Getting a bear in Pa. is hard. This hunter has a 5-year streak ― and tips for your success

Getting a bear isn’t easy in Pennsylvania, but a Carbon County hunter appears to have found the secret.

Ryan Hausman, 30, of Jim Thorpe, shot his fifth bear in five years on the final day of the statewide archery season.

“I went out that morning and, the best part, I was only in the woods for 30 minutes,” he said in a telephone interview. “Hunting bear is all about location, location, location. If you are not in a good location, you’re not going to see bear."

Hausman said the land in Carbon County has what he believes is ideal habitat for bears to thrive. “I have a lot of south-facing slopes and very thick and steep hollows where they like to get up and lay in," he said.

That’s where he hunted Saturday. “I got on one of their runways, I knew there was a bear in the area and I found one of their travel corridors along the riverbed and he came straight down to me at 9:30 in the morning,” Hausman said. When the bruin got within 20 yards, Hausman shot the bear with his crossbow; it ran about 15 yards and fell in mountain laurel. The Pennsylvania Game Commission estimated the bear to weigh 258 pounds.

Hausman easily remembers when he killed his first bear. “I was in shock. I never would have thought I would shoot a bear in my lifetime," he said.

Four bears later, “I don’t even know what to say about it. Most people never shoot a bear in their whole entire lifetime, let alone five bears. I put my time in. I do a lot of scouting."

The Game Commission reports somewhere between 1.5% and 2.5% of bear license holders get a bear in any given year.

“Most hunters, 43%, only ever harvested one bear,” Game Commission black bear biologist Emily Carrollo, said in a news release. “But 11% harvested five or more bears in their lifetime, and 1.5% harvested more than 10 bears in their lifetime. And the average number of bears harvested per hunter in a lifetime was 1.5."

Over the past five years, Hausman has found bears in a variety of hunting situations.

“Three out of five of my bears I actually shot while driving (walking through the woods) toward other people,” he said. “I actually shot while crawling on my hands and knees through laurels."

In 2022, he shot a 249-pound bear with a muzzleloader, and in 2021 he got his largest bear, at 615 pounds, with a rifle. “That took us 10 hours to get out of the woods because of the terrain,” that he said included crossing three creeks. His bear was the state’s fifth heaviest weighed in that year.

In 2020 he found a bear that weighed 235 pounds, and his first bear weighed 205, both shot with a rifle. The Game Commission’s inspection of the 235-pound female in 2020 revealed it was 17 years old. Females, because of the nutrition requirements to rear young, don’t grow to the size of the boars. As a comparison, the 615-pound male was estimated at 7 years 10 months old.

All the experiences were memorable for Hausman. Last year’s bear, after it was shot, ran up an oak tree about 40 to 50 feet and died. “We had to cut the tree down to get the bear,” he said.

He found the right habitat to hunt. “Three of my bears were taken in a quarter-mile radius,” he said about the land that’s straddles private and public property. The property has south-facing slopes that receive the morning sun for warmth and featured the thick cover that bears prefer.

Bear seasons

Bears are plentiful and widespread across Pennsylvania, with an estimated 15,000 roaming the woods. The general statewide firearms bear season runs Nov. 18-21.

In the extended firearms bear season that overlaps with the statewide firearms deer season. a hunter with a bear license can take a bear from Nov. 25 through Dec. 2 in WMUs 3A, 3B, 3C, 3D, 4C, 4E and 5A, and from Nov. 25 through Dec. 9 in WMUs 2B, 5B, 5C and 5D.

Hunters should be aware extended season bear hunting no longer is permitted in WMUs 1B, 2C, 4A, 4B and 4D, as was the case a year ago. The Game Commission no longer needs the season to meet its bear management objectives in those units, Carrollo said.

Through all of those seasons, the limit is one bear per hunter per year.

Bears by the numbers

So far this year, hunters in the archery, muzzleloader and special rifle seasons shot 1,180 bears. The largest is estimated to weigh 708 pounds and was killed in Butler County. Tioga County has the most bear harvests so far this year with 79. Lycoming County has 65 reported bear harvests and Potter County hunters had 63 inspected so far.

During the 2022 seasons, hunters killed 3,170 bears overall. That was down from 3,621 in 2021, but ranked as Pennsylvania's 14th-largest harvest.

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Tips for seeing bears

When walking through cover, hunters should stop often and look for hiding bears. “They will let you walk right by them and not move if you don’t see them,” Hausman said.

He was crawling through thick brush the year he shot the 600-plus-pound bear. “It was laying down along a creek,” he said. In the excitement after the first shot, he lost the magazine from his rifle and had to load single bullets into the gun for follow-up shots.

Hunters should be in areas with acorns and heavy cover. “If you find the acorn crop, you find the cover and then you will find the bear,” Hausman said.

Scouting has paid off for him over the 11 years he’s hunting for bears. “Location is everything. If you find the food, then you will find the bear,” he said. He’s found worn paths that bears clearly frequent and uses the same paths.

Handling five bears

Hausman has had three of bears mounted by a taxidermist. He has shared a lot of the meat with family and friends and has it made into sausage and kielbasa. “I always grew up thinking that bear meat was disgusting; that’s just what I was told, that people never liked bear meat. I had bear meat made into sausage and kielbasa and it was the best thing I ever ate in my life,” he said.

The key is getting the animal cooled down as soon as possible and removing its hide. The 615-pound bear had 9 inches of fat on his back, and that creates a problem for cooling the meat. Wait too long and the meat spoils.

He said bear hunters should have a plan. “I keep ice in my freezer just for that,” Hausman said. After the bear cavity was filled with ice, he had Saturday’s bear checked by the Game Commission.

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It can be a challenge to remove a bear, and it’s good to have a plan in place on who you can call if you need help. Nine people were involved in getting Hausman's heaviest bear out of the woods and he was fortunate to have friends with an UTV.

While he enjoys archery hunting for deer and bear at the same time, bear has become his priority during his five-year streak. “I want to keep that thing rolling. A goal for me every year is to get a bear. I won’t stop until I have a bear,” he said.

“Put the time in and you’ll find the bears,” he said.

Brian Whipkey is the outdoors columnist for USA TODAY Network sites in Pennsylvania. Contact him at bwhipkey@gannett.com and sign up for our weekly Go Outdoors PA newsletter email on this website's homepage under your login name. Follow him on Facebook @whipkeyoutdoors, and Instagram at whipkeyoutdoors.

This article originally appeared on The Daily American: Hunting bears in PA is challenging, but one hunter has a 5-year streak