My brother and I farm around…

My brother and I farm around the Sunderland area in the Region of Durham. We farm as far north as Woodville and as far south as Manchester. For many years now the bear damage in our corn fields has been increasing. We see damage every year and this past season was the worst. Bears were actually running ahead of the combine this year on two different farms. Most of our land is situated in WMU 78a where there is no bear season. The bears seem to know they are safe here.

When the spring bear hunt was active 20 years ago bear sightings were rare here on our farm. Now in the spring planting season it is rare if we do not see one every day. I fully believe the Bearwise program has been a complete failure if it is the mechanism by which the bear population is estimated in our area. All the neighbors see bears regularly but when asked if they called Bearwise the answer is always no. We were still seeing bears (fresh tracks actually) in January 2020. I tried to call bearwise but it was shut down at the end of November. I am attaching a word doc with pictures from the 2019 harvest year. I have many other damage pictures from previous years. They are available upon request. Next year we will be running a dash cam in the combine so we can document all the damage we see.