While the official tally has not yet been tabulated, it looks like the 2023 Pennsylvania bear season was the lowest in more than 15 years.
Preliminary numbers indicate hunters tagged 2,914 bears across all seasons this fall.
Travis Lau, the Pennsylvania Game Commission spokesman, said that number will likely grow a bit once “bear checks completed by officers that have not been reported as of yet” are added to the running total.
If those additional bears don’t push the total over 3,000, then 2023 will mark the first year since 2007 that Pennsylvania hunters have bagged fewer than 3,000 bears.
Hunters took 2,363 bears in 2007.
They shot 3,170 bears in 2022 and 3,621 in 2021.
The record year for harvest was 2019, when hunters bagged 4,653 bears.
Prior to the start of the 2023 season, the Game Commission estimated there were about 15,000 bears in Pennsylvania.
The harvest numbers reported so far for 2023 are listed on the Game Commission’s website, which logged bears as they were checked in by hunters at the agency’s checking stations.
All bears shot in the state must be taken to check stations, where they are weighed, teeth are removed and other checks are performed by Game Commission staff.
According to Game Commission records so far, the biggest bear taken in 2023 was a bear weighing 691 pounds. It was shot in Pike County.
The heaviest bear ever recorded in Pennsylvania was a bear weighing 875 pounds that was shot in 2010 in Pike County.
Besides the 691-pounder, five other bears weighing over 600 pounds also were reported by hunters this past season.
They were: a 645-pound bear shot in Schuylkill County; a 636-pound bear shot in Lackawanna County; a 630-pound bear shot in Monroe County; a 616-pound bear shot in Carbon County; and a 605-pound bear shot in Northampton County.
These weights all are estimated live weights based on the dressed weights of the bears brought to the check stations.
While there were no 700-pound bears reported this season, there were three shot in 2022 that weighed more than that mark.
Although Pennsylvania has some remote areas, it’s not exactly dominated by vast wilderness that some associate with bear populations.
Yet Pennsylvania hunters annually bag some of the biggest black bears taken in the world.
Not all states and nations where black bears are hunted keep detailed records of the weights of harvested bears, like Pennsylvania does.
But the heaviest black bear on record is one shot in New Brunswick in 1972 that weighed 902 pounds dressed, which put its estimated live weight at about 1,100 pounds.
While a bear eclipsing 800 pounds is rare for most places, Pennsylvania hunters have shot six in the last 15 years alone.
Official trophy records kept by the Boone & Crockett Club gauge black bears according to the size of their skulls.
In that record book, Pennsylvania leads the way with 29 of the top 100 entries of all time.
Getting back to the 2023 bear kill, hunters in Tioga County took the most bears, with 176 recorded so far.
Following Tioga in the list of top-five counties were Lycoming County, with 169 bears; Potter County, with 154 bears; Pike County, with 142 bears; and Bradford County, with 137 bears.
Bears were shot in all but nine counties. Lancaster, York, Chester, Bucks, Montgomery, Delaware, Philadelphia, Lawrence and Washington counties are the counties where no bears were taken this year.
Surrounding Lancaster County, 42 bears were taken in Dauphin County, 16 in Berks County and 10 in Lebanon County. In all those counties, the bears were shot in the mountainous, northern-most townships, far from their shared boundaries with Lancaster County.
Breaking down the 2023 bear kill by season, the Game Commission reports that five bears were taken during the early archery season, which opened Sept. 16 in Wildlife Management Units 2B, 5C and 5D.
The most bears – 1,231, were shot in the combined archery/muzzleloader/special firearms season.
The archery portion of that season varied by WMU across the state, with the majority of WMUs hunting Oct. 14-Nov. 4.
The muzzleloader season ran Oct. 14-21, and the special firearms season for junior and senior license holders, active duty military and people with disabled hunters’ permits ran from Oct. 19-21.
The statewide firearms season accounted for 1,086 bears. That hunt ran from Nov. 18-21.
Finally, 592 bears were shot in the extended firearms seasons, which ran from Nov. 25-Dec. 2 in WMUs 3A, 3B, 3C, 3D, 4C, 4E and 5A, and from Nov. 25-Dec. 9 in WMUs 2B, 5B, 5C and 5D.
The single-best day for bear kills in the state this fall was the firearms opener, Nov. 18, when 699 bears were shot.
LATE PHEASANT STOCKING CHANGES
An outbreak of avian influenza at a Northumberland County game farm has prompted the Game Commission to adjust its late-season pheasant stockings in order to protect its breeding stock for next year.
The flu outbreak was detected at Martz’s Game Farm, which is a popular, private pheasant hunting facility near Dalmatia.
The Game Commission does not take any birds from Martz’s for its own stocking program, but the agency’s Mahantango Game Farm is located not too far from Martz’s.
The concern is that the flu might spread to the Mahantango facility, so the Game Commission is planning to move its birds from there to its Loyalsock Game Farm in Montoursville, once testing confirms the Mahantango birds are safe.
To make room for those birds at Loyalsock, the agency had to quickly stock the birds being held at Loyalsock that were marked for stocking last week and this coming week.
Instead of splitting the stockings over two weeks, all the Loyalsock birds marked for stocking were released last week.
This affected stockings in Adams, Berks, Bradford, Carbon, Centre, Columbia, Cumberland, Franklin (State Game Lands 235 only), Lackawanna, Lehigh, Luzerne, Lycoming, Monroe, Montgomery, Northumberland, Perry, Pike, Schuylkill, Snyder, Sullivan, Susquehanna, Union, Wayne, Wyoming and York counties.
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P.J. REILLY | Staff Writer
Lancaster County receives pheasants from another Game Commission game farm, but it wasn’t scheduled to get any more birds this season anyway.
“This wasn’t a decision the Game Commission took lightly, because we know that pheasant hunters have been looking forward to the late small game season pheasant releases and will be inconvenienced by our making these adjustments on short notice,” said Ian Gregg, the Game Commission’s Wildlife Operations Division Chief.
“However, we believe this precautionary approach is the right thing to do because it will significantly reduce the risk of disease impacts that would be far more devastating to pheasant hunting in the long run.”
