WATERTOWN — An 18-year-old says she was “shocked” after seeing how heavy a bear was that she hunted over the weekend in southern St. Lawrence County.
Alexa R. Livernois shot the bear on Sunday right before 7 a.m. with a muzzleloader and it only took one shot.
Livernois said she had been hunting for about two and a half weeks seeing young bears that she didn’t want to shoot. She says she never saw this specific bear before shooting it dead.
The freshman in college attends school virtually in Iowa.
“I was happy, mostly shocked,” she said. “When he walked out, he didn’t look like he was basically 560 pounds.”
Her father, Brian Livernois said nobody thought the bear was 557 pounds until they put him on a scale.
After killing a bear in New York, the animal must be tagged and must be reported to the Department of Environmental Conservation within a specific timeframe.
To weigh the large bear, it was taken to the family’s garage. He was then skinned and gutted.
The bear’s dress weight was 466 pounds. A dress weight is how heavy the bear is without any of the insides.
Alexa said they don’t eat bears, but instead, she’ll get the bear mounted and intends to make a rug with the animal. The meat has been donated to a local butcher to distribute it.
Alexa and her boyfriend were able to have a neighbor drive a tractor to the spot where the bear was killed, push him into the bucket of a tractor, and “basically dump the bear into the back of the truck.”
“I couldn’t even lift his head up very well,” she said. “We basically got the tractor bucket basically right under the bear and we kind of just tried to roll him into the bucket.”
Two weeks before, Alexa’s boyfriend killed a 314 pound bear in the same general area.
They knew there were bears in the area as they have trail cameras set up and have seen that bear wandering the area for a couple of weeks.
Those bears seen on trail cameras had been doing damage to a nearby farmer’s cornfields, Mr. Livernois said.
“That’s why they were there, try to help out the farmers a little bit and then get a couple nice bears at the same time,” he said.
Bear sightings have not been uncommon in the north country the past couple of weeks as a post on Facebook showed what appeared to be a bear near Case Middle School in Watertown. The Livernois say that it was not the bear seen in that video that was hunted by Alexa.
