Bear Club Hunting Blog

Alex L asked:


Big game hunting is all about the trophy animal when a big game hunter is out looking for the record breaking trophy. The size, the length, the weight is all part of who bagged the biggest trophy. Big game hunting is all over the world, Africa for the large big game hunting, United States for the white tail deer, elk, bear, and other big game hunting. New Zealand for big game hunting birds and other animals, Asia and Russia for the black bear hunting. Hunting tours are set up in different countries to help the big game trophy hunter.

Russian big game hunting for black bear is an excitement any hunter would love to have, not only for the story however, the prize bear in their trophy room. With the population of black bear and brown bear in Russia over flowing, any hunter would have the opportunity to bag a black bear.

With nearly over 100,000 brown and black bears, the population of black bear in Russia stays constant. The bears in Russia are the largest population than any other country today. As a big game hunter, you can see why the hunting is excellent in Russia. With a large portion of black bear hunting concentrated in the Pacific coast and the European parts of the Russia hunting tours offer great packages for the prize trophy.

With the large concentration of black bear in Russia, Kamchatka is the largest habitat of the large bear perhaps in the world today. With plenty of salmon to feed on, the bears equal in size to the large population of bears in and Alaska and the Kodiak Island. As the smaller black bear having advantage over the other bears, they will climb trees to hide from view.

Russia offers the largest population of black bear in the world and most affordable hunting tours. With other places for black bear hunting being expense and the trophy hard to find, Russia black bear hunting is beyond doubt the perfect hunting spot for black bear.

Hunting tours guides have been taking black bear hunters to the wilderness in Russia for years, helping to bag the trophy record black bear. Black bear hunting season in Russia ranges from August to February, depending on the type of hunting a person would choose would be the time of year to go. Tours offer different types of bear hunting in oat fields, over bait, by stalking a large black bear, bear hunting with dogs or at a black bear den.

Hunting tours are set up for 2 to 6 persons to hunt with one guide. They offer lodging, meals, organization of the hunt, four by four vehicle, hunting guides, all licenses, primary processing of trophy and its conservation for transportation, trophy, veterinary examination of trophy, cites, and interpreters. Most hunting tours last up to seven days black bear hunting including some site seeing of Russia and outstanding well-known places.

Russia is the place to go for black bear hunting. With the over population of bear in Russia a big game hunter is sure to find the largest black bear for their trophy room.



Michael

Steve Gillman asked:


It may be true that black bears aren’t as dangerous to backpackers as grizzlies, but there are many cases of black bear attacks - some of them fatal. So even if you are in black bear country, there are a few things you need to know. The first, and perhaps most important thing, is to know how to avoid an attack.

How To Avoid A Black Bear Attack

Be noisy. Generally, a black bear will get out of your way if it knows you’re coming down the trail. Surprise it, however, and it may attack. If you are hiking with a friend, a conversation is enough noise to advertise your presence to the local animals. If you are alone, you may want to wear some “bear bells” or sing a song.

Be less flashy. You’re easily spotted from a long distance when you are in bright, colorful clothing. In Alaska, it has noted that bears see the bright colors and come closer to investigate, while they often won’t see hikers in darker colors. It isn’t clear that this is the case with black bears, but it is something to consider when buying that rain jacket - especially if you’ll be backpacking in open terrain.

Don’t cook where you sleep. Instead, stop along the trail to cook dinner, and then continue hiking for a while before stopping for the night. If you have already set up camp, hike a short distance away to cook dinner. The idea is to keep the odors away from where you are sleeping.

Hang food out of reach. This generally means ten feet high and four feet out from the trunk of a tree - difficult in some areas that don’t have many large trees. Rather than using twine, it is often easier to lift the food bag up with a stick (I use my walking stick) and hang it from a knob on a good branch. While some backpackers keep food with them, in zipped plastic bags inside other plastic bags, unless every last odor is contained, bears are likely to come visiting.

Two Kinds Of Black Bear Attacks

Bears, when surprised - especially if they have cubs nearby - attack to try to scare you away. These are called “bluff attacks,” and may end without contact, or the animal may hit you a few times. With this type of attack, the bear will growl a lot, and seem very angry. Try talking calmly as you slowly back away, or if the attack continues, interlace your fingers behind your neck to protect it, and curl up on the ground. The bear might just bat you around for a few seconds, and then leave.

Unfortunately, this isn’t the only type of attack. There are also those where you are being stalked and hunted. It isn’t common, but black bears will sometimes hunt humans for food. When this is the intent, you don’t want to “play dead,” or you will be soon. Fight for your life!

With this type of attack, the bear will likely be quiet, have his nose down, ears folded back, and be watching you closely as he moves towards you. He is trying to determine if you are easy prey, so don’t be. Yell, swing your trekking poles, and do anything else you can do to convince the bear that you’re too much trouble for a meal.

Putting something between you and the bear can help. A man who was being hunted by a black bear in Michigan continued to push his video camera at the bear as the attack continued for almost half-an-hour. The camera and his yelling kept the bear a few feet away, until his friends arrived (and it made for an excellent video as well). Running generally doesn’t work, but if you have no other choice, remember that black bears are slower when going downhill.

Use whatever you can for a weapon, but be careful about bending over to pick things up. Bending over may trigger a charge. When there are two or more backpackers, try a sustained defense using rocks, sticks and yelling. This can change the black bears mind. Other things that can help include, bear spray, a freon horn and whistles.



Anthony

Philippe De Tiege asked:


If you are looking for the hunting experience of your life, bear hunting is the thrill for you. Whether it is brown bear, grizzly bear, or black bear, bear hunting is a dangerous yet thrilling experience that excites most hunters.

If grizzly bear hunting is what tickles your fancy, travel to Alaska and hunt in the Management Unit 9. Grizzly bears dominate Unit 9. They dominate Unit 21 in Alaska, too. Grizzly bears are considered one of the most dangerous, unpredictable bears in the world, so considerable care is required when hunting these types of bears.

It has been noted that Grizzly bears and brown bears are interchangeable. Outfitters and guides will dispute this belief as they encounter bears - both grizzly and brown - in their day-to-day life. Those that travel on the shore line while bear hunting will experience more brown bears. Those bear hunting more in the interior will come across more grizzlies. Grizzlies are also smaller than brown bears, but genetically, they are the same.

Brown bear hunting is as dangerous as hunting grizzlies. Brown bears are physically larger because they live in a more temperate climate and their diet is high protein, high fat salmon. They are also distinguished by their coloring, which can be anywhere from blonde to brown, and even black.

Black bears, smaller than other bears, are not in any danger of becoming extinct. Their only major threat is poaching. Legal hunting - that is hunting with a licence - regulates the number of bears able to be harvested, which is extremely important to preserve the number of bears in the wild.

Before you go bear hunting, make sure you have the proper equipment to make your hunt successful. Your hunting rifle must be a 30 calibre or higher and the barrel must be channel glass bedded. The best rifle to use is one that shoots consistently in all types of weather. Outfitters will also tell you that you are responsible for your own gear - the ammo, sleeping bags, personal items, and your firearms permit. Make sure you carry that permit with you at all times when hunting. Alcohol is permitted in camp, but only in moderation. Excessive drinking and firearms are a dangerous combination.

Food banks are the recipients of harvested game animals. As a bear is a huge animal, you would not be able to go through that much meat on your own, so outfitters, who are required by law to salvage the meat, donate it. You can take some bear meat home, if you wish.

Learn the tagging system of the area you plan on hunting in. Knowing this information will allow you to hunt other kinds of wild game - pending that you have the right permit to do so - while bear hunting.



Douglas

Tala Bar asked:


LEGENDS OF WILD SWANS

The Wild Swans at Coole

W.B.Yeats

The trees are in their autumn beauty,

The woodland paths are dry,

Under the October twilight the water

Mirrors a clear sky;

Upon the brimming water among the stones

Are nine-and-fifty swans.

…

But now they drift on the still water,

Mysterious, beautiful;

Among what rushes will they build,

By what lake’s edge or pool

Delight men’s eyes when I awake some day

To find they have flown away? (s. link).

One of the best known swan stories is Hans Christian Andersen’s tale of The Wild Swans (s. link below). In it, a widower king had eleven sons and one daughter, Eliza. He marries a wicked sorceress who resents the children, and turns the boys into swans who fly away. The Princess goes out to look for them, and on the way she cries so much she creates a lake of tears. On the bank of this lake she finds her Swan brothers, and a fairy appearing in her dream tells Eliza the secret of their release: if she gathers enough nettles to make eleven shirts, when they wear the shirts they will be released from the magic. The girl collects the nettles, and sits in a cave in a forest to do her sewing. (It is clear that the cave in the forest, as well as the young men turned into swans, transport the girl and her brother to a place outside the realistic, civilized world into the realm of Nature and myth). Eliza is found by a young king who had been hunting; he falls in love with her beauty and takes her to his palace as his wife – nettles and all. During her stay in the palace, many jealous people tell the king wicked stories about her, calling her a witch, and in the end he is forced to burn her on the stake. While Eliza continues, even in prison, to sew her brothers’ shirts, they come to visit her in the shape of swans. At last, when she is taken out to be burned, they fly over her; she throws the finished shirts at them, and they return to their forms of eleven princess, except the youngest whose shirt is not finished and he retains one wing instead of an arm – thus retaining some remnant of the world of Nature within civilization.

Similar stories appear in Grimm with some variations, although in one story the girl has only six brothers instead of eleven. In all these cases, the swans are male; the situation is reverse, however, in Chaikovski’s beautiful music to the ballet Swan Lake (s. link below). That story tells of a wicked sorcerer, who turned Princess Odette into a white swan; all day she flies in the company of her girl swans, and only at night she lands on the bank of a lake and returns to her form as a woman. (The lake, by the way, was formed from the mother’s tears shed over her daughter’s fate; we have here a double figure of mother/daughter of a Water goddess). The story says that only if a young virgin man swears eternal faith to her love and marries her, she will be released from the magic; but if the prince betrays his oath, she will dies. Prince Siegfried of the story indeed falls in love with the Swan princess, but the sorcerer entices him to betray her by making him show his love to the dark, artificial figure of Odile he himself had created. Odile, actually, beside her opposite color, is the splitting image of Odette (here is a double image of white/black, light/darkness, or good/evil). After the betrayal is discovered, Odette prepares to die; but then the Prince comes and tries to save her. His love releases her from the magic, but they drown together in the lake.

Details shared by the two stories are turning humans into swans by sorcery; the hunting king/prince; and the lake of tears created by a female. The main differences between the two are the genders of the bewitcher and the humans turning into swans. It may be noted that both Eliza and Siegfried are names taken from Germanic mythology; the lake created by a female’s tears makes her a Water goddess. It may be assumed, then, that both fairy tales are based on much earlier European mythology connected with swans. In order to understand their basic meaning, then, it may be interesting to turn to such ancient myths.

It seems that many similar stories are common all over the continent, wherever swans appear. Such tales are known from Sweden, Germany, Romania and others, (similar to such where the swans are replaced by seal, bears or other animals), that in some cases shed their outer skin and take human shape; it is significant that in some of these stories, like in Andersen’s and Chaikobski’s, these people are bewitched, but in others they do it of their own free will. In an Online site called Swan Maiden (s. link below), a hunter encounters a swan or a group of swans, fly onto the bank of a lake; they shed their feather cloaks, turn into human maidens and go swimming. The hunter snatches one of the cloaks and hides it, thus trapping her owner to come and be his wife. They live together until she finds her cloak again and flies away. The stories end in various ways, from tragedy to happy ever after.

It is highly significant that all these stories involve females as swans, not males. But an old Irish stories tells it in a different way (s. link below). Angus son of the Dagda falls in love with a swan-girl who appeared in his dream. Afterward, he meets a group of 150 swans, flying in pairs, which are tied together with a chain of silver; but his girl wears a crown and a chain of gold. When Angus calls out to that particular swan, she leaves the group, turns him into a swan and they fly away together, tied with a golden chair. It is clear here that the swan maiden has her own power to change at will, and is bound by any male sorcerer; what is more – she has the power to change her lover as well into a swan, which makes her a veritable Swan goddess. This is a hint at the initial function of the swan in European mythology.

***

It seems that, in the Hindu-European tradition, there a number of Swan goddesses. Some of these goddesses were connected with death, and others with some qualities of the Underworld (where dead people go), like wisdom and prophecy. Robert Graves has defined the swan as a bird of Death, and the three Greek figures of Graeae, or Gray Ones, clearly demonstrate this idea: they were described as “fair-faced and swan-like”. They had gray hair from birth and shared one eye and one tooth which, according to Graves, they used for prophecy. Their genealogy goes back to the early descendants of the Earth and Sea, and their separate names were Enyo (“horror”), Deino (“Dread”), and Pemphredo (“Alarm”).

A Celtic Swan goddess was Brigit, to whom this bird was sacred; she was in charge of the Underworld qualities of Wisdom and Crafts. In Hindu mythology, the swan was sacred to Saraswati, goddess Wisdom and Learning, who sat on a throne made of two swans.

Other deities are connected with the swan through its shining white beauty. Such figures are Greek Aphrodite and Roman Venus, to whom the swan was sacred. But another symbol of beauty, much more complicated to these Love goddesses, takes this connection much further. That was Helen, who was the daughter of Leda and the Swan – or, in another interpretation, Leda as a Swan; after all, she was the one who laid the Swan egg, which the two pairs of twins sprung out: Helen and Clytemnestra; Castor and Polydeuces (known as Pollux) – the Dioscuri (“twins”) who “embodied the two halves of the year”.

The multiplicity of the swan’s image – Death, Wisdom, Motherhood, Beauty and Love –

is well represented in the figure of Helen, and is connected with another trait of that bird. The swan is a migratory bird, as is well expressed in both Yates’ poem and in Lemke’s painting. It is actually seen not only in autumn and the dying of the year – hence its connection with Death, but also in springtime, connecting him with idea of revival. It is, then, a symbol of the Great Nature Goddess who was in charge of the yearly dying and resurrection.

According to a site called Goddesses and Priestesses Connected with Hera (s. link below), Helen’s name means “bright one, light, Sun, fair;” it refers to her as a Harvest goddess, when the Sun is at its peak (in the Mediterranean area). Another title of Helen’s is Dendritus – “she of the trees”, referring to her as a Fertility goddess in charge of fruit trees; her tree festival was celebrated annually in the isle of Platanistas, where she was worshipped until late 19th cent.. By another title, Rhigidenes, meaning “rigidity”, Helen was in charge of death in various forms, including the orgasmic death of the penis. This combination of characteristics suggests she may have begun as a Pillar Goddess like Asherah or Aphrodite, worshipped with ecstatic dance and sexual rites.

This idea is the basis of the theory of the swan being a symbol of the dying year in autumn, that comes after Midsummer, the peak of the sun and harvest time, to be resurrected again in spring. The Dioscuri, swan born, were kings of the two halves of the year, annually dying and resurrected. Their mother, then, either Leda or in her embodiment as Helen, was actually the Great Mother Goddess, in charge of Life and Death, symbolized by the swan, appearing regularly in Spring and Autumn. Graves connects this myth in his book The Greek Myths with the idea that “at midsummer, they (the swans) flew north to unknown breeding grounds, supposedly taking the dead king’s soul with them.”

The swan appears also as Laima, a Lithuanian Mother Goddess (who is also represented as a Goddess of Fate, determining the life and death course of human beings), who was in charge of “blessing, unity, destiny, love, luck and magic”, according to the site by her name. Her symbol is said to be a wreath, and her totem is the swan. As a Mother, it may be noted that the Hindu god Brahma hatched from a swan’s egg. The swan was also sacred to the Christian Mary, Mother of Jesus. Male individuals could become swans only by her grace, either when she grants them her love as a maiden, or when she takes their souls away in death. Such Death goddesses were the Valkyries, who flew in the shape of swans when looking in the battlefield for warriors who died bravely, to take their souls as a reward to the Paradise of Valhalla.

However, Death goddesses of ancient myths turned into wicked witches in fairy tales. Thus, it was the same goddess in Andersen’s tale who, as the Sorceress Queen turned the boys into swans, and as the Maiden turned them back into humans; the young fairy in the story is another appearance of the Princess herself. Such an equation of Old Witch = Young Maiden appears in Chaucer’s poem The Knight’s Tale.

The swan, then, is one of the manifestations of the Goddess as a Maiden, Mother, and Death Crone, who causes her male charge to be born, to grow to a young handsome hunter, to make love, to die and descend to the Underworld, and finally to come back to life and begin the cycle all over again, as a symbol for the ever changing and circulating year. But the power of that goddess was taken from her with changes of social structure by “a wicked sorcerer”, who put himself in charge of her and of everything on earth, to destroy at will, as we can see in Chaikovski’s magnificent ballet.

http://www.northendgallery.ca/autumnswans.html - Autumn swans

http://www.aaronshep.com/stories/064.html - Lohengrin

http://hca.gilead.org.il/wild_swa.html - Hans Christian Andersen’s The Wild Swans

http://www.abt.org/education/archive/ballets/swan_lake.html - Chaikovski’s Swan Lake

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Mute.swan.cygnets.750pix.jpg - About swans

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swan - Swans in human culture, wikipedia

http://www.pitt.edu/~dash/swan.html - Swan Maidens tales

http://www.swansongs.org/swanmyths.htm - Irish myths and legends

http://www.swansongs.org/swanmyths.htm - Swans in shamanism

http://www.hindudevotion.com/saraswati.html - Hindu Saraswati

http://www.artofeurope.com/yeats/yea4.htm - WB Yeats’s poetry

http://www.moonspeaker.ca/hera/helen.html - Helen

http://findagoddess.com/display.php?HERNAME=Laima - Laima

http://www.pantheon.org/articles/g/graeae.html - The three Gray Ones



Jackson Trader

Soul asked:


Why is it okay to hunt the poor innocent deer and other animals and eat them for dinner but there is such a big deal about this dog fighting. Why is deer hunting looked at as a sport but dog fighting is a crime punishable with prison time? Is it possible that because the majority of hunters are caucasion and the people who have dog fights are minorities. They have trophies for animal hunters and some people even hand the deer heads in their living rooms. I think both are wrong and if Michael Vick has to do jail time for gog fighting, hunters should also do jail time because both are cruelty to animals.

Justin