Black bear weighing close to 800 pounds appears to be Pa.'s top bear of 2024. Here's why – goerie.com

When a Pennsylvania hunter encountered a large black bear about 15 yards away, little did he know he probably just harvested the commonwealth’s heaviest bear of the year.
Scott Price of Madison Township, Lackawanna County, hunted with a group of family members and friends in Monroe County when he shot a bear that weighed 774 pounds.
The four-day rifle season didn’t start out as he would have liked as his hunting gang didn’t see any bears the first two days. “The morale was low,” he said. 
However, on Monday, Nov. 25, their luck changed for the better.
Two hunters shot bears weighing around 140 to 150 pounds early in the day and things were looking up for the group of 19 or 20 hunters. 
On the next drive, he said, “My uncle almost ended up stepping on the bear that I killed. It was bedded under a blowdown. But he didn’t have a gun because he already killed a bear,” he said. Pennsylvania hunters are only permitted one bear a year.
“The bear gets up and runs a little bit towards my cousin who also didn’t have a gun as he killed a bear already and then you wouldn’t believe, it runs over to my dad who had just shot a bear an hour prior. He runs down in front of three drivers who had no guns,” he explained.
With snow on the ground, his brother who didn’t get a bear this year started following the bear’s tracks into the thick laurel and brush. When the bear ran out, the brother fired his pistol grazing the lower belly area of the bruin, but it kept running toward the other hunters.
“I could hear the bear coming through the brush and I readied myself and once I actually saw that it was actually a bear, I pulled my gun up and got ready. I shot him at 15 yards,” Price said. The bear died a short distance later. 
“I got on the radio and said ‘holy s*** he’s big,’” Price said. “I knew he was big. I was thinking 600 when I shot him. But I walked up to him and he was quite a bit bigger than that.
“My uncle who jumped him was freaking out. He said 700 pounds and he knows because he’s shot one over 700 pounds,” Price said. For perspective, the heavy animal weighs the equivalent of four mature white-tail bucks combined.
Price fired two shots with his .35 caliber lever action rifle to make sure the animal was down.
“It’s actually my dad’s gun that he gifted to me,” he said. Price and some of the other bear hunters are using red dot sights on their guns instead of scopes to help with target acquisition on animals in thick areas.
The hunters knew there were bears living in this thick, swampy and large tract of woods but didn’t realize there were any this big.
“We had no clue, it was a heck of a surprise,” he said about the massive bear.
The group of hunters took turns dragging the large boar more than 600 yards to the road. Fortunately, it was a downhill grade and there was some snow to help the bear slide. “We had six or eight guys dragging at a time and we all would rotate in and out,” he said. “I thank my gang. Without them I definitely wouldn’t have gotten the bear without their help,” he said about everyone working together.
To get an accurate weight, they didn’t field dress the bear and were able to get a true live weight of the bruin at 774 pounds on a scale in their family’s barn. A state game warden recorded the weight of this bear and the other two bears they got that day.
The extended black bear season continues through Dec. 14 in Wildlife Management Units 2B in the Pittsburgh area and 5B, 5C and 5D in southeastern Pennsylvania. Those areas near cities are not known for having many bears, let alone heavy ones.
Tuesday morning, Travis Lau, communications director for the Pennsylvania Game Commission, said, “it would seem a stretch that somebody is going to take a bear that big this week in any of those four WMUs.”
While Price’s boar is massive and appears to be the heaviest one for 2024, there have been bigger bears killed in the state. His uncle, David Price, harvested the heaviest bear ever recorded by the Game Commission in Pennsylvania. That bear weighed 876 pounds and was harvested in 2010 during the archery season in Monroe County. For 2024, the Game Commission inspected 2,618 by Tuesday morning. Last year hunters harvested 2,920 bears in the commonwealth.
In thinking about probably having the heaviest bear of the year in Pennsylvania, Price said hunting is more than getting a large bear.
“That’s cool, don’t get me wrong. But the experience with the gang was the most exciting part for me. Just seeing everybody’s reaction when they came up to it. I was just as excited as everybody else and surprised for sure. We had no idea that bear was around,” he said.
They removed the hide from Price’s bear and found more than seven inches of fat on the heavy animal. “My brother is a taxidermist and he was floored because he’s never seen fat like that,” Price said. “I know there was probably 200 pounds of fat that we cut off him.”
His family enjoys eating bear meat. “Stews and roasts are my favorite. Bear ribs are very good as well. As you can imagine, there’s quite a substantial rib on that guy,” he said.
It’s not his first bear but definitely the heaviest. The three other bears he got over his lifetime all weighed about 230 pounds. “This one is bigger than all three of my others combined,” he said, creating perspective on the unique specimen.
Price, 34, has been hunting bears with his family since he was 12.
“I started right when I could,” he said. His family has always hunted black bears and he has an old photo of his ancestors with two bears. “That’s my favorite part about bear season, the tradition of it,” he said about driving out woodlots with family and friends.
About 40 or 50 people stopped at the barn to see the bear.
Price plans to have a life-size mount done at Lamparters Wildlife Design in Gouldsboro.
Brian Whipkey is the outdoors columnist for USA TODAY Network sites in Pennsylvania. Contact him atbwhipkey@gannett.com and sign up for our weekly Go Outdoors PA newsletter email on this website’s homepage under your login name.Follow him on Facebook@whipkeyoutdoors.

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