Bears start on poplar leaves and grass here. Their poop is whitish. They will also eat winter kills if they find any. But it is mainly greenery until their plumbing starts acting normal.

Buddy that works in Maine has been seeing quite a few bears. He says their scat is now dark. Lots of winter kill moose in his area.

This pile of crap in the yard is mostly corn. There are corn fields up and downstream, maybe a mile away. There is always corn smashed down in the corners of a field or the outside rows, that just isn't harvested. Seems like the deer, coons and crows always hit the outside rows the hardest. Sometimes it's just not worthwhile for a farmer to even mess with, so they might leave 2 or 3 rows standing.

It's still early and it's going to be a while before there is much in the woods for bear to eat. If I'm not mistaken, bear will start working ant hills before long. Breeding season isn't long off.

Talking about winterkill and all. Years ago I was talking to a biologist about winterkill deer. I always figured that would happen during January, Feburary and maybe March. He told me that you can still have winterkill up through April and even May. Just one of those things, too little too late.

A man stopped by the other day and told me that he did see a sow bear with 4 cubs.

Years ago when the DNR had tracking collars on some of our female bear, they averaged a little bit more than 2 cubs per litter. If I'm not mistaken it was 2.3 cubs per litter, but that was a small sample of bear too. I think they only had 15 or 20 animals collared.

Sunday morning, 5/22/22 I checked my lured rock camera, forget exactly how long it had been since the last check? I'm thinking 6, maybe 8 weeks? The only thing that I had on camera was a mangy coyote and a medium sized bobcat. Zero deer. Zero bear.

One bad thing about waiting so long between checks, I've got a birch twig out 10 feet from the camera, as the leaves are filling out, it's pulled the twig down setting off the camera every time the wind blows.

Charlie, one of the owners of the mountain property and I were talking a while back, he asked what I thought could be done to improve things for the game. He was looking for something quick and easy. The entire property is all woods, no fields, the only clearing is a log landing. Otherwise there is nothing but the road.

Long story short, about a month ago I went up with a rake and a broadcast seeder. I've been raking the leaves from the high side of the road, in places where I think seeds might grow. The first day I put out 10 or 12 pounds of red clover seed. It's starting to come up. I'm not sure if it's going to get enough sunlight or not? Once the timber fills out, it'll be lucky to get more than 2 or 3 hours of sun per day.

I've got some alfalfa that I'm going to sow the next trip up.

The areas that i hunt have lost most of the ash trees! The loggers still take the standing dead ones.But it sure open up the woods and it is getting thick. The deer will have lots of budding spots this coming winter.I have seen 3 fawns so far,but a lot of single doe standing in fields by themselves,that probably are going to or already did have fawns.

All of our bigger ash trees are dead, I don't know of a healthy ash around here bigger than six inches at the stump.

Not sure how ash trees are doing in other areas, but it seems the stump of our trees are still alive, growing sprouts. They'll be more like a bush in another 5 years, unless they die too. On the mountain where I have my cameras, ash sprouts are coming up by the hundreds, I guess from the roots of the dead top big trees? I first noticed the sprouts 2 or 3 years ago. Most of them are less than 3 feet tall now.

One thing that I have noticed, in different areas, we've got a good many young oak tree sprouts coming up. Little trees, 5, 6 or 8 inches tall, with only 2 or 3 leaves. Chestnut oaks are pretty easy to ID because of their leaves. When that mountain was timbered the last time, 25 years ago, they took about all of the oak trees. What oak trees that are there, are pretty much a chestunt oak or black oak. I don't know timber as well as I should, but there are no white oaks on that property.

A man did tell me that he'd seen 2 fawns the other day, but he was in PA. I guess PA's turkey season just ended?

Moe and I were out turkey hunting the other week, we were up around 2,600 to 2,800 feet in elevation, and I noticed the oak trees seemed to have a heavy bloom The jack-oak brush too.

Talking about turkey hunting and all, I'll tell you this and I agree. Big Donnie's Dad (Glenny) told me years ago that a turkey, at a range of 300 yards knew within 30 feet of exactly where the calls were coming from.

Think about it, you'll be out and hear a rife shot, you have an idea where it came from. Give me 2 shots, I'm getting closer to your location. Give me 3 shots and I've pretty much got you pinpointed. Same way with a turkey call. Screach, screach, screach, he's got you.

Above I mentioned Big D's dad Glenny, I forget the details, but he was either on Round Knob or up in the Square Woods, and called a gobbler off of Coal Mountain. That's a pretty good stretch across there, Glenny killed the longbeard in the air. I forget how far he said the bird hit the ground from where he was sitting? It was close. But that turkey zeroed in on him.

Talking about Big D. and his father Glenn, it wouldn't be proper if I didn't tell you. Glenny had a stroke and died 2 or 3 weeks ago, he was 79. Lifetime family friends, his wife Cookie is a sweetheart, Big D. and I have been best friends forever. I've been keeping an eye on them, so far everyone is doing ok. You hate to see them go, but we all know that we can't keep them forever.

Lots and lots of fond memories with Glen! You know? It's like I told Donnie, we've been fortunate to have had him as long as we have.

Sorry for the loss of your friend.

Ash trees are still fine here. I have a wack of black ash on my woodlots.

Spoke to a guy that hunts turkeys. He says that he can't call them more than 300 yards or so if they are with females. He compared them to moose. When the males have company, they stay put unless it is to fight off another males.

It's always sad to loose good friends.
We have one more day of turkey hunting this season,
My son and i had a good season but no shots fired.
A little story, about 20 years ago i tore my hand up @ work(mason)
anyway i was off work because of my hand and decided to spend the
season turkey hunting.It took me 16 days of hard and early mornings
of hunting to shoot a jake,that was my best season of turkey hunting.Them dang things get under my skin!!!!!!!!!!

Search: Bear family shimmies down tree.

Or go to the hompage of ABC news, in the bottom left corner they always have short video clips. I just checked, it's still there. I think the video was taken in North Carolina, nice big sow with her cubs.

Turkeys are fun to play with and they can get to a feller, if you let them.

Talking about killing a jake turkey, there's nothing at all wrong with that. We're all looking for a 20 pound bird with a 10 inch beard, sometimes you do, sometimes you don't.

My opinion people walk away from a lot of gobblers that are on the way. It does take a lot of patience to sit there and watch when you can't hear or see anything.

Anyone that's ever turkey hunted much, can relate to this. You'll be sitting there working a bird and it'll just shut up. After 20 minutes or a half hour and a couple more calls, you still don't hear anything. You've got a woodtick crawling up your neck, it's getting hot and getting late, you'll stand up and take 2 steps and see it run off or flush. If you'd have sit there another 10 minutes, you'd have killed that bird.

But when you know he's out there, just out of sight, he's hunting for you then and it does get pretty intense. But, that's what makes it fun.

I've watched gobblers out in fields and powerlines with hens, fluff up and sturt around, and you know darn well that it can hear my calls and not make a peep.

Jared, one of the guys that hunts on the mountain where I have my cameras, he got a picture of a fisher the other day.

I checked the "lured rock" camera yesterday and chopped off the tree limb that was setting off the camera. In 2 weeks I only had a picture of a coon. A daytime picture of the coon and it was 75*. That's kind of odd.

Moe gave me a bucket of fish heads and trimmings, I dumped them off, back 40 feet or so behind the camera, 2 weeks agao. If you put stuff like that in front of the camera you'll end up with 100's of buzzard pics.

Above we were talking about winter-kill deer and all. I'll tell you about those fish. Moe and Donald caught the fish on a Saturday, cleaned them up and I got the stinking mess the next morning. I took them straight to the mountain. I had my dog with me and was out fooling around with her for 45 minutes or so? The fish were sitting on the back of the truck, in the shade yet. When I picked up that bucket, I'll bet there were 50 blow flies that boiled up. The flies had already started laying eggs.

It'd be the same with a deer carcass. After a week or 10 days, about the only thing that would be left is the hide and bones.

Talked to a man that lives about 5 miles east of town, he's got a mangy bear hanging around. He's to give me a call if he sees it again, I'll take my big dog out there and see what she'll do.

Moe is getting pictures of a buck deer now, it's horns are about 6 inches long now. Lots of time for them to grow yet.

Above I was telling you about seeding the road banks with clover, I could find more yesterday than I did 2 weeks ago, but it's not doing much! It's been 5 or 6 weeks now and we've had some nice rains too. Never know, it might take off?

Guys, if you remember I was looking for a big bear last winter, never did get him behind the crosshair, but I had fun looking for him.

I think about last season and one thing still makes me wonder. Since season went out and all, I've found out that there were more bear hounds on the mountain that I first knew about.

Not sure how many days total that I hunted on the mountain last season, but I do remember seeing a total of 19 deer. With 13 of them being the last day. Three fawns, 2 bucks and 8 doe. (That 6 point that I scoped over that day, he'll be nice this season.)

I understand that a pack of bear hounds will bunch up the deer, but I'm still curious as to what it was that spooked those 8 deer and ran them past me. We'll never know, that's just part of hunting.

Anyway, I hadn't been on the mountain since May or so? About 3 weeks ago I went up and started cutting out the road. It was a mess, took me half a day to get out to my second camera. On my first camera I had a bear and a bobcat picture. Two pictures of deer, and that's about it, a couple of coon pictures. On that camera that makes a total of 4 deer pictures in almost a year.

On the #2 camera, I had more coyote pictures than anything else. Several deer pictures, I had a salt block just up the hill. I need to replace it, next trip up. No bear or bobcats or fox.

I have a picture of 4 coyote pups, looks like they are running wide-open. And we're not sure, but it almost looks like the one pup has a coon tail in it's mouth. It could be just the way the sun is hitting it? But it does look like a coon tail in a way.

Several pictures of the pups, I guess their den was there someplace. That picture was taken in August, they were about the size of a fox at the time.