Just wondering what you all are seeing out there when venturing out into the wild to conduct BF work or otherwise. Many contend that BF could not possibly exist because no bodies or remains have ever been found. Believers state that the odds of finding a carcass in the wild is very rare, and many pose the question " how often to you stumble across a dead body or set of bones of a bear. Well its time to put that to the test. There is a seperate poll. so please vote.

Feel tell us about any bear carcasses you have found in the wild. If voting in the seperate poll, please only vote once ( don't know if that is regulated) and answer as accurately as possible. If answering "other", please explian here.

I have never found a bear carcass in the wild, and this includes one that I put a 180 grain Nosler Partition through the boiler room with a 30-06 at 100 yards and which I tracked for at least a quarter mile.

I found a partial black bear mandible when out in the woods once. I searched around for other skeletal remains but the piece that I found was all that was there, at least that I could locate.

I have come across other animal carcasses and skeletal remains in the woods before, but most of them were prey animals.

I've got a cool bear skull photo that my wife just took and put on our computer but being a computer knuckle head I can't figure out how to attach it here. Any help out there?

It says that it's 272 KB (whatever that means) and it's dimensions are 1024 x 768 (again, whatever that means).

Thanks, Norcal

Thanks for the responses so far everyone, please don't forget to vote on the poll covering this same topic found under the general discussions thread group.

Again Thanks and keep it coming!!!

I think I got it right this time.

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I found this guy while working in an overstory of mixed conifer and hardwood with an understory of old growth Manzanita brush. Really large thick brushy area. I suppose a hunter could have wounded him but that's unlikely as bear hunting around here is done with dogs and they tree the bear and then it's just shot out of the tree. I don't hunt but it doesn't sound like much of a sport unless you're a dog or a really big bad bear. There's some pretty badly torn up dogs on occasion.

All the bones were there in one area as far as I could tell but the other critters had spread them around a bit. All were bleached white and I'm guessing kind of old because some of the teeth have weather cracks in them. I only picked up the skull and half the mandibula that you see in the picture. My wife had them in her first grade classroom until she retired and now they sit in my office appropriately in front of a Smokey Bear poster. It doesn't seem to bother Smokey though.

I've found several other carcasses but they were all obviously the result of human (cars and guns) activity.

Now... if I could only find a big ape like skull.

Have fun, Norcal

2 times. The first was found near Ely, MN. It was skinned and gutted. hide was piled up next to the body. Skull, guts and paws were missing.
Second was found near Superior,Wi. Skull, part of neck and paws were missing, it was not gutted or skinned.
I did call wardens, not sure what(If anything)happened.
Here in WI I have found deer with only antlers or backstraps removed. I have never understood why anyone would do these things.

Ah yes, the old "dead bear bone are never found in the wild argument".

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Here's a chart showing grizzly bear deaths broken down by Natural, Hunter Havest, Citizen Killing, Management Control, Accident, and Unknown causes.

According to the chart, four bears were found in the Northwest Territories, ten found near Swan Mountains, and twenty (from 1973-1985) in the Yellowstone Ecosystem, that had died of natural causes (old age, intra- and interspecific killing, starvation, rock or snow avalanche, den collapse, or unknown reasons). That's 34 dead bears already, and doesn't include ALL the natural bear deaths indicated on the chart. And keep in mind, that chart is only a sample of grizzly bear deaths, so we don't know how large the actual database was. Obviously, somebody found and reported these dead bears, but they may have had no connection whatsoever to this forum.

RayG

Saw a test on tv a while back... They put a freshly deceased deer in a wooded area and put a time lapse camera on it. It was not during the winter, but within a couple of weeks there was nothing left but bones gradually being covered by leaves.

Deeds of that nature are usually only performed by poachers. Take the parts worth the most on the black market, paws, skull, gallbladder and leave the rest. Sad but true

Brown bear distribution and density:



So, approximately 54,250 brown bears in North America, with the U.S. portion being about 1,500 in the lower 48 (primarily Montana, Wyoming, and Idaho) and about 31,000 in Alaska.

34 bear carcasses out of the 1,500 in the lower 48 and the thousands in Canada represents a fraction of a percent.

Got any data on the number of black bear carcasses found? It is estimated that there are nearly a million black bears in the U.S. and Canada.

So if there are only, say, 5,000 sasquatches on the entire continent, what are the odds of finding a skeleton?

And before you come back with "how do you know how many there are/aren't", I'd say that the fact that no confirmed skeletons have been found (along with a lot of similar evidence) suggests that there aren't many of them.

I would guess most bear carcasses, and most graphs showing how bears died, are found and reported/recorded by biologists, or others looking for that data to report. If you're not looking specifically for something it's much easier to miss it. If you're publishing a report, or data, you're typically looking for the material in the report.

Years ago, I did find a bear skeleton up on Red and White Mountain in Eagle County. No hide, just bones. Wish I had taken the skull. No idea how it died, how long it was there, etc. It was in the middle of summer, not hunting season. Pretty rare find. It was not far off the trail.

COGrizzly, black or brown, could you tell? Too bad either way, my skull (the bears, that is) is one of my treasures (among many).

Have fun, Norcal

Exactlly what I am trying to get at...

I will PM one of the mods to see if the poll itself can be merged into this thread...

I would be one of those in the camp that says that remains will be virtually impossible to find and no conclusion should be drawn from that.

Chimpanzees have lived in Africa for 7 million years and it is estimated that there are approximately 1 million living there at least up until that past several decades. If the averge chimp lives 40 years then that means 175 billion chimps have romped around the Africa continent.

The first fossilized chimp remains weren't discovered until 2004.

So, the complete lack of BF bones and remains is utterly meaningless to me.

Hi


wiiawiwb : Are you pretty tight on those numbers ? That seems amazing that it took so long to find a Fossil with that many chimps running around over so many many years, Guess Nature has been doing a good job of cleaning up it own mess,

Peace
Tim

Hi RRS,

Here are a couple of links for you:

Nina Jablonski was the individual who indentified the first fossil which came from the Rift Valley in Kenya.

http://www.calacademy.org/newsroom/release...il%20chimp.html

The 1 million number of chimps comes from Jane Goodall's website. Look at the bottom under the "Become A Chimpanzee Guardian".

http://www.janegoodall.org/chimp_central/default.asp

The 7 million years is an estimate and most articles I've read use a 4-8 million year range. They can be referenced at a few places:

http://www.bradshawfoundation.com/chad.php

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/4201666.stm

Hope that helps RRS.

Wiia

Hi

As i expected, A very good and accurate post, With all that go's on over there in Africa digging and generally ripping up the place you would think fossilized remains would be found all the time, At least thats what i thought,

Thank you my friend

Peace
Tim

To answer the question, Yes. Just recently in the woods by my house. It had been terrorizing the neighborhood over the summer and into fall. We were walking and found it.

Any guess on the cause of death? Old or young? Wonder how you figured out it was around?

Back then I didn't know the difference between a black or brown bear skull, I hadn't dove into the Colorado Grizzly thing yet. But I'm pretty sure it was a black bear. No grizzlies in that area of CO.

What I find ironic about whether or not there are grizzlies in Colorado is that David Peterson has never seen a CO grizzly, yet had his own sasquatch sighting down in southern Colorado. (He is the author of "Ghost Grizzlies", a book about whether or not there are Grizzlies here. Anyway, google his name and "big butt" and other key words and he actually did an article write up on some bowhunter magazine. I should start a thread on it, its pretty cool.

Tangent! Ya, wish I had grabbed that skull. Wish I had taken pics of those prints too. Lots of regrets in my life!

We think it was old, no marks, no wounds. VERY large, my neighbor across the road watched it go over my fence (and pull it down) in two places. Earlier it took down the suet feeders and rip them apart.

I remember the Wiseman attack:



The bear that attacked Wiseman was a 350 lb sow (Wiseman was a big man, nearly as big as the bear, and he killed it in hand-to-hand combat), and biologists confirmed that it had borne young during it's life.

This is yet another example of the "experts" really not knowing what's out there. It's difficult to believe such folks when they emphatically state there there is no such thing as a sasquatch (using reasons like, "we've never seen one") when they don't even know if there are any brown bears out there.