Only two of them were aged (via teeth) but I was listed in the kill log, so my info and tag were in the system. There were 7 bears tagged at the station that I tagged my bear in. Jen returned with a piece of paper in her hand. The porous-looking skull indicates that the bear is old and its bones are beginning to break downįrom the photos that I showed Randy and his decades of knowledge (he has more years of experience than ANY bear biologist in North America) he estimated that at the very least, my bear was 12-15 years old. Young bears have very smooth skulls but the older ones… you can see where the bones are starting to separate. As bears age, so do their bones and they begin to break down. In the second picture, you can see that my bear’s skull is not smooth but bumpy and porous looking. You can tell the age of a bear based on the crest on top of their skullĪnother telling characteristic is how smooth the bone is. Randy explained that you only see that in old bears and you can age them based on how big that ridge is. It ran along the entire top of the skull. The top of the skull though was a different story: The crest was big, height-wise and length-wise. Randy could guess by looking at the picture of the teeth but it wasn’t totally clear and no pictures showed the inside ware of the bottom teeth. Since my skull had been cut several times, in order for the skull to be put back together, it had to be glued and is now one piece and not two. Randy started talking about the characteristics that stand out on a skull. He laughed, “It was more than 400 pounds… no way is that bear eight years old.” I explained that most people who looked at the bear thought that he was 8. I quickly pulled up these pictures and asked him what he thought. After handling more than 4,000 bears in his 32+ year career, he was pretty good at aging a bear by its skull and teeth. She started diving into computer records to see what she could find. I gave her my tag number, where I shot the bear and where I had tagged it. So, I asked Jen about my bear’s missing tooth. I sit on the Black Bear subcommittee for the Big Game Species planning process and see Jen Vashon and Randy Cross almost monthly. I knew a few numbers in my tag and couldn’t even find that. I looked up the tagging station and the date. I couldn’t wait to find out how old this guy was. The link to the information is usually posted all over social media and eager hunters share how old their bear was. Typically, it takes a year for the data to be published. Assuming that the tooth gets to where it needs to be. Biologists can learn about the health of the bear and it’s age. Each tooth is cut, like a tree, and the rings are counted. When you kill a bear in Maine, you are legally required to submit a tooth to IF&W so that the bear can be aged and logged into the records.
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