Guided Fall & Spring Black Bear Hunting

Black Bear

Nakina is famous for its Moose hunting and that is what most outfitters in the area concentrate on. Black Bears are a resource that not many Nakina outfitters take advantage of and this has resulted in our ability to offer you the best Black Bear hunt you will ever experience. This is your best chance at harvesting the trophy Black Bear of your dreams.

Our Black Bear Hunts are fully guided. We take you to the stands and from the stands back to camp. While at the stands we replenish the baits. We start baiting our stands 10 weeks before the first hunters arrive when most outfitters start baiting only 3 weeks before the hunt. As a result the bear get to know me. Then know my scent and they know what my truck sounds like. They are in the bush waiting for their dinner. When they hear the door of my truck shut and hear my truck drive away it's like the dinner bell has rang and they head for the baited stands not knowing a hunter waits for them in the trees. The guide service includes retrieval and field dressing. We have a freezer back at camp for the hide and meat. All bear hunts come with a boat and motor for fishing.

Our Spring Black Bear Hunt usually runs between mid-May until June 15 depending on the weather.

Our Fall Black Bear hunt starts in mid-August and weather permitting may go as long as the end of October.

Our extremely large Bear Management Area (BMA) is 350 square Kilometres of mature forest, which has given us many great places to choose from when considering the best place to build stands. The opportunity to scout out the area and put 18 permanent stands at the most strategic locations has resulted in our hunting guests enjoying a 80%+ success rate. We also have 2 ground blinds for people with physical challenges. All of our baited stands are 1 to 2 kilometres apart and we encourage that our bear hunting guests hunt as many stands as they can. We take a limited amount of hunters (average four per week) to ensure a high success rate and give hunters the chance to hunt at multiple stands. This improves your chances at harvesting a trophy Black Bear and makes the hunt more fun.

Most outfitters will start baiting the stands a couple of weeks before the hunt. We start baiting the stands 10 weeks before the hunt. The reason for this is once a Black Bear finds a baited stand the bear will keep coming back until a bigger bear chases him off. As a result the longer we bait before the hunt the bigger the bears will be at the stands. Black Bears in the 175 to 275 pound range are common in our BMA. This is much bigger than the Ontario average. Black Bears can easily exceed 400 pounds in our region. They are not as common but there are plenty of them. The size of the bear that gets harvested usually depends on the skills and patience of the hunter.

As professional outfitters we do all the work to give you, the hunter, the best opportunity for success. Ultimately it is the hunter's ability to be stealthy, which may determine the size of the bears you see. Big old Black Bears are smarter and they smell much better than a younger bear because their nose keeps growing and the amount of Olfactory Receptors increases, which is usually about 12.6 trillion in a mature bear. A mature Black Bear can smell 7000 times better than a Blood Hound and 2100 time better than a human. Mature Black Bears also have better hearing because their ears are bigger and as the crown of their scull grows the ears grow farther apart giving them the ability to pinpoint the origin of sounds from a greater distance. A hunter's stealth and smell management are the keys to seeing a big trophy Black Bear. Poor smell and sound management will result in only seeing smaller bears. A hunter's confidence to pass on smaller bears creates the opportunity to harvest the bigger bears as well.

Our Black Bear hunt starts mid-August and can last as late as mid-October, which depends on the weather. Rifle, archery, crossbow and muzzleloader hunters are welcome. We guide our hunters to our BMA on the first day and give you an orientation of the locations of the different stands. We can also supply you with fresh bait to replenish the stand. Accommodations are in our clean and newly renovated cabins on Lower Twin Lake. Some of our Black Bear hunting guests take advantage of the great fishing in the afternoon when the bears are least active.

Please contact us or go to our bear hunt details page for more information.