Unicoi County hunter bags 535-pound bear
01/05/07
By Bryan Stevens - Staff Writer
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Daniel Ray with the 535-pound bear he killed on his first bear hunt.
Call it beginner's luck for Daniel Ray, an Erwin resident who bagged a bruin for the record books on his very first bear hunt.
Ray said the male black bear weighed 535 pounds. "Everyone I've talked to has told me that it is the biggest bear they have ever seen,"? he said.
A check with Tennessee Wildlife Resources Agency confirmed that Ray's bear ranks as one of the largest ever recorded.
It's not the largest, however, according to Dave Brandenburg, a wildlife biologist with TWRA.
Brandenburg cited a few instances of bears killed in Unicoi County that weighed between 600 and 650 pounds.
Still, he said Ray's bear would have to be considered impressive. "It's definitely a trophy animal,"? Brandenburg said from his office in Morristown.
Ray, who said he has hunted for deer and [censored] since he was a kid, said this is the first year he has ever hunted for bear. "I just like to get outdoors and hunt,"? he said.
He doesn't have his own dogs for hunting bear, so he was using a friend's dogs when he caught up with the large bear in the Temple Hill community on Tuesday, Nov. 14.
Accompanying him on the bear hunt were Ricky Thomas, Chad Tipton, Jack Tipton and Steve Shelton, the owner of the dogs used in the hunt. In addition, Crockett Effler showed up toward the end of the hunt.
"The dogs had it cornered,"? Ray explained. "The bear was too big to climb a tree."?
Ray said the bear "was moving really fast"? and started coming downhill after he got off his first shot.
They got off their first shots at the bear around 9 a.m., but had to pursue the animal through some rough terrain. "It was laurel thickets everywhere,"? Ray said.
They caught up with the bear again about two hours later.
"It took five shots to bring the bear down,"? Ray said. "The bear was within 20 feet of me when I killed it."?
He then had to cope with getting his trophy out of the woods. Ray said 22 people helped him bring the bear out of the Temple Hill woods.
Ray plans to have the entire bear mounted as a trophy. "It was a once in a lifetime thing,"? he said.
He went into the woods again last week when bear season opened yet again, but he didn't take along his gun since state regulations permit only one bear kill per year.
Ray and his wife, Stephanie, are the parents of a son, Timothy, who is a 5-year-old kindergarten student at Love Chapel Elementary School.
"He was really worked up about it,"? Ray said. "He didn't know what to do."?
Eventually, according to Ray, Timothy accepted that the bear wasn't going to suddenly come back to life.
A typical bear puts on a great amount of weight every autumn, according to Brandenburg. "They can gain five pounds a day in the fall when there is a good acorn crop,"? he explained.
From September through November, Brandenburg said, a male bear can almost double its weight.
Bears in eastern North Carolina, he added, are usually among the biggest of black bears. These big bears, he said, feed on the abundant corn on farmlands in that part of the state.
For instance,a black bear shot in Hyde County, N.C., weighed 887 pounds, according to Brandenburg.
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