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ful clanging and banging. “You could hear it clear to the house,” she said. “It was like he was saying, ‘Let me out of here!’.” I The bear had finally taken the |bait — a whole ham coated with sugar cure. When it ambled into the large, six-foot long round steel drum, it tripped the trap door, a steel plate which slammed down behind it. When the Hutchesons got to the trap, they found an unhappy bear staring at them through the wire mesh on the trap’s other end.
Warden Blank said that his favorite bait is ham scraps. He said that many things work, including honey and peanut butter, “but you can imagine how expensive that gets!” And using most other meat or fish scraps, “after a few days you need a gas mask to clean out the trap,” he said.
Warden Blank winched the trap, which rests on long steel skids, onto the back of his pickup and took the bear to Luray, where he transferred it to the charge of one of the Commission’s game management specialists.
All of the bears trapped in the Blue Ridge Mountains and their environs, he said, are taken into the George Washington National Forest, located in the Alleghany Mountains on the Virginia-West Virginia border. None is released in the Shenandoah National Park, he stressed.
Also, those trapped in the north are released in the southern part of the forest, and vice versa. The game specialists hope that this “crisscross” pattern will lessen the chances of a bear returning to its former stomping grounds.
Apparently, the strategy works. Of “two hundred and thirty-some” bears captured in six years of trapping, Warden Blank has had only one return.
He smiled and added that, actually, “it feels like I’ve been doing this all my life.” Jerry’s dad, Gerald, was the Game Commission’s trapping specialist for 23 years before retiring almost eight years ago.
The bears trapped by the Commission become part of an ongoing study of Virginia’s bear population, Warden Blank added. Before being released, they undergo a physical, have blood drawn for a parasite count, a tooth is pulled and they are weighed and have an ear tag affixed for tracking and identification purposes. The three bears caught in Mr. Foster’s orchard weighed 275 pounds, 211 pounds, and “about 125 pounds,” he said.
Mr. Foster said the damage done by the bears is significant. Usually, he gets “about 200 bushels of white peaches” from two acres of trees. “We’ll be lucky to get 20 bushels this year. We’ve only got seven or eight peach trees left.” Asked to put a price tag on the
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