Trapping in bear country

Just started trapping in the mountains & black bears are setting my footholds off like crazy (see their paw prints around my set). Anything I can do about this?

Bigger traps?
Sorry couldn't resist.
I honestly don't know what you could do other than blind sets no lure or bait.

Get out of bear country.

Trap water critters

I once had a Newhouse #6 I sorely wish I had never parted with for I'll never own another. I've got a boatload of bear around me but they never bothered my traps, not once. They sniffed at them but then just walked on by.

Dont use drags!!!!

Nothing you can do about the bears...

Also, a strong-springed 1.75 coil will hold a 60 pound cub...and momma will not leave him. Trust me.

Yep , seen pictures of them held in as small as 1.5s .

Dang, not what I wanted to hear. I'm running all MB450s & have them set along the side of trails, 2 tracks, & intersections.

had them setting off my set till they went in dens

The bear dog have started around here now should keep them a little busy. I trap cats here in the mountains and there is nothing you can do to stop them just hope they get out. I use a flat set and bed close to my attractor that seems to help some but not all the time.

I'm in a area that is loaded with bear too, last year I didn't start trapping til mid January and never had any problems. This year I put some sets in a week ago and I've had one bear come into a set so far. I have some ko extremes and Jake's and I've been worried about catching one. Hopefully they'll send up soon with the rough weather we've been having

I shifted from checking traps to running trail cameras and checking some logging roads I drug so the tracks show up. After calling some bear hunters every time I find a bear track or see one on a camera for the last week I think I can trap unmolested now. Pretty sure the one that was throwing my traps was the one that had an arrow in him from bow season. There is too much food here, no chance of them going in for any more than a few days, maybe late January for a couple weeks. The males anyway. The things can smell something edible for miles. If they get a bite to eat one time, they will check out any scent associated with that meal. They are worse than possums, at least you can catch the possums and take them out.

Doesn't help. Had one walk off with my #5 Bridger last spring. All he left was a very impressive 20 foot catch circle on a 10 foot drowning rod.

Deer stop on a snare does not work on a bear leg either. Usually the bear will use his teeth and back or break the snare off but 4 years ago my father got a pretty good bite on his hand releasing a cub from a snare. Oh yea, he was 85 at the time!

Must have had a beaver in the trap

I suppose the 10' drowning rod went along too... ?? Wow

Dog proofs don't help much on them long tongued, bait stealing jerks either.

I wouldn't count on much running a bear off if it has a mind to be where you're at. Not only that, they can cover an incredible amount of ground.

I shot a black bear years ago in Alaska that was sporting a radio collar and ear tags. No harm, no foul and nothing illegal about it. Not saying the biologists would have just as soon I had left it alone but they were glad to get the collar back and gave me $25 for returning it.

The neat thing about it was they sent me a map indicating the areas they had made contact with that bear and also gave me vital statistics as to its age and weight. That bear had denned the previous winter twenty miles away from where I shot it.

On my registered line I had lots of issues early season. I solved it two ways. First, I killed a few bears. Second, I waited to trap later till most had gone to sleep.

I had floats with rats stolen, beaver stolen, boxes destroyed...traps all messed up.

Not my pics.
If we didn't set till they went to bed ,it wouldn't be until now .
We have to deal with wolf catches at all times anyway .

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...