State’s bear kill drops to lowest level since 1988

Post date: Nov 4, 2014 6:41:06 PM

By Joe Albert Associate Editor

OutdoorNews.com

October 23, 2014

Grand Rapids, Minn. — The state’s bear harvest fell for the second consecutive year, and the preliminary total kill of 1,618 animals marks the fewest killed in a season since 1988.

But given that the numbers of permits available the past two seasons – 3,750 each year – are as low as they’ve been in at least 30 years, wildlife officials aren’t surprised.

“It’s in line with what we were expecting, based on the lower number of licenses the past couple of years,” said Dan Stark, DNR large carnivore specialist. “It’s much pretty on track.”

This year’s season ended Oct. 12, and once the DNR tabulates the final figures, it’s likely hunter success rates will be at about 30 percent, or slightly higher. Hunter success over the years has averaged about 25 percent, Stark said.

The bear harvest during the 1980s slowly increased, and reached 1,509 in 1988. Through the 1990s and early 2000s, the harvest was generally in the 3,000- to 4,000-bear range, and it nearly hit 5,000 in a couple of years.

“The (current) bear population could be similar (to the late 1980s), but the thing we base our license numbers on is that the population just isn’t expected to grow as fast as it did then,” Stark said. “We had rapid growth in the bear population in the late 1980s and 1990s. There were more prime-age females in the population that were producing more bears every year. That allowed the population to increase.”

Officials now estimate there are 10,000 to 15,000 bears in the state. They backed off on the number of permits available to hunters to try to increase bear numbers in some areas.

“It seems like we’re at a point where the population is pretty stable, but we’re just not seeing an increase in bear numbers,” Stark said. “If the population starts to show an increase, we might make adjustments” to the number of permits available to hunters.

Based on recent DNR analysis of the age of bears harvested in the state, “There just aren’t as many of those 4- to 10-year-old females in the population,” Stark said.

In addition to lowering the number of permits available in the state’s quota area, the DNR again allowed hunters in the no-quota area to shoot only one animal this year. Even when hunters were allowed to shoot two bears in that part of the state, only about 50 people each year did so, Stark said.

“But when we’re trying to increase the bear population, it didn’t make sense to continue to allow two bears to be harvested in the no-quota zone,” he said.

Of the bears killed this year, 385 came from the no-quota area.

Tooth samples

Stark reminds hunters that it’s mandatory to submit a tooth sample from bears they shoot. The tooth samples are one of the key ways the DNR monitors the state’s bear population.

“We base all of our license numbers on this information, and the better compliance we have, the better information we will have on what the bear population is doing,” Stark wrote in an email. “The trend is that we don’t get 30 percent of the teeth from bears registered by hunters. Considerations for changes to increase compliance with hunters submitting their teeth for registered bears have been discussed, and we would rather not make changes if hunters do a better job of submitting teeth.”