Baiting black bears is legal in 42 of Alberta's wildlife management units, prohibited in most of the rest, and permitted over part of seven more. That makes the province an accidental controlled experiment — five seasons, 12,939 harvested bears, and a built-in intermediate group to test the gradient.
Four results, one of which is unusually clean for observational data.
In all five seasons, units where baiting is legal returned 26–36% hunter success against 13–19% where it is banned. The ratio stayed between 1.72× and 2.02× — a narrow band, while total harvest swung 58%.
Seven units allow baiting in part of their area. They sat between the two groups in all five seasons without exception. That ordering is what separates a real effect from a regional coincidence.
A common objection is that baiting leads to sows being shot. In 2025 the female share of harvest was 20.6% in baiting units and 21.3% where it is banned — essentially identical, and marginally lower where baiting is legal.
The young column is zero in every unit in every year. It is illegal to take a bear under one year or a female with a cub, and the harvest reflects that absolutely — unlike deer, elk and moose where young run 2–6%.
Alberta's regulations split the province into three groups. Nobody designed this as a study, but it behaves like one.
Baiting-legal units are concentrated in the boreal north, so the obvious objection is that this is geography rather than bait — northern units might simply hold more bears. The partial-baiting group is what makes that hard to sustain. Those seven units are scattered across the foothills and boreal, are governed by the same regulations as their neighbours in every other respect, and allow bait over only part of their area. They land between the two groups in all five seasons, every time, without a single inversion.
That is a dose-response relationship: more permitted bait area, more success. It does not prove causation on its own, but a confounder would have to track partial permissions unit by unit to reproduce it.
The size of the effect is also stable in a way that regional differences usually are not. Across five seasons the ratio between the two extreme groups stayed inside a narrow band — 1.72× at the low end and 2.02× at the high end — while total provincial harvest swung by 58%. Whatever baiting is worth to a hunter, it is worth about the same amount every year.
Bear composition is shaped almost entirely by what hunters choose, because bear regulations set very few limits on sex.
It is unlawful to hunt a black bear under one year old, or a female accompanied by a cub. Five seasons and 12,939 bears later, the young column is still zero in every unit. That is not rounding — it is a regulation being followed essentially perfectly, which is worth noting given how often compliance is assumed rather than measured.
It also means the sex split here is a clean two-way comparison, unlike the other species where a sexless "young" column absorbs part of the harvest.
Because a female with cubs is protected but a lone female is not, the female share reflects hunter judgment in the field: identifying sex on a bear at distance is hard, and many hunters pass anything they cannot confirm. That figure sat between 20.4% and 25.4% across all five seasons, which suggests a settled behavioural norm rather than a response to any regulatory change.
Which is why the baiting comparison is interesting in the other direction. Bait gives a hunter a stationary animal at known range and time, exactly the conditions that should improve sex identification. The data shows no penalty and, if anything, a marginally lower female share.
One year in this series does not belong with the others.
2021 recorded 3,670 bears against 2,172 to 2,431 in every following season. Both sexes moved together and the baiting gradient held, so this is not a composition change — it is more bears taken, everywhere.
The tempting explanation is pandemic-era licence sales, and the timing fits. But this dataset contains no participation figures, no licence sales, and no earlier seasons for a baseline, so I cannot separate a surge in hunters from a change in survey methodology or a genuinely good bear year. Flagging it as unexplained is more useful than guessing.
The mountain 400-series result is the same pattern the elk data shows: 29 units, 73 bears, 6% success. Bears are certainly there. Access, terrain and the absence of legal bait are what keep the harvest near zero, and it is a useful reminder that a low harvest number is a statement about hunters at least as much as about animals.
Every unit and season, filterable. Click any row or bar for that unit's five-season history.
Deep-link here with #dashboard.
Prototype: a rules-based parser, running entirely in your browser with no server. In production the parser swaps for a language model behind a small serverless endpoint — the data layer stays exactly as it is here.
Which units look strongest for the coming spring and fall — from a model you can check by hand.
No 2026 bear data exists yet: the spring season opens in April 2026 and the survey publishes around March 2027. So this is a forecast — but built on five seasons per unit, which is enough for a real trend rather than a line drawn through three points.
1 − volatility, so noisy units are pulled back toward what
actually happened rather than following a line through scattered points.2021 is the complication. It sits 58% above every following season, so a naive five-year mean is dragged upward for every unit. The recency weighting handles most of that, and the reported range is the projection ± half the volatility, so units still carrying 2021's spike show visibly wide intervals.
The projection assumes baiting rules, season dates and supplemental-licence availability hold. Those are the levers that would move a unit far more than any trend line: if a unit gains or loses bait permission, the five-season evidence above suggests its success rate moves by roughly a factor of two, which swamps everything this model estimates. Treat the high-confidence rows as the useful output and the low-confidence rows as noise.
hunters ≈ harvest ÷ (success% ÷ 100). Group success is harvest-weighted — total harvest
over total estimated hunters — rather than a mean of unit percentages, so a unit with two bears at 100%
cannot distort a group.
Taken from the 2026 regulations, which permit baiting in WMUs 322, 330–338, 348, 358–360, 500–506, 509, 510, 512–520, 522, 523, 529–536 and 539–544, and in portions of 320, 324, 357, 507, 521, 526 and 528. The partial group is those seven. Baiting is further restricted near dwellings, parks and industrial sites, and is limited to the open season plus the preceding two weeks — none of which this classification captures.