Color Phase Bear Numbers in Idaho

It’s almost time to start bear hunting here in Idaho. We can bait here so I always set a few up even though I prefer to spot and stalk with my bow. Here’s a little run down of our bait/trail camera experience a few years ago. I knew we had a high number of color phase bear but when I crunched the numbers I was surprised.

After we purchased trail cameras for our bear baits, we were surprised not only with the number of bears he had, but also with the color phase bear AND the quality of the bears. We always knew we had big bears around, but we had a lot of big bears around. Way more than we thought we had. After the season was over, when we compiled the pictures and did a conservative count of the individual bears (some bears hit the bait over and over again even on the same day, so we tried not to count those bears more than once).

Here are the numbers that we came up with:

We had at least 37 different bears hitting the six baits that had trail cameras on them and 81% of those bears were color phase bear!

• 56% Chocolate
• 19% Black *Most of our black bears have chocolate around their shoulders. We have very few coal-black bears.
• 14% Blonde
• 11% Red and Cinnamon

Here are a few of the pictures we got that season:

What do you think? Leave a comment below.

You may also like:

Northern Idaho Spring Turkeys