Home Forums Hunting & Shooting General Big Game Luring bears with out bait?

Fellas , I will be hunting bear in Colorado this coming fall, being a Louisiana boy i realy don't know a whole lot about bear hunting but am wandering is there an effective way to lure bears with any thing other than a bait pile? I plan on hunting any guy piles i can locate but are any of the scents that are sold legal and effective.The scents I am referring to are anise oil or some other strong scent that can not be eaten

No scents are needed.get a good set of glass. Plan on hiking a lot. Get up early and glass and glass in the evenings.
Look for local fall food sources.

Planning on hunting gut piles is not a good plan. Pretty simple

Call the bio in the unit you plan to hunt. Practice shooting out to 400 yards before you go. Know how to skin out bear before you shoot

Get into good hiking shape

Marshmallows dipped in bacon grease.

I’ve called them in with fawn distress calls. Rabbit too

Would you be willing to share more on that? As far as your set up, sequence ect. I’m really looking to get into calling black bears.

As always, check the regs. Using scent is usually considered the same as actually actual baits.

Why exactly is setting a gut pile a bad idea? Not to be offensive I'm just trying to understand I am wandering what I am missing . I know nearly every head of big game I have killed in the past , the un edible parts where eaten buy bears in a couple days. I'm ok with the glassing strategy in the morning but it is hard to see further than a couple hundred yards (in the openings) due to the thickness of the woods. Oh the area I typically hint is unit 77

I killed an elk during a warm dry weather stretch in Colorado a few years ago...

I had a bear on the gut pile before I got all the quarters hung in the shade.... small brown colored bear... I had to shew him off the caracas so I could finish.

If you are gonna hunt gut piles... best be there when fresh. They will be gone within 48 hours.

Sitting a gut pile isn’t the best plan unless the bear density is very high simply because you’re counting on one being close enough to find it in a short amount of time. You’ll have much better success finding an area where you can glass hillsides and see a lot of country. Get one located and make a stalk to intercept him.

Edit to add. My family has been hunting an adjacent unit to the area you plan to hunt since 1955. In that time we’ve had one bear get on a carcass and have killed 3 or 4 bears while hunting deer and elk. I’ve seen elk gut piles sit untouched for a week. Maybe next door where you plan to go there are better numbers of bears or maybe they’re mostly denned up when we go but it wouldn’t be my first choice for a place to just bear hunt.

I guess it is pretty high density . A couple years ago a friend an I both killed elk on opening day , not having anything better to do the next evening we sat on his gut pile at a range of about 150yds and we saw 3 bears at the same time with only the largest one actually eating before dark. This was in muzzle loader season.

Yep figure out the groceries they’re hittin, they get it pretty good pre hibernation

Depending on area, ponds can be effective. Sounds like you need a cow elk tag and the elk hunt would become a bear hunt pretty quick. Shoot em all, we have too many.

Carry a bunch of black licorice in an open container. Stinks to high heaven.....and you can eat it! To my knowledge, it’s not illegal to carry snacks, trail mix, or sandwiches while hunting......well, it may be In Kolorado! 😉memtb

So I’ve had no luck with blind sets, but my buddy who taught me has.

When glassing an oak hillside with bears they can be very hard to actually approach. So on a few occasions we’ve called them out of cover and into our sets. Obviously wind matters here, but it’s all basic coyote calling stuff. When you get their attention they will come in steadily. I’ve not seen the charge that others describe.

As for the sequence, never really did much for breaks, just set the shooter up 50 to 100 yards ahead of the caller. No decoys or anything. Pretty steady desperation calling.

My friend and I hunted black bears for the 1st time on Kupreanoff Island in 2009. My buddy watch a video where distress calls were used to call in bears so he had one in his pocket. We spotted a bear across an inlet and stalked it for an hour or 2. The bear finally disappeared into the trees but sure enough he called it back with the rabbit call and shot it a short while later.

If you search through some Mark Dombrenski's old posts he talks about calling them in the Spring and had some good ideas, and said much the same as Exi. He would spot them first to make sure they weren't a sow with cubs and would then start calling to get them out in the open. I have yet to try it but he did mention that they would lose attention quicker than coyotes so you'd have to keep calling the whole time without much pause, but obviously ymmv