Post a picture you took in the last week.

[Fish Felon]

Speaking of fires....I overlapped a fire map with a Moose survey map from 2020 (most recent one I could find). All the high density Moose areas surveyed were....Surprise-Surprise....previously burned by a large wildfire within the not too so distant past.

Science based wildlife management is fukced in this state....too much emphasis on it being science....when the shit ain't rocket science.....

[kwackkillncrew]

Nice Rug! If you're into that sort of thing....

I personally hate bear rugs. I think they're one of those old-timey things that were popular due to a cultural thing at the time.....back in the frontier days floors were fukcing cold, carpet hadn't been invented yet, rugs were ornate and cost a fortune.....so a bear rug in front of the fire place was fukcing awesome. You could put your bare feet on it and have them be warmed stepping on your floor there....versus every other square inch of flooring where your foot froze....we're talking log cabin shit with no foundation, floor is timber you milled flat and laid above dirt...the same dirt that was there when you built your home in whatever spot you chose. If an ember popped out of the fire and burned a golf ball sized hole in the fur? No one gave a shit. It was just a rug...not a trophy.

Nowadays most rugs are too ornate.....most are the same thing in terms of detail as a head mount, so they make for a sweet trophy.....except unlike other shit you hang on the wall?

This one is a rug that goes on the floor. So you end up losing 25' to 30' square feet of floor you now can't walk on.....because you decided to drop a grand on a taxidermied floor covering. Or you can tack it up on a wall....and lose a whole fukcing wall to a rug, which everyone knows goes on the floor.

Kwak, your rug seems low-fi and I'm hoping it'll actually get used as a rug. Hopefully you've got a fireplace to throw it in front of...otherwise bedroom that shit to keep your feet warm when hopping out of bed. Plus, there's the added bonus of your wife wanting to bang on it....chicks like fukcing on bear rugs....must go back to some prehistoric caveman shit where they get turned on by having their man do something manly like kill a bear and turn it into something to cover the dirt floor of their cave. I dunno.

All I know is I've skinned and fleshed out more MN bears than I'd ever cared to. They're fukcing disgusting. 95% of 'em our shot in the evening in the first half of September...so you've got a rank bear hide that's green for a foot or two out from where it was shot, they're covered in ticks....I'm talking COVERED....we used to freeze them, unthaw 'em, then flesh them to kill the ticks....otherwise you'd have hundreds of deer & wood ticks crawling up your arms. And oh yeah, the fukcers don't have hardly any hair. They come back from the tannery almost white.....with hair like the upper lip of a Greek chick....there's hair there, just not enough to grow a mustache, enough to wax on the regularly if you're a chick.....but if you're a MN tanned bear hide shot in the first two weeks?

We dyed the fukc out of 'em. We'd load up a commercial dye into our air brushes with a special attachment....and dye the entire hide black.....the only way you're getting a "black bear" out of an early September MN bear.

My old boss....only time he got sued. A dude brought his brand new bear rug home....laid it over his brand new white couch (mid-80's), fukced his wife on it....since it's a lot more comfortable banging on a bear rug on a couch versus on a the floor......my old boss didn't tell people the shop secret to making all the shit MN bear hides black....dude's couch was done-zo...completely destroyed. We'd wipe the hides down with rags heavily soaked in paint thinner, and go over them several times to remove as much of the excess dye as possible, but no fuggin way you're getting all of it. I suggested that it'd be more time efficient and cost effective to simply have a 55-gallon drum full of dye to dunk the hides in....that's how much dye we sprayed on them.


If I ever shoot a bear, it'll be the one and only head mount I'll ever have. Just a head mount....head and little bit of the neck....no freaking way am I doing a full shoulder mount or heaven forbid....one of those ghastly forms where it's got the arms out like it's going to attack you.....

Mine will be closed mouth and well done...realistic with the eye and nose looking moist, anatomy spot on....just a bear head with his mouth closed as he happily comes to whatever sugary-maple-syrup shit I lit like a candle as my bait the bear presumably is eager to come into....

I'm not sure why this style of mount hasn't replaced rugs and all the open mouth angry snarling shit. It hangs on the wall, is neat looking, is tasteful enough, and small enough that most women will tolerate it.

To me it makes way more sense than deer shoulder mounts. Ultimately on deer? The antlers are the trophy. That's the entirety of what is being displayed....even a world champion taxidermist would rather have a Boone & Crocket rack on the shittiest mount ever, that a 120 that gets them another blue/best of category/best of show. I'm still not even real big on Europeans....I like just a horn mount.....the smaller the base the better.

So to me.....a bear head mount makes so much sense.....way more sense than a rug....way more sense than a deer shoulder mount...........but I'm pretty fukcing out there in a lot of aspects so my taste in bear preservation and display in the home not being mainstream is far from being a shocker compared to my tastes in other avenues in life.............

Its not even a true rug. i just got it tanned so its just a tanned bear hide. i got it thrown over our stairs railing right now. I dont want to spend the money on getting it "rugged". I dont really like the head on bear rugs. If it was cheaper i would cut the head off and then get it rugged so its more of a blanket. I only helped with 1 mn bear. Theres no ticks up here and we shot it in mid october so it was super easy to deal with. My buddy and i did most of the fleshing before i brought it in. black bear hides up here are a dime a dozen and the only reason i got this one tanned was because it was my first bear and the hair is super thick and soft, the only spot where hear is lacking is basically on the belly and that seems pretty typical of the bears up here from what i have seen.

Unless its a spring bear hunt up here, typically you arent even required to take the meat for black bears. You need to take the skull and hide in to get sealed and then you can just throw it away if you want to.

[Nershi]

My buddy just got a bear head and rug back from the taxi. He has a big log house and it looks badass on his wall. Wouldn’t be fitting in a small house like mine. Same with an elk mount. I got a couple buddies with elk shoulder mounts and no good place to put them. One has the head mounted at about belly button level to fit in is his living room.

Bear tastes good. I never understood why people shoot them for just the rug and/or skull. I don’t see the point in hunting them if that’s the sole purpose. Shooting yogi over a donut pile or tree’d from
dogs then leaving all the meat seems like such a waste to me.

[kwackkillncrew]

Bear tastes good. I never understood why people shoot them for just the rug and/or skull. I don’t see the point in hunting them if that’s the sole purpose. Shooting yogi over a donut pile or tree’d from
dogs then leaving all the meat seems like such a waste to me.

Agreed. I will never hunt a bait pile. I don't care that people do it, just not my style. I know spot and stalk is much tougher in mn but I feel it's way more exiting. I could take my boat out of whitter drop some shrimp pots and shoot a pile of 5 to 7 foot black bears but they aren't going to be great eating so not worth it to me. Bear plowing blueberries in the alpine is where it's at.

I also don't want to shoot something if I can't eat it. That's why I will never kill a brown bear, unless it's trying to f me up.



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[Quack]

I would definitely go for a bear rug like yours- tanned, no felt. But I don’t have a desire to shoot one. Maybe I can get one from a souvenir shop in Alaska someday!

[Quack]

This is my dog eating cow bones in front of someone’s trail cam. Hopefully the camera still had battery life and space on the card!

[Fish Felon]

[Fish Felon]

Fire is my new art.

[Fish Felon]

[Fish Felon]

Approximate burn map....so much left to burn....