BECKLEY, W.Va., — West Virginia hunters killed 3,195 black bears during the 2015 hunting season. The mark set a new record for bear and breaks the old high mark from 2012 of 2,735.
“We didn’t really predict it this year with the mast conditions,” said Colin Carpenter, Bear Project Leader at the West Virginia Division of Natural Resources. “A lot of it with bears always has to do with food. With the lack of food the archery kill went up, but also adding to it was the mild weather we had in December. The lack of food might have put some bears to den, but there were a lot of them still out and hunters killed them right up until the end of the month.”
It was an all-time high for the archery harvest as well. Hunters killed 1,140 bears during the archery season, 710 with long bows and 430 with a crossbow.
The Natural Resources Commission, acting on a recommendation from the DNR’s Wildlife Section, for the first time had three separate early seasons in 2015 in which hunters could hunt bears with dogs. The first was September 5-10 in Logan, Mingo, McDowell, and Wyoming Counties. The four counties are closed to a rifle season for deer, but allowing for a gun season for bears was a huge success according to Carpenter.
“It was kind of an experiment, we didn’t know whether a season that early would be popular, but it was very popular,” he said. “Those are counties where we wanted to kill more bears, because we don’t have the option of giving them a buck firearms season to kill bears.”
During 2014 the four archery counties had an early bear season at the same time it was open in Boone, Raleigh, Fayette, and Kanawha Counties. During that season, those four southernmost counties produced 24 bears. This year, during a season of their own, more than 120 bears were taken. Boone, Raleigh, Fayette, and Kanawha Counties had their early season October 3-9 and the harvest in those counties was comparable to the 2014 season. A third early season, September 19-25, in the mountain counties gave houndsmen three additional weeks of hunting in various parts of the state. They seemed to respond and then enjoyed great weather in December for their traditional bear hunting season in the mountain counties of the state.
Carpenter was also enthusiastic about bears killed in new areas. Some counties which haven’t had a bear killed hunting in modern times recorded them this year.
“That was one of the great things this year,” he said. “We’re having bear kills show up all the way to the Ohio River. We knew we had bears statewide, but now we’re getting verification through harvest.”
Although the data is just starting to be analyzed, Carpenter said the success of archery hunters in the western counties could impact the possibility of a gun season in those counties in the future. Two bears were killed in Wetzel County during the bow season and hunters killed bears in all counties of the DNR’s District 5, with the exception of Jackson, Mason, and Wood Counties.