Home Forums Hunting & Shooting General Big Game Copper ammo and black bear—30-06 or 6.5 creedmoor?

If you shoot well with both I’d shoot the 6.5. If I was shooting the 30-06 I’d sure as hell wouldn’t be shooting a 180 gr copper bullet out of it. 130-150.

If you put the bullet in the right place, I doubt you'd be able to tell the difference between the Creedmoor and the 30-06. If you don't put the bullet in the right place, I doubt you'd be able to tell the difference between the two, either. Be honest with yourself about which one you shoot better. If it's a wash, it's a wash.

A couple anatomical points...
Humans are lucky, each lung comes in its own sack (pleura) collapse a lung and the other is much more likely to maintain function for a while. Other critters are not so lucky.

Bears are much lighter boned than ungulates, the comparison is not even close. OlBlue shot a Kodiak bear and I cleaned a scapula. It was a beautiful sunny day and I took a picture of an orange-handled knife through the bone. It has been posted here many times.

Their bones are remarkably flexible and, I assume, very tough. They are not particularly hard.

Muscle is like water to bullets.

After many years of cup and core use I will take a solid copper every time.

The 06 and the Bear Claws

I would use a 180g Hornady Interlock, flat base, in the '06. It will saw up a bear like you had took a chain saw to it. Second choice would be a 180g Partition. I like a lot more shock on the animal than the Barnes puts on them. I shoot a really hot load of H4350 in a Lapua case at 2700 fps+.

Whichever you shoot better but...the 06 is giving you weight and frontal area.. Echoing the what others have said, if you need to use a 180, at least at shorter distances, a 180 partition will likely leave a larger exit than a 180 barnes (if you are close enough to get the partition to fragment some). The 150 barnes is a better choice than the 180's for you. They are relatively long bullets for their weight so also might shoot well in your rifle.

Only killed a few black bears and they weren't hard to kill, but as mentioned they all were kind of hard to find afterwards. One died in a blowdown, less than 100 yards from where it was shot...took hours to find because of all the shadows etc.

I have called in two with a varmint call, Weems Wild call, and a Lohman MVP-3, they were both hard chargers

The most excitement you can have with your clothes on!

Today, I would be trying R#23 and R#26 for velocity

Old saying: "A well hit bear won't go as far as a well hit deer, but a poorly hit bear will go a lot farther than a poorly hit deer." That has been my experience. My biggest bear was shot with a .32 Special at 15 feet. DRT. Others shot through the chest with ordinary C & C deer bullets never made it farther than 30 yd. They aren't grizzly bears and just aren't that heavily put together. Focus on shooting them wear they live, not necessarily what you're shooting them with.

I wouldn't use a copper bullet unless required by law. Had poor results using them several times with small exit holes and animals that ran farther than expected with good hits. I have only killed two Black bears, one with a 200 grain Speer Hotcor and the other with a 30-30 pushing a 150 gr. bullet forgot what load it was. The 200 grain Hotcor from my 308 performed perfectly, pretty big exit and bear went nowhere as it went through the spine just behind the shoulder. The bear shot with the 30-30 was a head shot. Bears can be pretty hairy making it sort of hard to tell exactly where the spine is and they are often shot in shady places. Personally I want a big exit hole for leakage. The 30-06 would be my choice.

Both rifles and loads you listed will do fine with proper bullet placement.

06 with standard 150 to 180 grain bullet. Done deal. Ed k

I'll be toting a 6.5 Creed for bruins this fall, if that helps. Black bear I mean.

Eskimos don’t think twice about whacking 1,000 lb. polar bears with .22 cf, and they don’t use premiums either.

They are crazy, but I can’t recall anyone getting AFU by doing so.

Pretty hard to loose a polar bear in a thousand miles of nothing with dogs to trail him with. Edk

I once asked a young Eskimo about a polar bear he’d killed the week before. I said “isn’t your Mini 14 with 55gr FMJ ammo a little small for polar bears?”. He replied,” it shoots 20 times before it’s out of bullets”.

That bear only took 7 or 8 BTW

Ditto, with one caveat... depending on where you hunt, you may factor in the difference between killing a bear and finding it once dead. Have seen them killed with .22 rimfire and a couple of .22 centerfires in the hands of confident capable hunters, all east of the coast range.

My grandson killed a called black bear last evening, 25 hours ago. He has been seeking an elk load for his Tikka 30-06, and he hunted bear with it because a 180 grain Swift A-frame is the most accurate bullet he's tried in his rifle. 58 yard shot, almost broadside, bullet hit center of ribs angling back a smidge to exit at last rib. The bear went 30 yards and was dead within seconds... and was exceptionally difficult to find. Innards plugged the exit, zero blood trail found by some good trackers with him. The bear was finally found by careful search for occasional broken ferns or squirts of scat, plus some grid work, and the searchers walked past it twice inside of 6 feet without seeing it.

OK, first bear, standing in the only open spot where he could see it, he likely should have broken its shoulder given the thick brush - except that he could not see the shoulder and shot the only vital visible. Any hit that did not drop it on the spot, with any rifle bullet combo, would mean trailing the animal at least a few steps. I had one go 15 feet in super thick brush, surprisingly hard to find and a nervous search for it.

This musing is likely more about bullet placement than caliber, but a larger exit hole to leak is usually a good thing.

None of this applies where you can almost always see your boots, see ground across a ravine or canyon, go around or under vegetation without having to part it, etc. You should have seen how scratched up those men were last night by the time they found the bear and got it to a road.

Having nattered all this, I'd take the one I shoot best and most confidently, and if equal, it would be the .06.

A ton of overkill beats an ounce of underkill.

It may not work out so well for him if he shoots an elk in the same place.

Same geographic location or same spot on the animal?

Same shot placement.

?? Took out big sections of both lungs and a chunk of liver. No elk is going to last long with that damage, I say from experience, not theory, and an elk is far more likely to leak a blood trail than a bear that tends to plug exit holes. Plus an elk has hard big hooves, way easier to track even without a blood trail than a soft padded bear foot on duff and moss. Again, spoken from experience rather than theory. Our mileage does vary, but if I had to, I'd take that hit with that bullet on every elk I could shoot at for the rest of my life. Not perfect but it would be rare to lose an elk hit there if one can track at all.

Re the original topic, a friend kills elk and big bears with a .220 Swift in open forest country, while my son who hunts true rainforest moved up from his never failed 30-06 to a .338 Win mag. We do like to find what we kill