BECKLEY, W.Va. — The first of the early bear hunting seasons in West Virginia gets started this Saturday. August 31 is the opening day of the season for bear in Mingo, Logan, Wyoming, and McDowell Counties in West Virginia. It’s one of the earliest opening days for bear hunting in the United States. Only the state of Maine’s youth season opens earlier.
It’s set that early in those four southern West Virginia counties for a couple of reasons. Those counties are archery only for whitetail deer and the season for bear is set at a time to create as little impact as possible on trophy hunting for deer. The early season also draws a lot of out-of-state hunters into the region since it’s Labor Day weekend. A lot of those out-of-state bear hunters, particularly from Virginia, North Carolina, and Kentucky take advantage of the opportunity on a holiday weekend to travel to the West Virginia coalfields.
The early seasons were created as a management tool to roll back bear numbers in areas where they had become too plentiful. Colin Carpenter heads up the Bear Project for the West Virginia Division of Natural Resources and said they have modified the counties which have early seasons because of the trigger.
“In 2022 we took our mountain counties out of that early season format because we had achieved our objective and lowered the bear population in those counties. We’re currently letting the bear population rebound in those areas. Probably at some point down the road, we’ll open the early season back up in those counties, just not yet,” he explained in a recent edition of West Virginia Outdoors.
Along with the early season opening this weekend, there is an early season from October 5-11 in Boone, Fayette, Kanawha, Nicholas, and Raleigh Counties. The hunts are with or washout hounds as are the hunts in the Mingo, Logan, McDowell, and Wyoming Counties.
But the Natural Resources Commission approved a new wrinkle to the early bear season for 2024. A season without dogs will be held from September 21-27 in all or parts of 13 different counties which are not typically bear hunting areas. They instead border those traditional bear hunting counties to the west. Those include Barbour (west of Route 92 and Route 250 from Belington to the southern border of the county), Braxton (west of I-79), Calhoun, Clay (North of Elk River), Harrison, Lewis, Mercer, Monongalia, Monroe (west of Route 219), Roane, Summers, Taylor, and Upshur County (west of Route 20).
“Essentially it’s an expansion zone for bear and we worked into our most recent bear plan revision giving those counties the option of an early season. They’ll be allowed to use a firearm, without dogs, to kill a bear in those counties. It will be a new opportunity,” Carpenter said.
The varied opportunities for bear hunting also include a season to coincide with the antlerless deer season, the buck season for deer, and the traditional December season.
“From a conflict standpoint, it’s been pretty good. We had a flurry of bear complaints in early May and June and we were worried about the berry crop because it got real dry, but the berries where there and they stayed in them. It’s been a fairly slow August which means the bears are finding natural food somewhere and that’s a good thing,” said Carpenter.