Contact: Dolores (Mohr) Kenyon
E-mail: dolores@wiclarkcountyhistory.org
Surnames: Iraci, Frank, Klahn, Beck
----Source: Clark County Press (Neillsville, Clark Co., WI) 9/16/2020
Harvests 700+ lb. Bear (Naiya Iraci – 9 September 2020)
11-Year-old-girl Harvests 700+ lb. Bear
Eleven-year-old Naiya Iraci bagged a bear just outside of Merrillan on opening day of hunting season in what may turn out to be a record-setting feat while hunting with her grandpa, Mike Frank. Submitted photo
By Ryan Spoehr
The challenge of a young girl from southeastern Wisconsin was too much even for an extremely large animal to bear in the Merrillan area.
Just outside of Merrillan on the opening day of bear hunting season, (on the edge of the Town of Dewhurst, Clark County), Naiya Iraci, 11, shot a bear while hunting with her grandfather, Mike Frank. Depending on what the final weight is determined to be, it could be anywhere from seven-to-eight times her size, what’s more is it could be a state record bear.
An initial estimate of the bear’s weight was 760 pounds, but it is expected that the weight will be determined to be more than 800 pounds.
Mike owns a cabin and some land just outside of Merrillan (along HWY 95). The family is from Kewaskum, which is in Washington County, about 40 minutes northwest of Milwaukee between West Bend and Fond du lac along USH 45.
Naiya is an avid hunter. She has gotten five turkeys and two deer. But this was the first bear she had ever seen while hunting.
“I was shocked,” Naiya said.
Mike had put out some bait on the property after catching the bear on footage via his trail cameras. He and Naiya were up in a tree blind at about 7:20 p.m. opening night, which was Wednesday, Sept. 9.
At about 5 p.m. opening night, Naiya and Mike went out and up into a tree blind to wait for the bear.
“We went out and were there about two hours and starting looking around, and then saw him,” Naiya said.
This was the culmination of several weeks of work, and there was concern that they might not see the bear come opening day.
Mike became a little worried that the bear wouldn’t come back and that wolves had pushed the bear off the bait. He caught an image on a trail camera of 11 wolves by where he put out bait and another image of a wolf running.
“The last picture we got of him, he was running, and the next picture right behind him was a wolf. Every night, the wolves would come in after he left and ate what bait he wouldn’t eat. Then, he disappeared for five days. He was gone Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Monday [and Tuesday],” Mike said.
So, Tuesday afternoon, Mike put out some bacon scent to see if he could draw the bear back in. Sure enough, he came back.
“We started getting excited,” Mike said. “We knew we had a chance that he was back.”
The wolves temporarily pushing the bear off actually helped Mike get the bear in so Naiya could take the shot.
“By the wolves pushing the bear away from the bait, the wolves could not get at the good because we had a cement block on top of a stump, and the wolves didn’t know how or could not get the block off to get the food inside the hollow stump,” Mike said. “So, eventually, the wolves moved on because they [are] feeding; they’ve got to move on. So, then the bear came back.”
The blind that Naiya and Mike were in about 14 feet up in the air.
“I looked out the window and he was right there – right below us,” Mike said. “I tapped Naiya and said, ‘Get ready.’ She started moving and getting her stuff ready.”
She put on her ear muffs and had an AR Creedmoor 6.5 rifle at her side.
“By then, the bear was making his way around the food pile, but he stayed in the woods. He didn’t come out,” Mike said. “But then, he turned when he was close to the bait.”
“I saw him, and I was going to get right on him,” Naiya added. “He came right to the bait, knocked it over with one paw. It fell out, and then he was going to go, and that’s when I shot him right in the head. He dropped right down.”
When Naiya looked at the bear after shooting it, he wasn’t down for the count.
“He started moving, so I shot him again,” Naiya said.
At this point, Naiya’s and Mike’s hearts were pounding, and their adrenaline was high, they said.
After their hearts stopped pounding, they left the blind. Mike had a shotgun as a backup just in case. However, when they walked up to the bear, they were in for a surprise.
“That’s when they realized how big it really was,” Mike said. “My God, it was really big.”
Mike said that the paws easily could envelope his hands and then some.
The next challenge was moving the bear, which did not prove to be easy.
Mike enlisted help from a neighbor and Naiya’s dad, Joe Klahn. However, they had to use a winch and ATV to get in in a trailer to haul, along with a piece of plywood on the back of the trailer to slide it onto the trailer. They field dressed the bear before loading it onto the trailer.
“Had I known [it could be] a state record, I wouldn’t have done it,” Mike said. “We didn’t know it was going to be a state record bear. It had that white glaze on its chest, which is very rare and why we keyed in on that bear.”
When they took the bear to Hixton Ridge Taxidermy, which was at 10 p.m. that night, Jon Beck was in shock at what he was seeing.
“When we got out, my grandpa looked at the taxidermist and his mouth was wide open, and he knew it was a huge bear,” Naiya said.
Beck knew it was a special bear and encouraged them to not skin the bear right away that night.
Beck said to wait and to get a weight on it the next day.
“So, we left it outside. We flipped it on its back so the heat would come out so the body could cool down, Mike said. “We went down there the next day and Jon had already taken it to the Hixton Feed Mill and threw the bear up on the scale.”
The dressed weight came out to be 720 pounds. But the scale wasn’t a certified scale because there is a 20-pound variance on truck scales.
So, the following day, they called around to find a certified scale, and were unable to find one even through the Department of Natural Resources. But they found a scale at D&S Manufacturing in Black River Falls.
“They were just wonderful,” Mike said.
“Everyone just quit working,” he added. “They came over to look at the bear and even the ladies in the office came out to look.”
The folks at D&S weighed the pallet and the bear and subtracted the pallet-only weight from that number. It was then confirmed the field-dressed weight was 720 pounds.
After consulting with game wardens at the DNR, Naiya and Mike found out they had to go through Boone and Crockett Club, a nonprofit organization that advocated fair-chase hunting in support of habitat conservation, to get a determination on if the harvest is a state recor4d.
“We do not know if the entrails will be counted. We think they will, but we don’t know,” Mike said.
They still had to fill out paperwork for that and were unsure of what the timetable is on a determination.
Entails could make up 15 percent of the body weight.
“If you take 13 percent of the certified body weight, that will put that bear over 800 pounds,” Mike said.
Beck estimated entrails could be up to 17 percent, which would easily clear 800 pounds.
“It’s going to be the biggest one I’m ever going to mount,” Beck said.
This bear was so large that the standard black bear paperwork for mounting doesn’t account for such a large weight.
“We have to use the grizzly form for the mount because black bear forms for the mo0unt aren’t that big,” Mike said.
Naiya said this bear won’t be the last bear she gets while hunting.
“The next one’s probably going to be smaller,” Naiya said.
After harvesting what could have been an 800-pound-plus bear on the opening day of hunting season outside of Merrillan, Kewaskum resident Naiya Iraci (she is the only girl standing by trailer with DNR men) was advised by Jon Beck of Hixton Ridge Taxidermy and game wardens at the Jackson County Department of Natural Resources that it could have been a state record for a bear harvest. Submitted photo.
(Additional Note):
Word from Mike Frank:
Another update on Naiya's bear that she harvested on opening day of the Wisconsin Bear Season. After contacting members of the Wisconsin Buck and Bear Club and Wisconsin Bear Association. I learned that Wisconsin does not recognize record bear by weight, length or girth. It is determined by skull measurements by Boone and Crockett. The skull now has to be cleaned and then dried for 60 days before it is officially scored. After having the bear weighed on a certified scale at 720 lbs. (field dressed) and adding 13% for the entrails her bear weighed 813.6 lbs. and 90" (7'6") in length.
I talked to the taxidermist that is mounting Naiya’s bear and he did a rough measurement on the skull and said it is 22"+ and definitely a Boone and Crockett bear. But now we will have to wait until the official score comes through. Let's all keep our fingers crossed for Naiya's bear placement in the record book...
