Some interesting info about bears with collars and tags.

Glad you got this together. Yes some bears are long distant travelers come acorn drop time. In Manitoba there was one going swimming across Lake Winnepogosis some 15 miles of water to get to the Burr oaks

good info, thx for posting

Bernie, I know you're passionate about bears. I watched that video and the only thing I got out of it was....
If I had a bear tag for that unit, most likely, I'd try to secure some private ground near that Oak stand.
Somethings "learned" are best left unsaid!

Too many people can't keep their mouth shut when they learn something.
We can GPS a chickadee,hawk,duck,hornet,armadillo, ect .
Overall, we'd just be regurgitating info that has been known for years.
Really not much to learn from collaring bears/wolves ect.
They've been doing what they've done for millennia.

Not dissing you as I know you make income on bears and you do a real good job staying humble.

I disagree. I think I learned plenty from that video. I could never imagine a bear would cover that much ground for food, then return to an area to den.

I hear what you are saying, and I do not give location specifics for obvious reasons. I do know the exact epicenter of where dozens of these bears go every year. Andy told me right where it is. When the GPS collars started showing this mass migration, he made the drive to the area and asked for permission to walk the property. It's all private and quite a bit of it is one large landowner. He said there were places you could hardly walk without stepping in bear scat.

Of course I would never share that location in public, but I may someday go see if I can cruise those woods and just see what it looks like. Seems like it would be very educational. Seems to me there would be a hundred other areas like it around the state, but who knows why so many bears go to that spot. One extended family maybe? Lots more to learn about these amazing creatures.

This is just the beginning of that. I did a story on how far bears travel for Bear Hunting Magazine and I need to put that info into video form. It's crazy. Couple examples, they had a sow near grand Rapids, MN that took off and went all the way up into Canada, and denned near Atikokan. In the spring she emerged with two little cubs and made the 120-mile journey back to Grand Rapids area with those little cubs. Can you imagine those little cubs travelling that distance across lakes and rivers, swamps, deadfall, etc.? They trapped a nuisance bear and took it 50 miles away to release it. The bear was back in a day and a half. Crazy stuff.

There was a bear tagged in the UP of Michigan which was killed by a hunter in southwest Wisconsin. Lots more examples.

The Michigan DNR has found a few bear that galivant all over creation too. One male bear was tagged and collard in Cheboygan Co. (northern tip of the Lower Peninsula) and several months later it was found to be denned up in the Deadstream Swamp, not far from my home. Next summer it returned to Cheboygan Co. for the summer, then once again denned in the Deadstream . Next year it again summered in Cheboygan Co. It never made it back to den in the Deadstream because it was tagged by a hunter that September in Cheboygan Co. That is a straight line distance of between 54 and 93 miles, depending on where in Cheboygan Co. it went. Another male bear tagged in the Baldwin area had a summer range about 80 miles east of where it regularly denned for the winter. Another interesting bear was a yearling collared near Harrison in Clare County. It was mostly a home body and stayed in a relatively small area near the town airport. One day it couldn't be located so the wildlife guys started circling to see if they could get a beep on it. About 25 miles north they got a good beep and the technician was very familiar with that area and the bearing they got was pointing directly toward a DNR bear registration station located at a taxidermy shop about a mile away. I was the taxidermist that owned that studio. The fellow surmised that, since bear season was open, that someone had shot that bear and I was either checking the bear to be registered, or had taken it in to mount. He called me when he got back to the office (less than 2 miles from my place) and asked if I'd taken it in......I had not. He then went back out with his tracking equipment and located the young bear in a thicket about a mile from my place. The following morning they checked the bear again and couldn't find it, nor get a beep on it. They worked south 25 miles to where it was originally, and that young bear was back in it's small area near the town's airport. It had hightailed it back 25 miles south in less than 12 hours! As for bear moving long distances to feed, I don't know how they sense things, but one fall during season we had a heck of a time locating a fresh track to run the last couple days of season. We moved off east maybe 12-15 miles to an area of hills with a bunch of oak. There were bear all over that area. It was as if every bear within a two county area had suddenly shifted over there to eat acorns as well as a heavy and late wild cherry crop. Interesting beasts, for certain.

Good stuff.

Oat field and corn fields are a death sentence for bears when the cue into them. My 2 cent worht....

One area in Manitoba where they harvested salt for the HBC was a large area for bear migration in the fall acorn drop season. The bears harvested made their way down in the salt boats, dried and preserved. Many times the bison hunts did not pan out that was the only food for the HBC forts on the prairies.