an inch wrong on the tape measure.

Great group of guys! Always an enjoyable time with them but certainly some bad luck. New hunters on Monday.

Happy Mother’s Day!

It is amazing how tough animals can be.

His shoulder height appeared to be just under the 36” tall post so he got shot. It can tough to tell the difference between a fat 3 or 4 year old boar and a short legged 5 year old, but it does remind us that 36” tall is the minimum, not a half inch lower if we want to target the 300+ lb, 5+ yr old boars.

We got burned out of this area last year with the forest fires so we didn’t get to feed the bears up there so that’s probably part of why he had the lower than normal body weight. He could have also come from across the Peace River.

His guide Gavin came, took pictures, and took the bear away to be skinned. John went back in the blind to see if another one would come in.

John said he saw over 50 different bears on his hunt, on 3 baits.

By the way you can also tell the gender or sex of humans by seeing what’s between their legs, not by what’s between their ears. Just saying…

Earl really deserved this bear, he held out for a big one all week last year and didn’t kill.

20 6/16 skull, 380 lbs and 7 ft 6 inch square hide. He certainly was Mr. Big! Congrats Jim!!

So 7 ft 2 inches long and 7 ft 10 inches wide give 7 ft 6 inches square, or average, of the hide for anyone wondering how I get those measurements. The skull is out of the hide but the paws are in, so if paws were out it would be about another inch wide. We freeze the hides for transport and let your taxidermist do the finish work.

330 lbs, 19 3/16 skull, great bear!

Ryan

R

He was on a sow hunt with me originally, but then Jed took over as the videographer and I forgot to mention an odd looking, short legged, fat bear that I couldn’t decide whether it was a big sow or a boar from the trail camera pics.

Well, they shot it and it was a short, fat big boar, whoops. It truly was short legged, shoulders were only up to 32”, very odd for sure.

It weighed 330 lbs, 19 11/16 skull. A huge 2nd bear bow kill for Tyler! So much for delayed gratification, haha

And yes skippy I’ll post the Big Bear Board

The breeding season is on and boars are wandering around. We try not to chase recent trail camera information and just sit an active bait where a big bear is still alive. If a boar hooks up with a sow and is stuck on her for 3 days then the trail cams are very helpful though.

The evening before this one came in Nate had another big bear at the bait that just wouldn’t give him a shot. It had a crippled leg and kept laying down. This bear probably pushed it off the bait, now we will put another hunter on it to try to get the cripple.

We want everyone to trophy hunt for a big boar for the first 4 days of their hunt, then if they haven’t killed one for the 5th evening we tell them to kill a big 200 lb black sow if they want to make sure they go home with a bear. NOT to shoot a young boar. You could kill a big sow almost any evening on any of our baits. So it’s mature bears only, 100% chance to kill, sow or boar. For mature, 5 1/2 yr old, 19+” boars, its about 80% kill. It would be higher if everyone held out.

It is difficult for some hunters to accept this way of managing the bears. They mostly come to us for big bears but then when some guys show up for their hunt they just want to shoot whatever makes them happy, young boar, little colored one, whatever. It’s just not what we do and I spell it out on our website.

I’ll tell guys if you just want to kill a couple bears, maybe get a big one, but be able to do whatever you want, go hunt somewhere else for a year or two or more and then come to us for a big one! Get the bear killing out of your system a bit first.

He was 12 12/16 long and 8 2/16 wide. Seems like you gotta get that 13” long to make all time B and C of 21.

He killed a big, old 240 lb sow with his longbow later the same evening. Thanks for helping manage our bear overpopulation!

Very excited, happy group of hunters! We always take a week or more of hunters from Mexico. Often there is a trad guy or two in the group, 3 of them this week.

This makes our 9th, 20+ inch bear for the season, and our 16th one over 19”, 19 bears over 18 inches along with several big sows for 21 total hunters. Our best year yet and we still have a few hunters to go. We can’t help but think if only we had recovered the 4 wounded big bears from the first week, what would our numbers look like?! Oh well, there is a good chance they survived and will become cautious, Legendary bears.

Nate and Arbi were very thankful and generous too! Two good, fun guys to have in camp.

We ended up with 6 bowhunters, 3 traditional guys and 3 compound shooters, shooting 7 bears, and we only recovered 4 of them, lost 3 of them. Of the 4 bears we found, only one was hit in the chest and died within 100 yds of the bait. Two others were gut shot and the other one was hit low and the guide gunned it down. Two of the recovered bears were 4 1/2 yr old boars, 275 lbs, 18 3/16 skull and 285 lbs and an 18 7/16 skull, both shot on the 2nd day of the hunt. The other 2 dead bears were sows.

The 3 wounded bears were a big, 5+ yr old boar, a 4 yr old boar and a sow. With archery equipment they usually survive and are back on the baits the next year, but a lot wiser.

We have a new group of hunters in camp, started hunting this evening.

Besides all the bad shooting and wounding, I make it abundantly clear to anyone who books a bear hunt with us that they are signing up for Trophy bear hunt. They don’t get to shoot whatever they want because it’s their hunt. (Or get to shoot at bears in whatever body position they want too. It needs to be broadside standing on all four legs, not moving, but that’s another topic.)

They are agreeing to be part of a Quality Bear Management program that we’ve had in place now for over 10 years. Our bear hunting now, is way better than it was 20 and even 30 years ago because now we manage our bears like a Texas whitetail ranch, we didn’t before, we made our area into what it is today. It wasn’t by accident. You don’t buy a hunt at a Texas ranch, managed for mature 5 plus yr old whitetails, but then just shoot a 3 or 4 yr old buck because he has a drop tine, scores high, or just looks good to you. It isn’t fair to the other hunters on the ranch or next years hunters.

I will tell hunters if you want to just shoot whatever you want then please book a bear hunt somewhere else, kill some bears, get it out of your system and then come to us to specifically hunt for a big boar, or a mature sow in the last couple days of your hunt to make sure you go home with a bear.

You don’t grow big bears by shooting the young, small ones.

He waited for the perfect broadside shot before even drawing his bow and then centred both lungs and the bear didn’t go 50 yds. Perfect. More pics and stats in the morning.

Congratulations to all the successful hunters and major kudos to the workers behind the scenes!

Tony’s bear was a big framed 5 1/2+ year old but he had an infected skull injury that almost certainly inhibited his weight and skull growth. Only weighed 305, look like a 350 pounder. Skull was damaged probably by a moose kicking it in the head, yrs ago. It only went 18 8/16. Perfect bear to kill, thanks Tony!

Amazing season

Here’s one of the bears on the 4 wheeler from June 12. Jorge Garza passed up a few bears before this big guy came into the bait. He thought it was a big one, but wasn’t sure so he sent a short video of it to his guide Gavin. Gavin sent it round our group chat and we all agreed it was a big one worth taking. We love it when hunters make sure they’ve got the right bear in their sights before shooting. One shot with the 45-70 rifle and Jorge got his big bear, 19 8/16 skull, 305 lbs, just under 7 ft hide. Our first big bear off the new Swamp bait.

NJbuck we would love to have you do a hunt with us! The choice of who sits where, is mostly random. I randomly decide who goes with which guide, or if a repeat hunter has a preference then he can choose his guide and then the guides decide which bait they want to hunt based on the most recent trail camera info.

The guides don’t have a bait line, they mix it up all the time so they are constantly switched on which baits they restock and pull the SD card info from. I don’t want guides running their own mini outfitting operation within Mike’s Outfitting, deciding who gets preferential treatment but I do want them to feel good about picking the right bait for their hunter that week and hauling in the big one for everyone to see back at camp!

Overall, we generally hunt the baits with a “big enough” bear that is daylighting the most, the bigger the bear the usually more random and nocturnal. Hunters can ask for a giant, tough to kill bear and maybe burn up their hunt on it and not get one. Or we use the nocturnal giants as a 2nd bear hunt, see if a guy gets lucky after taking a good one.

Mike, do you ever do anything different to try to entice a nocturnal bear to hit during daylight?

Hopefully it brings in another boar that he tries to keep off of his bait and lots of other relaxed bears on site can bring him in too.

Do you find that the preference over bait choices by the bears changes throughout the season?

But Beau did have a sow with a beautiful coat come into the bait in the last hour and she dropped her right at the site with one shot from her 6.5 rifle. Congrats to her! Pics coming soon. And we are all done for hunting now…

Not to take anything away from you, as I know that you are the one who has all the "stressors and logistics of putting all this together", but I once read that "A good leader is made into a great leader by the standards and dedication of his workers". i.e.: A good business is made into a great business ....) You must be pretty damn proud of your hard-working crew.

Thanks for posting these hunts, was a very enjoyable post, Bob

Yes I have some fantastic guides and a great chef, Josh too! We have a standard here of how things should be done and systems for almost everything. So when a new guide like Gavin comes on he quickly learns how to do things right. He becomes part of something bigger than himself and is a proud, valuable team member. I just try to keep the ship steering in the right direction and see where I can assist everyone, plus shoot my bow as often as possible, haha.

Beau is just 15 years old but she showed great maturity by holding out right to the end, passing up dozens of bears in the quest for a big boar! It was so close with the giant chocolate one, dang it!

This last week of hunters was a show of what happens when everyone is patient and waits for the right bear and waits for a perfect shot. Six hunters with zero wounds, 5 big, 300 plus pound male bears killed and one big, old dry sow. Perfect!

Out of the 25 males all of them had skulls over the Pope and Young minimum of 18 inches. 19 of them went over 19 inches and 11 went over 20, none over 21, but 3 were within 3/16 of it. Such a tough mark to get over!

Eleven bears over 20 inches is a new record for Mike’s Outfitting. 11 over 20 inches for 33 hunters, a one out of three chance to kill a 20”. And that’s with 5 big boars being wounded, how many of them were over 20? At least two of them I bet, were 20+ from the trail camera pictures. Oh well, hopefully they become 21+, and reach Legendary status.

It was a fantastic, fun season. I’ll post some other pics of the fun around camp. We aren’t just all about big bears. We also do our best to give everyone a really enjoyable bear hunting holiday!

Thanks to everyone who hunted with us and thanks to all the bowsite people that followed along on our adventure!

This thread I think has become one of my favorite. I learned so much about bears from this.

One day I hope to use the information Mike provides to break my bear jinx.

Thanks bghunter! Come up to Alberta and we can help you break your jinx.