Baiting black bear has got to be one of the most fun ways of hunting black bears. It not only gives you a way to look over your trophy, if you are lucky and get several bears working your stand you can watch how they interact. It also gives you an opportunity to get some really good pictures. For me half the fun of baiting is experimenting with different scent and bait combinations. However the game management unit I live in have a very low population of moose so black bear is one of our main sources of meat. Given that and black bear don’t have all that much meat on them so it takes several to get us through the winter. I don’t have a lot of time to do a much experimenting if I want to get a years worth of meat in. I had to come up with a way to get in as much meat as I can in a short period of time. I should mention I live in an Intensive Management Unit, so I am able to get all the black bear I want. Which brings me to Baitem907 they have an extensive line of scents and lures for black bear. I went into Baitem 907’s web site to look around and I got to tell you that place is a candy store bear baiters. Jesse has a full array of black bear baiting supplies. Whooping 8lb scent balls that come in every flavor from maple, peanut butter, marshmallow, bacon with estrus not to mention the standby’s like anise, honey and blueberry.
Eight flavors of small gel scent ball to scatter along trials leading to your bait station.
They have cover scents, scent powders to enhance the smell of your bait, liquid stuff for drags. They even have a burn formula they call Attitude Adjustment for spooky bears. Going through Baitem 907’s site brought me back to the days when I used to stand in front of the glass fronted case at the local candy store wondering how to invest my nickel. What to do? What to do?
After checking out Jesse’s web site and an online forum she is active in I decided to get a couple of big scent balls. I bait in an area with both black bears and brown bears so I don’t use much meat or meat smells, so that left out the bacon with estrus. I don’t use anise much either, mostly because everyone else does and too many bad shots have educated to many bears. I have my best luck with sweet smells so I got a blueberry and marshmallow. I live on a remote Alaska homestead so I only get mail a few times a year. So when the plane came in with my order I was waiting at the lake for it. As soon as the pilot opened the door you could smell the bait balls. The big test would come in the spring at my bait station. How would it last hanging in the wind and rain? They not only made it through both spring and fall seasons without losing potency. When I cleaned my bait stations up last October for what ever reason I left one hanging at one of the stations. In December while out hunting spruce hens I went passed the station and I could still smell the blue berry. They are both in plastic bags in one of my caches now and in just as good a shape now as they were last year. I figure they will both survive both seasons this year. For me that is very encouraging to many times lure are loud out of the bag but by the time the season starts a bear couldn’t smell them if he was sitting under it. I don’t know what they use but they have done their research the smell are natural and they last. One of the biggest advantages I found to 907’s bait balls was I didn’t have to haul bags of bait out everyday. In the past I would have to haul bait to my stations everyday whether I was hunting them or not. Now if I don’t go hunting for a few days even though the bait is eaten up the scent kept the bears working the stations. Judging by the products I used I would highly recommend Baitem 907 to anyone who baits black bear. If you hunt hogs according to Baitem 907’s site many of their bear baiting products will work equally as well on southern hogs. Try them you’ll like it I did.
I’ll still do a lot of my own experimenting just because it’s something I enjoy doing. But when it comes to serious bear hunting I’ll be using Baitem 907 stuff.
PVA Alaska black bear hunt
All pictures complements of Baitem 907