December 27, 2020 – Washington Co., WI – This week we will post popular videos from 2020. Be sure to cast your vote on which one you like. At the end of the week we will tally which video was the No. 1 story for 2020.
In early November 2020 a mother bear and her two cubs were captured on a trail camera strolling through a woodsy area in the Town of Wayne. The time on the trail cam video is 9:04 p.m.
DNR warden Bill Mitchell said the trail cam was over by the Wayne swamp. “That bear looks like it’s a couple hundred pounds,” he said. “Usually we get males but not a female with two cubs; I’ve never seen that ever.”
Chucker Dreher from Kewaskum is a local black bear hunter and expert. He said the warm weather is what’s messing up the wildlife, this sow included.
“They’re probably out looking for food. The farmers up north have all their crops off already and we still have farmers with corn and beans in the field,” he said.
Dreher said this would be the third time black bears have been visible in the area. “In June 2010 a black bear came through just north of Kewaskum and then it went along Highway 28 and was on Harry Ramthun’s back deck eating off the bird feeder,” he said. “I was trailing it and tracking it for the DNR to tree it, tranquilize it and get it back up north.”
Dreher said that plan went sideways when dogs treed the bear in Port Washington. “He ended up in the city of Port Washington, a neighbors dog treed it and we tranquilized and in front of a crowd it fell onto an outdoor trampoline and bounced off and it bit its tongue, so there was blood.”
Dreher said that could have been done quietly but the story ended up in media across the state. “We had a perfect plan but that didn’t happen. The bear wasn’t hurt and eventually we took it back up to Rhinelander,” he said.
As far as the bear in the photo Dreher said if they are not harming anything then the DNR will leave them alone. “It’s a people thing,” he said. “If the people see it out in the field, they’ll call everybody they know to go see it.”
Dreher said if the bears stay in the swamp they should be OK. “It’s in a good block there right now. The south side of the swamp has a nice set of ridges where it could make a den but the problem is in the spring the sow will chase the cubs away and then we will have three spots to worry about.”
The “nasty warm weather” according to Dreher is to blame for confusing the wildlife. “These bears are all screwed up and the deer – some are rutting like crazy and others think it is summer and they’re taking a break,” he said. “Normally when the rut is here the bears are in their den.”
The Wayne swamp, according to Dreher, has a great food resource. “The problem is we’ve had so much development … it may just wander to where people see it,” he said.
This story was updated November 17, 2020 when one of the cubs was struck and killed on Highway 45 just south of Highway 145 near Cabelas.
In early December, Dreher said he heard the mother bear and cub were spotted in the Greenbush area (Fond du Lac County) headed back up north. He said by December they were “denned up for the winter.”
