bears in spring??

[trikesnmud]

looking for some opinions..when do they come out and is there a difference when blacks and grizzlies appear?

[Tree Guy]

Hey Trike,

I ran into a Grizz yesterday! I was working on a trail clearance job in Sibbald Flats, below the Moose Mountain lookout trail.

Anyway his tracks went up the road about 1km and he went back into the bush on my trailhead (of course). Cool part, though, there were two wolves following his every step. (PM me and I will e-mail them as I haven't tried the PhotoBucket thing yet).

He hung around us most of the day, but there as a degree of confidence holding a running Husky 575!;)

From what I have heard in regards to your question, I believe that the Grizz get up a couple of weeks earlier than the blacks, but I could be wrong.

[trikesnmud]

hi: was just curious if anybody had seen them out yet, thanks for the reply. I'm not a hunter of any sort but we do a bit of quadding north of Edmonton. When quadding the thought of a bear siteing is always in my mind somewhere as I seem to have the most quadding experience in the group and being who I am, I'm just concerned about the wellbeing of the group. We have run into a few bears over the few years we been doing this...five bear in one day once. Fortunately they are always scared and running. I guess someday we may encounter a different situation. Anyways thanks for the info.
If you can send the pics trikesnmud@hotmail.com works
thanks

[BrownBear416]

I don't think you have to worry to much about black bears if you are in a group and on quads Grizzly's come out of there dens depending on the year of course anytime in early April and blacks are usually out around the the later part of April.I dont know how far north you are but i am 2 1/2 hours north of Edmonton and we dont see many grizzly's.. Hope this helps answer your Q's.

[jrs]

edit-double post sort of.

[jrs]

Black bears can get aggresive when large and in areas with lots of use and limited hunting. We had one climb on our quad and circle the other guys i was working with last summer. The quad had only been off a few minutes and chasing it away once with the quad resulted in it coming back and the guys calling it a day (season had closed 2 or 3 days before, otherwise i would have gone down their in the evening and taken care of the situation myself :) ) The only other issue i know of invloving ATV's was a grizzly out by Hinton that climbed into the same guys argo and eventually wandered away. Made them worry for sure. I'd say your pretty safe in a group though.

[trikesnmud]

hey thanks for your input, I appreciate it!
I was kinda interested as well in your experience, when would one expect the bears to come out. I know it varies from year to year and from area to area, but approximently when do they show...north of Edmonton?

[Tree Guy]

A buddy of mine is a surveyor. One morning travelling in the bush, his truck quit. As he was on his back under the truck about 45min later he smelled something! A large boar had come up to the truck to check it out (windows open, food inside) unaware my friend was under the truck, and then the bear smelled something!

Apparantly as my friend turned his head from under the truck to see what the smell was, the boar did exactly the same thing to see what the smell (knowing my buddy, probably doughnuts!:lol ) was from under the truck! They met nose-to-nose two feet away from each other! He said that he didn't know who was more suprised!:rollin He got stiches in his head from jumping....bear ran away!