The Boone and Crockett Club recognizes four categories of bear—black bear, grizzly bear, Alaska brown bear, and polar bear— and two categories of cats — cougar and jaguar. For some 25 years there was a moratorium on the acceptance of polar bear entries. In 1994, the Club renewed acceptance of polar bear entries. The Club is not currently accepting jaguar entries in the Awards Programs unless a CITES (Convention on International Trade of Endangered Species) permit is included with the entry materials, though the historic listings are maintained in the records books.
Skulls of cats and bears require the simplest measurements of all trophies that are eligible for the records books. Only the length and width of the skull are recorded. However these measurements differ from all other trophy categories in that the measurements are taken to the nearest sixteenth of an inch (instead of to the nearest eighth of an inch).
All flesh, membrane, and cartilage must be removed from the skull before a measurement can be made. As with all trophies, a 60-day drying period must be observed before an official measurement for trophy entry can be performed. If the skull has been “boiled” to remove adherent flesh, the 60-day drying period starts after it is removed from the pot. Similarly, if the skull has been frozen or stored under any conditions other than normal atmospheric ones, the 60-day drying period starts after it is removed from the freezer or after it is returned to normal atmospheric conditions.
Skull measurements are made only with the lower jaw removed from the skull as it is not part of the measured skull. Usually, the length measurement extends from the forward extension of the upper teeth to the rear of the skull. The width is taken across the zygomatic arches of the cheeks perpendicular to the length measurement. Skull measurements must always be taken at right angles to the skull axis. That is, the width must be taken at a right angle to the length, and the length must be taken at a right angle to the width.
The correct line of measurement for skull length is a straight line from the sagittal crest region at the rear of the skull to the frontal portion of the teeth. This line must be parallel to the surface on which the skull is resting. This means that the skull front may have to be elevated, as shown in figure 4-A, to achieve the proper measurement line.
If teeth are protruding at a noticeably unusual angle (straight out rather than generally down), or malformations of the skull that give a greater measurement than the skull deserves, adjust the measurement to credit only those normal features present. On bears, the point of contact is usually across the incisors; on cougar, the frontal point may be on the canines. If the teeth are missing, then the front starting point is from the front of the skull itself.
A large pair of calipers may be used to perform skull measurements as demonstrated in figure 4-B. However, care must be exercised in closing them to exactly the right tension against the skull. If they are too “tight” against the surfaces, they will close slightly when removed, thus changing the measurement. Care must be taken when using calipers, especially on cougar, that the length is parallel to the longitudinal axis. If the frontal point of contact is a canine, then calipers cannot be used because a length measurement from the canine to the sagittal crest would be a diagonal to the axis of the skull rather than parallel. If this is the case, then another acceptable method for taking the length measurement must be used since the length measurement cannot be a diagonal to the skull’s axis.
Another excellent skull measuring method is to use two levels and two large c-clamps (figure 4-C). A c-clamp is attached to the bottom of each level to make the level free-standing in an upright position, forming the right angles needed for the measurement.
For the actual measurement, the levels are positioned snugly against the skull, and the bubbles are again checked. When both levels are perpendicular to the surface the skull is resting on (as shown by the bubbles), and are snugly against the skull, the measurement is then made between the two levels.
Another method used to obtain the length and width measurements accurately is to construct two large square-cut wooden blocks. These blocks are positioned at 90 degree angles on each side of the skull, at the proper location to reflect the greatest distance. Once the blocks have been snugly positioned so that no space can be discerned between block and skull, and the skull positioned so that it is parallel to the surface it is laying on, the skull width or length is then measured between the blocks. The best way to take this measurement is with a carpenter’s folding rule. Obviously, this system demands perfectly square-cut, right-angle blocks and a perfectly flat surface for accuracy (figure 4-A). Some measurers have used this concept to construct measuring boxes for skull measurement. Such boxes, when properly made, provide a convenient and easy-to-use tool.
In the past, pieces of skulls that had been shattered by a bullet, dropping, chopping, sawing, etc., could not be included in the length and width measurements. However, it is now possible to include bone fragments in each measurement, so long as the pieces can be perfectly pieced back together. Each damaged skull is considered on a case by case basis. See the Damaged and/or Repaired Trophies policy for complete details of this policy.
Related to this issue is the problem that may exist if the zygomatic arches are sprung. Often when cleaning a skull for display purposes, these arches slightly separate and spring outwards. Such separation can artificially inflate the width measurement. If so, the measurer should lightly press the arches back into their natural position before taking the width measurement.
On rare occasions, mostly with polar bears, the rear point of contact may be at the occipital condyles (the rounded edges of the spinal cord hole) rather than the sagittal crest (near the upper back of the skull). See figure 4-D. In such cases it is proper to record this measurement as the length measurement. Since the plane of measurement changes, you will have to rotate the skull either upward or downward to find out whether the rear contact is near the skull top or near the spinal opening. Remember to properly level the skull when taking this measurement. When the rear contact is across the occipital condyles, you cannot use a caliper to get the proper length (since the center, straight line passes through the spinal cord opening).
The measurements are recorded on the score chart, in sixteenths, and the final score is determined by adding the length and width measurements. There are no penalties in skull measurements since there are only the two measurements of length and width.
Fuzzy teddy bear or ferocious menace? Man-eating or good eating? Endangered animal or common backyard pest? Big game trophy, bumbling clown, or wilderness icon? Rug or cure for arthritis? Big and bad or small and furtive? Which is it? The fact, is the black bear of North America have multiple personalities. They are the “Sybils” of the animal kingdom. Even calling a black bear “black” is a contradiction in terms; they can be black, blue, brown, red, cinnamon, blond, and even, in the case of the much-vaunted Kermode bear, white.
Personality disorders aside, black bears are also the most widely distributed of all the huntable big game species in North America. They can be found coast to coast: rolling rocks for crabs on the shores of both the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans, slurping blueberries on the mid-Arctic tundra or gorging on high desert fruits south of Arizona.
Though some may disagree, black bears are one of the most sought after of all the big game species. Who hasn’t desired a black bear rug? Next to whitetail deer, there is an argument to be made that black bears are the second most popular big game animal to hunt.
Popular to hunt they may be, but easy to field judge, they are not, and yet, in spite of the high degree of difficulty, everyone who hunts black bears wants a big one. A “meat bear” won’t do. To whit, in all the many years I’ve outfitted for black bears, not one of my client-hunters has told me that his dream was to shoot a small bear for the freezer. It hasn’t happened and it never will. The fascination we hunters have with big bears is ancient and primal; a combination of “fear” and “facing fear,” another black bear dichotomy. It’s akin to climbing up onto the roof of a building and looking over the edge, the higher the building (the bigger the bear), and the deeper the fascination.
Taking all this into consideration, why is it then that so many hunters have small or medium-sized black bear skin rugs on their wall? And more to the point of this article, why do they have small bear skulls in their dens? Why indeed. Ask them and virtually every one of them will say something to the effect of, “he (or she) looked huge to me.” It is a standard and a fair evaluation of black bear hunting. Without doubt, the toughest part of taking a big black bear is knowing what “big” looks like. What follows in this article will hopefully help you correctly make what will be your toughest judging call of all.
When my hunters ask me, and they all do, how to judge black bears, they invariably throw in what they know about judging black bears, the one or two tips they’ve read in some bear article, things like “look for small ears” and “big bears have small-looking heads.” My pat response is that they are way ahead of themselves, looking at the size of a bear’s ears or head isn’t necessarily wrong, it just isn’t the right thing to be doing first. The first thing they should be looking at when they see the bear they want to judge is the location of that bear.
Big bears live, eat, and hang out in the best living, eating, and hanging out areas. Find the best looking bear habitat in whatever hunting area you are in and odds are, the bear you see there will be big, especially during prime evening hours. Small bears usually live in marginal habitat for their own safety, as well they should, since big black bears eat small bears. Often I hear hunters tell me that they spied an especially large bear right up near the edge of the timber, near the big trees. And they may well have, but odds are, the reason that bear is up there near all those good escape trees, is that the bear itself is small and the very tops of those nearby trees are the best insurance against ending up as a bear breakfast.
Of course, location is a relative thing. In my guiding area on Vancouver Island, a “good location” is a grassy meadow along a creek in the bottom country or a reclaimed road seeded to clover in the high country. In other areas, a good location may be a bait pile or oat field. Because of the huge diversity of black bear habitat across North America, good location is relative and impossible to qualify. Know your hunting area and you’ll know what to look for, but remember, if there’s a bear feeding on a prime spot at prime time, odds are it’s a bear worth judging.
Big bears are the toughest, meanest sons-of-a-guns in the valley and they act it. Watch a human bully walk down the street, he walks with a swagger and an attitude. A big bear walks the same way. He doesn’t fit and start at every sound like a small bear will. A big bear doesn’t have to; he believes he’s got nothing to fear. Once you’ve spotted your bear on the prime feeding spot during prime time, it’s time to get serious about how that bear is behaving.
It is important to note that long before you judge the size of the bear, you must judge the sex of that bear. A big, old sow will have all, or more correctly, almost all of the physical characteristics of a big, old boar. She’ll have the nasty looking face that’s seen one too many years in the ring, the potbelly and the sway back. The one thing (besides the obvious) that she won’t have, except in exceptional cases, is the “I’m the biggest and baddest son of a gun in the valley” behavior that determines sex more effectively than if that bear was wearing a bikini.
Watch to see if the bear stands on his hind legs and rubs his back on a tree, that’s a boar. If it walks along and straddles small trees, wiping its scent on that tree, it’s a boar. If it stands up and breaks saplings over its shoulder, it’s a boar. If it encounters another bear and gives chase, it’s a boar and if it is following a smaller bear, it’s a boar.
Believe it or not, if the bear has attitude, meaning if it displays any of the above behavior and is feeding on the best food source during the best part of the day, I will have already made up my mind for my client to take the bear. No looking at ears, head, belly or tail, if we’re close enough, and the bear is about to disappear. I’ll call the shot and live with the consequences. That’s how important “location” and “attitude” are.
The simple fact of the matter is, no matter how much longer I look at that bear, I’m still not likely going to be any surer about the size of the bear’s skull than I was when I first determined it was a boar! It isn’t like judging any of the horned or antlered game—there’s nothing to look at, and it’s like judging the size of a whitetail buck’s antlers when those antlers are inside a burlap sack. It can’t be done, or at least not accurately.
There is one last general appearance tip to judging black bears that makes the top three in importance, and that is scale. A big bear looks big . . . but so does a closer, smaller bear. Here’s a quantitative example of this. If the bear is 150 yards away but the hunter thinks the bear is 200 yards away, the hunter will overestimate the bear’s relative size by somewhere near 25 percent. In other words, the hunter is in for a serious case of ground shrink when he walks up to his bear. Get as close to the bear as you can. The closer the bear, the less chance there is of misjudging the distance to the bear, and thereby misjudging the bear’s relative size.
When I’m guiding, if the bear my client and I are judging fails any one of the above general conditions, then I will normally let the bear walk. It’s tough and I’ve been wrong before, but at least there isn’t a dead small bear lying on the ground. Call it a personal aversion to profuse apologies. If it does pass all the above criteria, and there is time to get fancy on the judging, I’ll use every second I have to confirm what I already know. Normally I’ll tell my hunter to be ready to shoot because at that particular instant I believe it’s a big bear worth tagging, but the longer I can look at the bear the higher the odds that I’ll be right.
1) Body Shape: Do you wear the same size pants as you did when you were in high school? Be honest, does your spouse poke you in the belly once in a while and tell you to cut back on the Twinkies? Bigger bears are older bears, and like most of us, they don’t have the svelte bodies they once did. They tend to look “heavy” and out of shape. Remember, they monopolize the best feed and habitat, and therefore exert less energy to live.
2) Head Shape: A big bear (boar) will have a deeper, wider and longer snout than a smaller bear or a female. His ears will appear to be wide apart and small. If he is aware of you and looking your way, his ears won’t stand up on top of his head like a dog’s ears, they’ll seem to be aimed out to the side of his head. A big bear will have well developed “bulging like Arnold,” biting muscles on the top of his head.
3) Legs: A big bear will have massively developed front shoulders. His shoulders will look big and burly. A sow’s wrist will pinch in directly above the foot. Not so with a boar. The lower forearm, wrist and the foot on a big boar are all the same width. A big bear often appears to have shorter legs because the body is so much thicker, but keep in mind that the best-scoring bears for the records book are often the lankier looking, longer-bodied bears.
We’ve got a saying around my camp, “Let Boone and Crockett sort them out,” and we live by it. There isn’t a guide or hunter in the world who can accurately call the skull measurement of a black bear. It’s impossible. There are simply too many variables that affect the final dried measurement. Sorry if it bursts any bubbles or offends other guides or hunters, but after outfitting for hundreds of black bears and seeing thousands upon thousands of them, I stand by what I said.
There are bears that have meatier heads; bears that look great and are great trophies, but that don’t score well. There are others that have short skulls, block-headed beasts that look impressive, but that don’t score well at all and there are lanky, skinny bears with donkey faces that score like the devil, but that a hunter seriously looking for a records book bear wouldn’t walk across the street for. Black bear morphology is just too darn diversified to make a science out of judging. Trust me, I’ve been on both ends of the surprises when it comes to the actual score of the black bear I just told my hunter to take.
The best way to hunt for a records book boar is to simply shoot the bear that looks good to you and that hopefully you’ll appreciate. If it’s got a nice hide, be happy with your animal. If it has long claws and weighs a ton, good for you and congratulations. If it isn’t as big as you’d like, don’t fret, you’re not alone and the rug on your wall will still look great. If it happens to be one of those rare few bears that has grown a skull that qualifies for the records book, thank your guide and your lucky stars and don’t expect to repeat the feat in the near future. It won’t be that bigger bears aren’t around—they are—you just won’t be able to tell them apart from the other bears in the area!
Field judgment of the size of the grizzly and Alaska brown bear (not polar) of the North American continent is really quite simple and well defined. The major points to consider are:
1) Legs: If a bear has what appear to be long, thin legs, it is a small bear. If it appears to have short, squatty legs, generally it is a big bear.
2) Walk: If a bear walks with an easy gait, without much movement of the rear end, it is a small bear. If a bear walks with a duck waddle, with grossly exaggerated movement of the buttocks, it is usually a big bear
3) Ears: If a bear has prominent and relatively large and easily visible ears, it is a small bear. If the bear has apparently very small (or barely discernible) ears, it is usually a very large bear.
4) Relative size of the body: Obviously a very large-bodied bear will usually have a large head. However, you can be fooled with this observation. Occasionally you will find a large-bodied bear with a pinheaded skull, or you can have a relatively small (or average-bodied) bear with a jug-headed skull, which will score much higher than anticipated.
Of course, you have to take the time to scrutinize your bear to apply the above evaluation. Quite often when afield, there are only a few seconds to decide whether or not to shoot. You must therefore remember to apply your best evaluation character as soon as you spot your game. If you have enough time to apply all of them, you should know pretty well before you pull the trigger whether or not your bear has a chance of making the book. A readily visible difference in a big brown bear and a small one is that small bears don’t appear to have a neck. A big brown bear will have a head-and-a-half between the hump and his ears. On a small bear you can barely see his head length between the hump and the ears.
On an old bear of any type, the head widens with age and tends to give the appearance that the ears come more and more out of the side of the head, rather than being on the top of the head as they are in a young bear.
Brown and grizzly bears can be especially tough to judge in the fall when they have put on a lot of weight in preparation for winter. If the bear is feeding right between his paws, he’s probably a pretty short bear because he doesn’t have much neck to reach down. A bigger bear will feed out in front of his feet by a couple of inches to as much as a foot.
Polar bears are evaluated differently because they’re different shaped animals. The squared hide of the polar bear has more length than width, whereas the brown and grizzly bear have more width than length. Consequently, the big polar bears will develop a distinct rangy look. A big polar bear will have a long, lanky body, a long neck, and a very “snaky” appearance, overall.
Criteria for judging cougar and jaguar are quite similar to that for bear. The older specimens will almost always appear to have a large body for their skull, while the reverse is often true for young animals. As in bears, this is often due to the body of the older animals depositing fat. Invariably, when you see a large cat running, you are struck by the almost pendulous belly that swings from side to side as the cat runs. Younger animals are noticeably sleeker in appearance. Older cats appear short-legged for the body although the tracks will appear larger, with a very large track almost always indicating a very large cat.
In cougar hunting with dogs, there is usually ample time to view the animal after it is brought to bay. While the cougar is atop a rock or on a high tree limb, very accurate evaluation can be made by an experienced hunter. And, one is usually rather sure of the size of the cougar long before it is brought to bay from the size of the tracks and its general behavior The older cougar tend to give longer chases (unless full of meat from a recent kill), while younger cats will often bay quickly.
Jaguar furnish very different problems in evaluation afield. While they will be brought to bay by the dogs in most hunts, just as in cougar hunting, it will often be a confrontation on the ground which means the activities will generally proceed non-stop to the point of the shot. In fact, there may not really be a choice, the hunter may have to shoot in self-defense of himself and the dogs. Therefore, the evaluation must be on the tracks, deepness of the roar (if heard) and the behavior while being chased by the dogs. Generally, the hunter will have to rely strongly upon the expertise of his guide in jaguar hunting. ■
