An 11-year-old girl in Wisconsin recently killed her first black bear, and it may just beat the record for the largest black bear harvested in the state.
On opening day of her first bear hunt and accompanied by her grandfather, the sixth-grader spotted her first black bear in the wild and saw an opportunity for a shot she couldn’t pass up. Though the youth hunter confessed she was “kind of shaking,” she managed to hit her target from 27 yards away.
Her grandfather shared that they later dressed the animal in the field to preserve its meat and weigh its entrails, per guidance from the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources (DNR). They then used two certified scales to determine the bear’s field-dressed weight. He estimated the bear to weigh close to 813 pounds before dressing, but its final weight came in at 720 pounds.
However, the Wisconsin DNR doesn’t measure state-record bears by weight, but rather they rely on the Boone & Crockett Club measurement of the animal’s dried skull.
“The skull now has to be cleaned and then dried for 60 days before it is officially scored,” he wrote on Facebook, adding that his taxidermist measured the skull at around 22 inches, and thinks the animal will “definitely” enter the record books.
In the meantime, though, the young hunter and her grandfather are “just going to have to wait.”
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