Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Alaska Spring bear hunt -- 2021!

Next hunt, May 19. Was actually sunny where we went!
Took my dad, brother, and a visiting relative. We turned into the inlet we'd be hunting in and I went down to idle speed in the skiff. Using the binos I spotted three bears on the beach almost immediately....waaaay back at the end of the tidal flat.
I could see the pronounced hump of one of them and knew it was a brownie, and assumed the one right next to it would be either a sibling or a large cub.
But 500 yards past them on the beach was a black blob lumbering through the grass.

It was really hard to keep the boat going slow and quiet knowing that black bear was feeding back towards the woods and away from us. We finally did get to the beach, and my dad and I hopped out to make the long (about a mile) stalk. My brother and our relative stayed with the skiff to make sure the tide didn't mess with it too much, and they had a nice vantage point to watch us with the spotter.

After getting up and around a little hill that for a few minutes obscured our view of the bears, we saw the brownies still there but no more black blob.
I hoped that all that had happened was that the black bear had turned the far end corner of the flats and was still in the grass.

Once we got better eyes on the brownies we realized it was indeed a sow with a soon-to-be-evicted cub. With the wind in our faces we had to make enough noise and be visually obvious enough to scare off the sow and cub, while being silent and stealthy enough to not frighten the black bear we hoped was still around the far corner.

From my brother's perspective:




From my perspective, about 60 yards away from the sow/cub: