Alright! Another spring hunting season is right in front of us and I’m am so excited to share it with you! I drew an archery spring bear tag right here in my home state of Arizona for 2020. If you’ve followed any bit of what I do, you know how much of a bear nerd I am. They are without a doubt my favorite species to hunt. Pair that with another love of mine, bowhunting, and I’m a pretty happy guy. My tag is good for May-July and scouting has already begun!
Being that this hunt takes place during a fairly dry part of the year down here, the plan is to focus on water. Over the next few weeks I’ll be checking out various water sources and placing trail cameras on them to monitor any beary behavior that may or may not occur in the area. Bears just love their water. They’ll swim in it, play in it, sleep in it, and obviously drink it. I’d look at this as sort of an achilles heel of the bear this time of year.
In this episode, I head down into a brand new area to a spring. Right from the get go, I was a little apprehensive of placing a cam here. The spring is fairly close to a trail, but after further investigation, I just couldn’t pass up placing a cam. It offered a great potential setup for an ambush with a hill right above the spring looking down. Would be a nice way to potentially take a bear over that water source.
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At the time of putting the cam up it was late February. Like I say in the video, I really have no urge to check that camera until April most likely. Maybe even May. It needs to get hot and dry for those bears to consistently be smashing the water. Once it does, there can absolutely be multiple bears hitting the same water source throughout the whole day, not just in the morning and evening. So, now we wait. Until then, I’ll be out checking out some new areas and getting excited for the coming spring hunting season!
Most focus in the hunting world gets put onto all things ungulate. That being deer, elk, moose, caribou, etc. Basically, all of things with antlers or horns. Rightfully so! All of those species are magnificent animals with a ton of opportunity behind them for the blue collar hunter to take advantage of. Arizona is no exception in that right. We have a massive amount of attention put on our huge bull elk and tons of opportunity for mule deer and coues deer, especially for the bowhunter. Those are some of my favorite hunts of the year, but they are not my absolute favorite. For me, that title rests in the paws of our Arizona black bear. Yes, we do in fact have bears here in our hot and desolate desert believe it or not. Let me tell you why they are my favorite animal to hunt here and the best hunt you’ve probably never heard of.
I remember sitting on the side of a cliff with my brother, being mad at myself on the third day of our hunt. We had just picked up a bear that morning with our glass and I chose to not try to close the distance with my bow. Instead, I caught myself just overthinking the situation. This led to a bunch of time wasted. That was at 7:30 a.m. At 10:30 a.m., I indeed picked the bear back up with my binoculars. It happened again though, and I didn’t act. Excuses rolled through my head about why I shouldn’t try to make that stalk. “The bear is not going to be there when I get over there. I don’t want to waste time going on a blind stalk.” Before I knew it, we were heading back to the truck, dreaming of the fantastic breakfast we would have in town the next morning. The whole time in doing so, I was frustrated. Frustrated that I didn’t at least TRY to make something happen.
When I was a kid, I always wanted a little brother. I remember asking my parents for one throughout my childhood. No matter how much I asked though, it just didn’t happen. That was until one morning when I was 12 years old. Just about to head out of the door to go to school, my parents gave me the news that I would indeed be having a little brother. That morning, as I swung on the swing set with my best friend, we chatted about how awesome it was going to be, me having a little brother. We talked about the things we would teach him as he got older. We looked way into the future and gazed at the days we would share a campfire together. It’s hard to believe that was almost 20 years ago.
The term “OTC Tags” is one that is growing more popular everyday in the hunting community. For those of you that don’t know what that stands for, it means “over the counter.” It is getting increasingly harder to draw tags through lottery systems. I don’t think it is going to start heading in the other direction anytime soon. We spend a ton of money every year on bows, clothing, optics, you name it. Hours and hours are spent at the range shooting our rifles and sighting in our archery equipment. For a lot of folks, myself included, it is disheartening when you invest so much time and money into something, only to be told you can’t go hunting this season. Not going hunting is just not an option on the table in my house. This is why I focus most of my attention on OTC tags.
“Never say never.” We’ve all heard that a time or two. I remember especially hearing this phrase as a kid. Maybe it would come up during a rough football game on T.V. Our team would be losing with very little time left and I would hear my Dad say, “never say never.” Most times the obvious would happen, but sometimes they’d end up pulling through and winning. You just don’t know how something is going to play out, unless you see it through. I think this phrase translates perfectly into hunting.
Over my years of black bear hunting there is a consistent theme that wafts its way past my ears every now and then. On multiple occasions, after posting a successful bear hunting photo, folks have asked me, “Why did you shoot a bear? You can’t eat bear.” This leaves me puzzled every time I hear it. Their surprise after I tell them I eat bear a few times a week never gets old though. So, with this piece, I want to lay that question to rest.
If you’ve been following along with me for the past few years, then you know how much of a bear nut I am. Last year I wrote a story called Canyon Bruins, which took you along the epic journey that was my 2015 season. If you read that story then you know that is when I was able to harvest my first black bear. On that morning, we were able to see 9 bears in about an hour and a half, all within 300 yards of each other. Everything from the shot to the packout was nothing short of an adventure. It took me 3 years to find a good bear spot here in AZ, so you can imagine how excited I was to get back to that magical hell hole that these Canyon Bruins called home for the 2016 season.
Finding a good hunting partner can sometimes be just as difficult, if not more difficult than hunting itself. A lot of things have to lineup between two people in order for it to work. This became all too apparent when I really got into all of this. Up until a certain point, I had always hunted with another person. As the fire grew inside of me to be out in the field though, I came to a fork in the road. Either I was going to not go out at all or I needed to go out alone. I chose the latter and throughout my adventures have really grown to love hunting on my own. Even with that being the case, I still enjoy getting out into the mountains with good friends and family. After all, that is how I ended up loving hunting as much as I do in the first place.
2015 was a pretty exciting year for me in the field filled with new experiences and opportunities. It wasn’t until a few weeks ago, when I stopped to think about it all. It was almost overwhelming reflecting back on everything, which is what I intend on doing here. Being relatively new to the hunting lifestyle(3 years), means a lot of things happened to me for the first time. The deeper and deeper that I dive into this, the more things that I want to experience someday and the things that I do get a chance to experience, seem to create new traditions that I can’t wait to take part in the following year. There were way to many firsts that happened during 2015 to list here, but I would like to take the time to reflect on the major ones.
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