On camera last night

Male? Female?

Size?

I've got till Friday to foot snare and am considering it

really hard to say with just one pic,

female is my guess

I think it looks likea sow head too

Perfect shot angle right there = shoot......jk

Sow.

Osky

All I got! Lol.

My first thought was that it wasn't blocky enough for a boar.


Either way, a real big bear.

I'll probably leave her be

It’s black

We can't say that anymore

Lol

Huge

There can be an oddity of course but according to the bear researchers I’ve worked with in northern Minnesota, female black bears structurally grow until they are sexually mature and things happen. They can still put on tissue and fat of course after that.

At my camp since the 80’s I’ve only had two sows make the 300lb mark, barely. It was explained to me those two sows for whatever reason did not have cubs the first few years they could have and so had grown larger skeletally.

I know some areas may cause exception to this, my area is the heavily bushed north country. Sows on camera can appear large but rarely are what they seem.

Osky

The odds say it is a boar.
Most females are denned up by now, especially if they have Cubs or are pregnant.
My 2 cents

If that bear did not have cubs with it it is likely not a sow. A bred sow would already be denned up for the winter. Reason being that the fertilized eggs do not implant in the uterus until she dens up, and bred sows den up by November 15 in order for this to happen. If she does not den at this time the cubs are born too late and will be too small to follow the mother when she leaves the den in spring. Many things in nature go by a certain time schedule!

It's a yearling, pretty hard to tell males from females when they are young like that. Pretty fat though.

One photo can be very decieving.

There are many variables as to when a sow or boar go to den, wether they stay denned, how often they wake during the winter and how often they go walk about during the coldest snowiest times.
When I ran cameras for deer, thinking we had any deer here, many times thru to November tagged sows showed up alone. Minnesota primarily tags sows.

Osky

Go measure the tracks.

That's my experience, a small bear 1or2 years old will have large ears compared to their heads.
The bear in the picture is an older bear , and a large bear, male or female is just a guess, but looks like a boar to me.

It would be nice to get a better vantage point on the pic, If you have a nice size boar the butt end almost has the same symmetry as the front rounded chest and a sow's back legs are pin shaped slightly more. This is the first bear I passed on,September 13th to shoot my Cinnamon Bear- my neighbor took him the following weekend, he said he weighed 388/lbs.