If we have a good acorn crop, they will home right in on the white oak acorns, as these have the least amount of tannin, a bitter acid that limits the nutritional value of the nuts. If the white oak acorns are in short supply, they will key in on red oaks and chestnut oak acorns, in that order of preference. Sometimes, whether there are ample acorns or not, individual bears will focus on hickory nuts.

Any soft mast that is still available, such as muscadines, pokeberries, persimmons and other wild fruits, help round out the smorgasbord. If a bear wanders upon an agricultural field of standing sweet corn, it will often feed to the point that it might start visiting the corn patch as often as twice a day. Sometimes bears will feed in a corn field until they have literally gorged themselves and can't eat another bite, and then just lie down right there in the field until later in the day or during the night, and then start feeding again.

If you can find some woods near a corn field where a bear is feeding, and you can secure permission to hunt, you would be hard-pressed to find a better place. In addition, you will likely be doing the farmer a favor, as bears can be quite destructive in corn fields. They plod around in the middle of the field like a bull in a china shop, knocking down and destroying 10 times more corn than they consume. They tend to feed in a circle among the cornstalks and sometimes it looks like a helicopter landed in the middle of the field.

If you don't have access to an agricultural field where bears are feeding, focus on acorn trees. When Tony Cantrell talks about looking for signs of the bears raking up leaves, he is talking about places in the woods where the bears have keyed in on the choicest acorns. When they find what they like, they will not only eat the freshly fallen acorns on the top of the leaf litter, they will rake up the leaves trying to get at those that are down under the leaves.

It can be an impressive sight, the kind of thing that gets a bear hunter's heart racing. There will likely be lots of bear scat around, some fresh and some a week or two old. If anyone ever asks you if a bear squats in the woods, the correct answer is: Yes they do, often and in great quantity. It is not unusual to find 10 or 15 piles of bear scat under one good acorn tree.

It is next to impossible to predict in any given year whether or not we will have a good acorn crop. The oak trees flower back in late April and early May, but the acorns don't become visible to the naked eye until sometime in mid-September. The DNR conducts a hard mast survey in September of each year, and many bear hunters volunteer to assist in that effort. Some just grab a pair of binoculars and head out in the woods to check for themselves.

Tony Cantrell said that if there is any pattern or rule of thumb to predicting where the bears will be in any given year, it is this: "If there is a good mast crop in North Georgia and North Carolina, and hardly any here, we will likely have few bears on this side. If we have a good mast crop here, then we can hope for a good season. Bears are like anything else. Where the food source is, the bears will be, and they will be there until the food source runs out."