BECKLEY, W.Va. — The first hunting season of the fall in West Virginia opens up this weekend. The early bear season starts Saturday and runs for nine days in Mingo, McDowell, Wyoming, and Logan Counties in the southern coalfields. Hunters have the opportunity to kill a bear, with a firearm, in those counties as a way to hopefully reduce the number of bears in that part of the state.
“Typically when we are looking to add days of hunting opportunity we’re trying to bring our numbers in line with management goals. In those four southern counties, bear numbers are above management objectives. What we typically do is bring the season in earlier in the year when all bears are available for harvest and what we typically see is a higher percentage of females in the harvest and that’s what we’re trying to do is harvest more females,” said Colin Carpenter, Bear Project Leader for the West Virginia Division of Natural Resources.
The timing of the hunt in those particular counites has several reasons. First, those are the counties where hunters can only kill whitetail deer with a bow and arrow. The counties are a huge draw for hunters looking to kill trophy bucks when deer season arrives. . The early bear season is placed around Labor Day to make it as far from the archery hunting season as possible so as not to disrupt those hunters planning to pursue a whitetail later in the fall. The season is also the earliest bear hunting season in the mid-Atlantic Region. Some New England states open bear season around this time, but West Virginia stands alone amid neighbors and Carpenter said that makes it attractive to out of state bear hunters.
“It’s become a pretty popular season. We see a lot of out of state bear hunters coming in to hunt this season since we’re one of the earliest bear seasons around,” he explained.
Populations of bears have exploded in West Virginia. Three decades ago the DNR estimated bear numbered fewer than 500 in the state. Those were confined to bear sanctuary areas in the high mountains of West Virginia. Research by the DNR at the time concluded the best way to help rebound the population was delay hunting season until after pregnant females had gone to den. Since the pregnant females go into hibernation first, the season was moved to December and over the course of about a decade the population grew. It’s now expanded to all 55 counties where in some cases the bear are too plentiful and there needs to be a thinning of the numbers. Carpenter said the idea is to reverse the change which was made to grow the population.
“Bears ended up being way more adaptable than we ever thought they would be. Turns out if you give them some habitat and protection, they take off and prosper,” he said.
The DNR continues to monitor the population closely to make sure the pendulum of bear population doesn’t swing too far in the other direction. The state requires each successful hunter to remove one of the bear’s teeth and send it into the agency.
“The age we get from that harvested bear is what we use to reconstruct that population and that’s how we see what the population is doing and the trend over time,” he explained.
The tooth offers that age. Instructions on how to extract and submit the tooth to the DNR are included in the DNR regulations brochure and on the DNR website.