Bear Chat

Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources to host online bear chat May 19 at noon

Join DNR staff for an online bear chat Thursday, May 19 at noon. Species experts will be on hand to answer questions ranging from homeowner tips to avoid bear conflicts to habitat and behavior. Visit the DNR website, dnr.wi.gov, and search keyword "chat" to submit questions and view responses from DNR experts. Here, you can also view past chats and sign up to receive email notifications.

For more information regarding bears in Wisconsin, search keyword "bear."

Rendering Bear Lard

Very few bear hunters make use of the fat harvested from their hunt so if there is a bear season where you live, there is probably free fat to be had.  I've yet to hunt bear but thanks to some friends who do, I seem to be able to come up with some every year.

Bear lard is just as good as any other lard for frying.  Bear lard makes for the best pie crusts.  Bear lard, often blended with beeswax, is also used by some for waterproofing leather boots.  I've read it can be used in your hair.

If I had to guess why bear lard is preferred for some of these uses, I would draw attention to its low melting point.  At room temperature, bear lard will be a thick liquid.  Kept in the refrigerator it will remain soft.  It only hardens up in the freezer.  That low melting point makes the lard a lot easier to mix through the whole batch of dough when making crust and ease of rubbing into boots or your locks.

Rendering bear fat is a lot like rendering any other kind of fat with the exception of the previously mentioned high melting temperature.  When rendering sheep lard, for example, it is a pretty simple task to get the lard to set up in the cool garage.  With bear fat, however, much cooler temperatures are required.  The lard only becomes firm enough to handle just as the water itself is beginning to freeze.

Once the lard is solid enough to handle, cut it up into smaller pieces and place them in wide mouth jars which are sitting in a large crock pot in warm water.  This allows the lard to melt just enough to make sure each jar is filled.

Bear lard does seem to go bad in the fridge quicker than other lards.  Consequently, I always store it in the freezer.  I'm told lard can be canned but with bear lard anyway, I feel better with it in the freezer.

Half the fat from one bear.  Pardon the mess on the stove.

As the fat thaws in the stock pot, cut it up into small pieces, keeping the water at a slow boil for two hours after all the fat has thawed.  Those solids (cracklings) can be used for making cornbread, used in dog food, or thrown to the chickens on a cold winter's day.

Fish out the fat solids, rinse them in hot tap water and return the rinse water to the vat.  This lard sat in a 25 degree garage for 24 hours and is still soft to the touch.  At 48 hours it was very solid to the touch and ready to process.

Cut the lard into chunks that will fit into your jar.

Scrape any gunk off the bottom.

Put chunks into jars and then set them in warm water to melt.  The quarts for the eating.  One jelly jar for boots.

Bear Fat Potatoes for Breakfast

I can discern a small difference cooking with bear lard, as opposed to the sheep lard I have used for years.  Cooking in bear fat, however sound cooler.

I don't hunt bear, at least not yet.  A friend does, however, and only a couple members of his party make use of the fat.  He brings me fat, I give him a cut of the lard, bingo, you have an example of emergent order.  We are an economy.

The potatoes were purchased a year ago and have done well in our root cellar.  Monday I'll make the trip out to Nuto Farm in Rice Lake, Wisconsin, to pick up 500 pounds for the next year.

According to Northern Plains Potato Growers, that makes my family above average.

We also pick up a year's worth of onions and six months worth of sweet potatoes.  We'd buy them for the whole year but, despite trying a couple of different storage options, I can't yet get them to keep beyond six months.

Bear Hunters: Watch Your Step

Gil faced a decision and had just seconds to make it.

The buck of a lifetime had crept up behind his deer stand and was angling away from him and about to slip behind some brush and disappear.  It was not moving the way other deer had as it came into the clearing.

This is probably how this buck had lived long enough to grow into the buck of a lifetime.

Gil was properly equipped.  He had the skill set.  The deer was, as we would later pace off, a mere nineteen yards away.  Gil took his shot.  It was a difficult shot but it was reasonable to believe that he was going to kill that deer.

I met Gil because there wasn't much of a blood trail and Sparta and I were called in to lend some assistance.  In retrospect, I think he hit the deer in the meaty part of the neck or the high back and it will likely survive.

After this experience the buck of a lifetime is liable to become a ghost buck, showing up only at night on random game cameras.

The last wound bed: Sparta took us another 250 yards before loosing it suggesting he went across a highway and into an open field.

Gil is a resident of northeastern Barron County Wisconsin.  His full-sized four wheel drive pickup truck is immaculately clean.  He wiped Sparta's paw prints off the dash within 20 seconds of the last time I got out. He works at an auto body repair shop.  He grew up a few miles away.  He's a hunter, a fisherman, and a land owner.

He is a good-old boy in every best sense of the word and he's had enough of bear hunters.

Specifically, Gil has had enough of bear hunters who use dogs to run and tree bear before dispatching them.

Black bear are an elusive species.  They avoid humans, and move in rather random patterns through the landscape.  Consequently, there are only two efficient ways to hunt them.  The first is to lay bait so that the bear becomes accustomed to traveling to a particular place and eat the bait.  The hunter than ambushes the bear when the season opens.

The second way involves using large fast hounds to catch the scent of recent bear passing and follow that scent to the bear who then climbs a tree to escape the hounds but where it is held until the hunting party arrives.

A neighbor with game cameras on his 30 acre woodlot tells me there a three distinct bear families that make our immediate area home.  I've never seen them, and I spend a fair amount of time outdoors.  I've lived in the area twelve years and I've never seen one that wasn't caught in the headlights of my car, though I run across bear sign and bear dens on a regular basis.

Bait works fine but as a dog man myself I am sympathetic to those who hunt with dogs.  It is an active and kinetic way of hunting.  You'll more than meet your daily step goal on your fitbit.

It connects us as human hunters with our oldest of hunting companions: our tribe members and our dogs.  Baiting bears is fine and I understand why people do it.  It just isn't something I, and those like me, are in to.

Not every abuse of rights comes from the government.

I was surprised when Gil adamantly and repeatedly complained about bear hunters.  Most, no all, previous objections to bear hunting I have heard comes from a place of ignorance, from people unconnected to the region's hunting traditions.

Given the state political situation, I'd have expected him to be more sympathetic and understand their plight.  I'd have expected him to reflexively support other hunters against the anti-hunting lobby, found primarily in the urban centers in the southern third of the state.

The fact is, his understanding of bear hunting was deeper than my own.

His complaint came down to a simple issue of trespassing.

On occasion the violators were hunters from out of state (Minnesota is a short drive from Barron County), sometimes it was a guy down the road.  The brute fact is that he is tired of catching stray hounds crossing his property; he is tired of giving his lecture to their owners.  He has experienced how difficult it is to match hounds caught on game cameras to owners from down the road or seen driving away without of state plates.

He's frustrated by continually finding gut piles next to his field or within site of his deer stand.

His property rights are being abused and ignored but not not by the government.  The problem is his fellow citizens.

He is weary of making the difficult decision to not turn in the fifteen-year old first time bear hunter to the authorities who chased an exceptionally large 450 pound black bear to his property where it was killed. He doesn't want the kid to face the consequences of what is, at root, bad parenting.

It is an age old conundrum, how to confront the assholes without becoming an asshole?

Gil wants to be asked permission.  That's all.  He wants to be respected as a landowner.  He wants bear hunters to go through the hard work of contacting landowners before letting loose their hounds.  Few people will say "no" if they know the people running the hounds. It means bear hunters need to put in the time in the off season of building relationships.  At least in Gil's experience, that is not happening at present.

He didn't say as much but the frustration I heard in his voice reflected a readiness to support the end of hunting bear with hounds if that is what it takes to win back his property rights.

We will always have the complaints of individuals who have nothing but a passing and ill-informed encounter with hunting. Veterinarians will and should continue to have a voice to help us keep our dogs healthy. I welcome canine advocates who may not be hunters themselves but can maintain enough objectivity to help keep us all honest.

Bear hunters are treated well in Wisconsin hunting tradition and law, if that is to continue, they need to keep land owners on their side.

Let's keep these hounds self-actualized
http://www.wvliving.com/Winter-2013/The-Great-Bear-Hunt/

If bear hunters loose rural land owners, hunters who care and know just as much about our wildlife as they do,
turn their backs on bear hunters, they will loose the privilege of hunting bear with dogs.

In the process they will have done harm to other hunters who use dogs in the hunt.  Once the political pendulum begins to swing, it continues to swing until it overshoots the rational middle.

The north does not have the traditions of the south, hunting with dogs is on a less stable foundation.

As someone who only recently was given the opportunity to track wounded game with his dogs, the question has a second order impact on me as well.  Every hunter has skin in the game when it comes to how hunters are portrayed in the political media and we all are at risk of shame when a negative portrayal is correct.

If we do not police our own, we will find that we are all being policed; and deservedly so.

Why should we be granted responsibility if we fail to act responsibly?

Gil had to make a split decision on whether or not to take a shot at a deer.  At least in one part of Northern Wisconsin Bear hunters need to take a long look at their ethical practices.  It is time for some of the long hard work of re-building a relationship of trust with landowners.  They've had to face this problem before and it is time to do it again.