There are now so many bears in PA that my son and I don't start setting traps until the week of bear season, which is the week of Thanksgiving. The problem is afterwards, with warm weather they still are not denning up at the usual time. So this year we waited until mid-December to set, and did not catch any bears as a result. We also did not have a great trapping season, either, with a lot fewer cool catches, and the usual slew of possums. Not sure what the solution is. Whenever there are bears around, our traps will get messed with or will have a bear in them, which sucks and is too exciting for me. When we wait for them to den, then a good bit of the trapping season is lost. And yes, we do bear hunt. But we haven't killed a PA bear since 2006...

use smaller traps so bears can pull out easy I had to do this for wolfs here in u p

biggest we go is MB550, running them almost exclusively except on water sets, and I am not going back to smaller traps. the MB550 is about as perfect a trap as can be had, fits fox, coyote, and bobcat. guy from maine said at the 2017 PA rendezvous said no. 2 sized traps were just right for fisher, but i gotta say, that 550 looks right. doubt i will connect on a fisher anyhow, so the 550s remain. we gotta shoot more bears. our season is four days and we kill between 3,000 and 4,000, and there are still a pile of bears left afterwards. PGC is very conservative about harvesting everything down to grasshoppers, so killing more bears is not going to happen until they are eating three people a day for a year

I'd be getting me a bear tag for that area~

We do, oh we do. We have a good sized crew that hunts, and we do drives along with two other camps. But the country is big, very rough and steep, and the bears have all the advantages. We do not bait in PA, and the season is really just four days, with a few extra days tacked on in more developed areas, like the Poconos. So it's crazy in the woods during Thanksgiving week, the bears go into hiding in the steepest, thickest laurel patches, and then the bears come back out to play the day after season ends. A lot of people are pushing for longer bear seasons, at least make them concurrent with deer. Anyhow, we do hunt bears, and that is no guarantee of getting one. I have only killed one PA bear in 20 years of hunting them, though we do have this policy of no widows no orphans - in our camp we do not shoot cubs or sows with cubs.

For those who followed the Maine thread last fall, we had a nightmare season dealing with bears. I haven't figured out a great way to deal with them other than pulling a set if it's hit two or three times, and waiting till they go to bed. Thing is, bear bait sites are great draws for marten/fisher so we often set near them. Bears finally went down about halfway through the season. I ended up with a dozen or so marten/fisher boxes damaged beyond repair. Who knows how many snapped traps that could have caught fur. Years with low food abundance are better as the bears tend to go to den earlier.

Unfortunately here in VA the bears don't really go to den much. We had a cold spell that was between -5 & 10 degrees w/ wind chills for 3 weeks solid & still had bears on our trail cams about every other day. They were however smaller ones. Maybe the bigger ones denned up for a few weeks, I don't know. Just gotta keep on keepin' on I guess...