Around the Outdoors by Jim Sheperd
gengberg December 14th, 2009
Around the Outdoors
Growing up in Kentucky when I did, it was easy to take part in every facet of the outdoors. In fact, it was encouraged. With Boy Scouts, the Conservation Clubs, and 4-H, and the local wildlife officers’ encouraging every kid my age to hunt, fish, camp and hike- and providing help and encouragement all along the way, you actually had to work at not getting outside -unless you were a city kid.
Trust me, there weren’t that many cities.
The fishing was great, but the hunting was limited to the occasional dove shoot, rabbits and squirrels. In fact, growing up, anything in larger than a .410 shotgun was really excessive. A fast-handling .410 usually did about everything necessary. The 20, 16 and 12 gauge shotguns were looked on as either excessive or the guns of someone who’d moved to Kentucky.
Today, however, that’s changed.
Great wildlife management - something the state was discovering as I was growing up has reversed the ravages of the coal industry. Kentucky has reclaimed and repopulated land that a few decades ago, looked looked like the surface of the moon. We kept the coal coming, but came at a terrific price -our culture, heritage and lands were literally scoured off.
But that was then. Today, Kentucky residents think nothing about going deer hunting. They enter the Kentucky lottery for elk tags. Elk- in Kentucky. When I was growing up, telling someone you’d seen a whitetail was likely to get your fanny warmed for lying. Today, in my home county, residents wrap their shrubs and fruit trees to keep deer from peeling them clean over the course of the winter.
But this coming weekend, Kentucky will celebrate a reclamation landmark that may be even more auspicious than the recovery of deer, turkey and elk. In eastern Kentucky’s Pike, Letcher and Harlan counties, hundreds of hunters are expected to hit the wilds on Saturday in hopes of being one of the lucky hunters to bag a black bear.
It’s been a century - 100 years - since Kentucky has had any significant black bear population, much less one capable of supporting a hunt. But black bears have slipped across the state lines from West Virginia, Tennessee and Virginia, moving as the once clear-cut forests have grown back. And, in the words of Steven Dobey, coordinator of the bear program of the Kentucky Department of Fish and Wildlife, they have thrived.
Not to the point of becoming pests, but to the point that hunters with a Kentucky hunting license and a $30 bear permit can try and be one of the lucky hunters. There’s a very strict quota on the hunt- a total of ten bears, or five sows. That’s one per hunting area that will be open for hunting. Other areas, especially those where sow bears winter in the highest concentrations, have been set aside as preservation areas.
In fact, hunters will have to check on a hunting hotline at the end of the first day’s hunt to see if it will continue into December 20. If it does, they will hit the woods again, in hopes of becoming one of the ten lucky hunters.
Even if they don’t, they will have participated in a historic event that was, once again, largely made possible by the same anglers and hunters criticized by so-called “wildlife” groups that would like nothing better than to see hunting become a thing of the past.
We’ll keep you posted.
–Jim Shepherd
- Conservation , Hunting , Bow Hunting , Tips , Other states Programs , Wildlife , Bears , Habitat , Big Game
