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On Oct. 23, the opening day of Maryland’s brief black bear season, hunters harvested a complete of 24 bears. The most important was a 643-pound boar that set a brand new file for the heaviest bruin ever killed within the state. It was checked in by a hunter named Melissa, who most well-liked to not share her final title or the small print behind the hunt.
“Melissa didn’t need publicity, however she’s from Garrett County, and she or he shot it about 8 a.m.,” Maryland DNR sport mammal chief Jonathan Trudeau tells Out of doors Life. “I checked within the bear. She instructed me she shot it as soon as with a .350 Legend rifle and it didn’t go far earlier than falling.”
Melissa’s bear is much and away the largest one ever taken within the state, in line with Trudeau, who’s answerable for Maryland’s bear program. The earlier file from 2007 weighed 615 kilos. That bear was additionally taken in Garrett County, which is one in every of solely 4 counties the place the state permits bear searching. (Of the 24 bears harvested on opening day, all however 5 have been killed in Garrett County.)
Final yr, hunters took 103 bears throughout the six-day season, which is about common, Trudeau says. The most important weighed 427 kilos.
“Maryland often has 100 to 130 bears collected each six-day October season,” says Trudeau. “The present tally [for this season] as of Oct. 26 is 74 bears.”
He provides that Melissa’s 643-pound black bear was exceptionally massive, since a lot of the state’s bears common round 300 kilos.
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“This bear had been seen in path digital camera photographs, and coming into corn fields on non-public land,” Trudeau says. “Melissa didn’t know if she was going to mount the bear or make a rug with its cover. It was a large bruin that’s going to take up an enormous quantity of wall area.”
Maryland points black bear permits through a lottery system, and the DNR sometimes doles out round 950 tags annually. Trudeau says that 90 p.c of these go to residents, and in a typical yr they’ll have round 5,000 candidates in whole. He provides that for the reason that state’s bear inhabitants is rising, there’s an opportunity that extra permits shall be made out there sooner or later.
“Maryland has a wholesome inhabitants of about 2,000 black bears, and it’s a rising quantity with bears spreading to the east and south,” Trudeau says, “[We] have some mixing with black bears in neighboring states, which we’ve proved by tagging animals.”
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