Jones said a sow bear in good habitat requires 4,000 to 5,000 acres of territory. A boar bear needs at least three times as much room for roaming than a female, since his range typically overlaps that of three females. A boar's home range can be as much as 50,000 acres in the poorer habitats of the mountain region. However, in some areas of the coast with good habitat, including agricultural fields, the home range of a boar bear can be as little as only 3,000 to 5,000 acres.

Besides the differences in home ranges of bears and the types of foods they can find in the western and eastern parts of the state, there are differences in the ways bears are hunted in the two regions. Opportunities for still-hunting bears along the coast are much better than in the mountains because the food sources and the bears are more concentrated. Also, bear-hunting seasons on the coast are more likely to overlap deer-hunting seasons.

"In the mountains, a few bears are killed by hunters incidental to deer hunting," Jones said. "But the seasons don't always overlap in the mountains, so it seems to be more of a haphazard type hunt than a purposeful type of bear hunting. That may change, with hunters in the mountains getting better at still-hunting bears as the population in the mountains continues to grow, and we may see that happen within the next 10 years. But there are places where it will always be difficult to hunt bears with dogs in the mountains, especially in the areas where we are still seeing bear range expand into the foothills."

The problem with hunting bears with hounds in the foothills areas is that the property is a patchwork of small landholdings interspersed with dwellings. In such areas, it's hard or impossible to get permission for hunting on large areas of contiguous property. However, Jones thinks the foothills still-hunters will figure out how to become successful.

"That's the way it happened on the coast," he said. "In the beginning, there weren't a lot of still-hunters. Now, still-hunters harvest around 30 percent of our coastal bears. Currently, in mountains, around 95 percent of our bear harvest is taken by the use of dogs."

Still-hunters at the coast are successful at using what has become a traditional method of taking bears. These hunters find trails leading to agricultural fields from thick cover and watch them from tree stands. The best time is to catch a bear leaving the field in the early morning to head back to its bedding area. The best conditions are overcast or foggy, which tend to keep the bears in the field longer after feeding all night. Bears are also taken as they feed in the fields. Hunters watch the fields at sunset and in the early morning.

This type of hunt is not necessarily easy, even if a bear is using the field. A bear can smell where a human has been a day later. Perhaps the most important thing a hunter can do is practice scent control to increase his odds for bagging a bear by still-hunting. Wearing rubber boots and watching the wind direction may be the most important ingredients for success following the discovery of fresh bear sign.

To judge the size of a bear, coastal hunters examine tracks and scat. Any track more than 4 inches wide is made by a male bear and big piles of bear stuff laden with corn or soybeans can tell an experienced hunter the size of the bear that left them along the trail.

There are also some unusual methods that have become increasingly successful for the few savvy hunters who practice them. At the coast, hunters use canoes to paddle through swampy areas, with Chowan Swamp Game Land a possibility. Bears feed in the "gum berry" trees, blackgum and water tupelo. They either are spotted while feeding or while sleeping in the trees. Some hunters say they build nests in these large trees and stay in them so they don't have to bed in the watery swamps where there's scant footing.

"I saw a guy four or five years ago who had a lot of damage to his hardwoods," Jones said. "The bears had broken the limbs off his white oaks, and dozens of limbs the size of your arm were broken off and on the ground where the bears could get at the acorns. You don't see that often, but it happens. You can look for this type of feeding sign or you could listen for a bear breaking the tree limbs and be able to hear it from quite a long distance."

Large areas of public land exist in the mountains, consisting mostly of millions of acres of Pisgah and Nantahala national forests. These consist of rugged terrain, with bears inhabiting some of the higher elevations and increasingly moving into the lower elevations.