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All Hunting Articles
Spring is in the air. Flowers are blossoming and the chirping of birds is everywhere.
Now let’s kill some bears.
Well at least that’s what the B.C. Government thinks spring is all about.
There will be no grizzly bear hunt in Alberta this year.
The Province has extended its three-year moratorium on grizzly bear hunting for 2010.
"It's impractical to try and establish all the different guidelines in the recovery plan to consider a hunt for this year," said Alberta Sustainable Resource Development spokesperson Dave Ealey.The Province released its new status report on grizzly bears in Alberta last week. It says there are 691 grizzly bears in Alberta up from an estimated 350 bears prior to the report. DNA samples revealed grizzly bears range in density from five to 18 bears per 1,000 square km.
The province's recently released grizzly bear numbers don't tell the full story of what's needed to help Alberta's grizzly populations, Alberta conservationists say.
Jim Pissot, the executive director of Wild Canada Conservation Alliance, and Nigel Douglas, Alberta Wilderness Association conservation specialist, both see the report as a call to the government to limit motorized access to grizzly habitat.
New Jersey’s black bear population has soared to nearly 3,500, a level that can no longer be controlled solely by non-lethal methods, a wildlife biologist said today as the state Fish and Game Council adopted a management policy recommending a six-day hunt in December.
The biologist, Patrick Carr, said the main reason for the growing population is the abundance of food state residents willingly and unwillingly provide. The result, he said, is that the bruins are living longer and giving birth to more cubs than bears in other parts of the country.
FAIRBANKS - Interior hunters won't have to spend $25 on a brown bear tag this season.
The Alaska Board of Game on Monday voted to eliminate brown bear tag fees in all Interior region game management units.
The game board is holding a 10-day meeting at the Westmark Hotel in Fairbanks. After two days of hearing public testimony, the board began debating and voting on more than 130 proposals submitted to change hunting and trapping regulations in the Interior.
Approximately 2,000 black bears are killed every year in California where it remains legal to hunt bears who weigh over 50 pounds (including cubs) with packs of dogs. The California Department of Fish and Game (DFG) has now proposed radical changes to bear hunting regulations that would allow even more bear killing. California residents: we need your help to stop this proposal.
Provincial parks, the Rocky Mountain corridor and a major highway in British Columbia are the main areas where grizzly bears are being killed by sports hunters, according to a new statistical analysis by the David Suzuki Foundation. Using provincial government records the environmental organization plotted on a map the locations where 11,000 grizzly bears have been killed in B.C. over the past 30 years. "It paints a distressing picture," says Dr. Faisal Moola, director of terrestrial conservation for the David Suzuki Foundation.
Bears are now being celebrated at the 2010 winter Olympics in Vancouver. There are pictures of grizzlies and black bears on posters and murals all over town, even a huge white Spirit bear was featured in the opening ceremony. Bears are imbedded in Canadian culture and society; they symbolize our natural world that we are so blessed with, yet come this spring British Columbia is set to make another dubious milestone in its checkered history of bear management.
Q& A about Guide Outfitters and Hunting in BC
MADISON - Wisconsin wildlife biologists have raised the number of available black bear harvest permits for 2010 by 22 percent compared with 2009. With a new population estimate of about 22,000 bears, and a state bear population goal of 13,000 bears, DNR biologists have established a 2010 harvest quota of 5,235 bears and will issue 8,910 permits.
New governor, same old question: What to do about New Jersey's black bears? The number of bear complaints, sightings and incidents rose for a third consecutive year in 2009, reviving the debate over whether the state has too many bears or too few residents willing to modify their lifestyles so bears won't want to come by. Unlike his predecessor, Jon Corzine, who favored non-lethal bear management, Governor Christie has said he favors a hunt - provided there is enough fresh and reliable scientific data to justify reducing the bear population.
Watch out, Smokey. Keep your head down, Yogi.
Saying that California's black bear population has quadrupled in the past 25 years, state Fish and Game Department officials are drafting new rules that could increase the number of black bears killed by hunters each year in the state by 50 percent or more.
The proposal also would allow hunters for the first time to use global positioning system devices on the collars of hounds that they use to track bears, along with automatic triggers that alert hunters when their dogs have treed a bear.
SAN LUIS OBISPO — State wildlife officials have renewed a proposal to open San Luis Obispo County to trophy hunting of black bears.
A large swath of the center of the county would be opened to bear hunting for the first time, according to an environmental report released last week. State biologists estimate that 1,067 bears live in the county and as many as 50 of them a year could be taken, if the hunt is authorized.
Nunavut's environment minister has rejected a wildlife regulator's recommendation for how many polar bears should be hunted in the Baffin Bay region.
The current quota allows the killing of 105 bears a year in the region, which stretches from Baffin Island in Nunavut to northern Greenland.
The territorial government asked the Nunavut Wildlife Management Board in 2008 to consider a smaller bear harvest or a hunting moratorium in the region.
Madison — The sight of a black bear in Wisconsin elicits a range of emotions among us human inhabitants.
"Awe" may be the most common reaction. An animal that can outrun, outclimb and outwrestle an NFL linebacker seems to curry immediate respect.
Sometimes the "fear" instinct kicks in, too, especially if we're on foot and get a guttural sense of our comparable weakness.
If a sow or bruin is raiding your bird feeder, "anger" may even surface.
But rarely if ever does a bear draw "indifference."
That's even true today, when the state's bear population is likely higher than at any point in our lifetimes.
A confrontation with a bear in Allegany County is going to cost a Niagara Falls reservist a week’s salary but he hopes, at least, the incident may serve as a cautionary tale to anyone confronting a wild beast in the woods.
Michael Moore, who has done two stints in Iraq with the Army and is now an Air Force reservist, said he could have been fined up to $2,000 and spent time in jail for killing a bear while hunting this past November in Allegany county.
The bear came up upon Moore in the woods in Birdsall on opening day of deer hunting season November 21.
“I sat there for a good thirty seconds, to see if he would go away,” Moore said as he recalled the incident from his Niagara Falls home in Cayuga Village. “I turned to my right and fired a warning shot.”
B.C.'s policy frameworks fail to take ethical issues into consideration
A new decade has dawned and in a few months yet another year of grizzly bear hunting will commence in British Columbia.
The B.C. grizzly bear hunt has been a source of unrelenting controversy. Both sides are stuck in a continual expert-driven argument in which both camps claim science supports their positions.
Two men who killed a grizzly bear in Pend Oreille County are prohibited from hunting for two years and will be on probation for five years, a federal judge ruled this week.
Callers to Nunavut Tunngavik Inc.'s polar bear hotline have spoken and they're saying bear populations are booming. Paul Irngaut, a wildlife advisor with NTI, said he's interviewed 35 hunters through the hotline. They report signs of climate change, including thinning sea ice, but say that polar bears are adapting to the changes-and thriving, Irngaut said. "Yes climate change is happening, but [hunters] don't feel it's going to have a negative impact on polar bears," Irngaut said Monday. "Polar bears hunt on land, they hunt on open water."
...The sight of a hunter shooting at a bear while standing just off Highway 99 north of Whistler on May 20 shocked Pemberton resident Lana Beattie enough that she reported the incident to authorities....While it was still early in the 2009 bear season, people working to reduce human-bear conflict by preventing bears from accessing garbage in Whistler said they were "encourage" by a dramatic reduction in the number of calls of bear sightings so far this year.....
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