Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunting Rifles Lost a bear with .338 wm.

I referenced Ralph in my post. He and I had a long successful and hard working time together. He mentored me in many ways during this period. Together he and I developed the supplemental bear feeding program. We both had the same feelings about the amount of bears killed and to try something different. Our partnered success was so much better than anticipated the problem got bigger with such a healthy plentiful new food source.

Big males monopolized the feed stations, and the other bears peeled trees all around them. The big bears stopped chasing down cubs to eat,... and just sat fat and happy on an endless food supply. All the cubs grew up knowing only that peeling trees was normal. It was proven to be a learned behaviour. Moving bears from the tree-farm with a live trap to remote areas or different locations caused tree peeling to begin in locations it was unheard of prior. That ended the option to move them.

Moving bears over 100 miles with collars and ear tags often had them back to the exact spot they were caught in a month so. Those we referred to as " double dippers" were removed for good at the next opportunity. The WFPA had me write an educational reference book called "Solving Washingtons bear problems" I have a single copy remaining. They owned the rights it was their book. I just authored it for them. It was while I was developing comments in that book that the realization of how many bears we took out began to impact me. Much of the book was based on the new feeding program.

WDFG was instrumental to help us develop that feed. We caught bears and drew blood the Vet would analyze it and our various recipes were used to match the blood draw of wild bears to be sure they had the right mix of nutrition and it was good enough to have them eat it. Originally the feed was refrigerated and would spoil if is was not eaten soon. It was also a soft pellet that would be damaged in a pickup bouncing on bad roads. That was about every road I used!

After a few years purina and our original land o lakes business created a harder non perishable pellet that we could use with equal success. However the development of the bigger feed stations was needed. I experimented with so many designs all of which the bears destroyed or cost so much to build that we could not afford them. Eventually I built a 55 gallon size drum with some tricky angles and baffle measurements and some interesting welding requirements.

They were easy to mass produce once the templates were made and we had about 100 of them built. I was running 60 of them myself the other two guys shared responsibility for 30 with 10 as spares. The bears still managed to destroy these once in a while too. This has been a good reflection for me actually. Part of this period of my life was at the time the highpoint of my life at 28-30 years old. The best was yet to come for me, but this was a formative part of my future!

I do feel that it better balanced my communication skills with anti hunters. I learned empathy for the first time in my life doing this. Maybe just a natural development of maturity too. I was on the cover of the Seattle Times News Paper with a reporter filling a station with feed. They had me doing all the media driven requirements. I was on at the time the biggest radio show in the the region. Bob Rivers and Spike Oneal had me on to share the program results and vision. Not exactly celebrity level stuff but for a kid growing up in the farm country feeding his family hunting with traps and a sheridan air rfile it was a big deal for me!

Moving to South Africa was like going to Hollywood for a young actor after that! Wow ..... That was where everything exploded for my hunting and wildlife management business future!