Caught this guy out kicking off the bear rut.

Not-so-great cell phone pics taken at a distance. But he was a big boy.

What state Yoder?

PA

They are on them here. My bear camp in Northern MN.
A week ago I came across a torn up area, huge tracks on a sow and the story was told right there on the ground.
I’m hoping that bore is no stranger come September.

Osky

Nice catch with the pic Yoder..

Osky

We watched him come a few hundred yards. He ended up disappearing in a small thicket and I had somewhere I had to be. So I couldn't wait him out for better shots. I wish there were something in the pics that acted as better scale. The pics I got in no way do him justice. My best guess is 450-475 lbs. But I could be a bit light because of the wide open space he was in. One way or the other.............to anyone who would shoot him........likely a bear of a lifetime.

Awesome. Looks plenty good.

Osky

Great pics!

On Vancouver Island at this time of year, three of us heard and watched a black bear making a kind of whiny singing sound. It reminded me of whale song though it was not quite as high pitched. None of us had ever heard a bear make such a sound, and I never have since. We assumed it was some kind of mating sound.

Anybody else heard this?

Another possible bear mating sound: A month ago, some kind of large animal made a loud belch/bellow sound at me when I broke a dry limb as I hiked to a lion calling stand. It was several hundred yards away in forest. Two minutes and 150 yards later I scraped through the limbs of a fallen alder, and instantly the thing bellowed/belched at me again, this time from within 100 yards on the old abandoned road. I set up and called, heard something nosing about within the first five minutes, then nothing for the rest of the hour. I guessed that this was a bear in mating mood, doing an interrogatory bawl to ask what critter was making clumsy sounds in the brush.

If in Canada in Fall, I'd assume this loud bawl/belch was a bull moose interrogatory, but not on the Olympic Penninsula. Bear? Cougar? (I've never seen an elk nor elk track in that watershed or might consider elk as the bellower.)

About June 1 on Vancouver Island. This bear was about 350 yards away across a big creek and then a swampy meadow. Point and shoot camera. Looked like a big bear to a friend and to me. Bear season was open and we were seeing bears, but we were fishing and not hunting. The friend lives there and has a 7 foot black bear and I helped a grandson tag one a little larger than 7 foot. Fun to watch bears in the spring. I'm still curious as to how big this one would have measured. We measure hides and skulls, never have weighed one.