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On December 10, 2022, a retired marine named Daniel Parrott tagged a behemoth of a black bear while hunting over walker hounds with a group of outfitters in eastern North Carolina. He dropped the bear with a well-placed shot from a Marlin .30-30 shortly after first light. And when he approached the downed animal, alongside his guide and hunting partner Billy Barber, the two men were astonished by its size. At 717 pounds, the boar black bear was far and away the biggest that either Parrott or Barber had ever laid eyes on.

“I’ve hunted bears a handful of times throughout my life,” Parrott told Field & Stream. “But this was the first time that I’ve gone bear hunting and felt very confident that something was going to happen.” Parrott was invited to attend the bear hunt as a participant in the Combat Warriors program, a nonprofit with chapters in five different states that provides combat veterans with ready access to hunting opportunities. He said the hunt kicked off around 6:35 a.m. when Phil “Rabbit” Ferguson—the lead guide and owner of Stormy Ridge Outfitters—let his hounds loose on a fresh scent. 

717-pounds black bear
Dan Parrott shot the bear under the guidance of Stormy Ridge Outfitters out of Engelhard, North Carolina. Dan Parrott

“The radios came alive within seconds of the hounds finding the trail,” he said. “I was hunting with Billy and two other guys. When we started hearing the hounds, they moved off to a predetermined spot about 200 yards away. Billy and I moved deeper into the woods, following the edge of a large drainage canal.”

Parrott was hunting in Hyde County, North Carolina, not far from a 46,000-acre chunk of state-owned property known as the Dare Game Lands. The area is known for harboring black bears that reach staggering weights by feeding year-round on a combination of hard mast and readily available agricultural crops like soybeans and peanuts.

The largest bear ever recorded in the Old North State was killed by a hunter in Craven County—just three counties south of the spot where Parrott took his giant bruin in mid-December. That bear was taken with a shotgun slug at close range. It weighed 880 pounds, but—because its skull was so severely damaged—it was never entered into the Boone & Crockett record books.

digital scale
Parrot’s bear weighed in at 717.6 pounds on an official digital scale. Dan Parrott

“This area is full of big hardwood forests with lots of oaks and locusts,” said Parrott. “There’s a healthy bear population, and, at the same time, you have a relatively low population density of people. I’ve been told that the bear population exceeds the human population in some of these counties.” 

It wasn’t long after Parrott and Barber broke away from the other two hunters that Barber spotted movement about 50 yards away in a thick stand of cypress trees and loblolly pines. “The bear was moving at a leisurely pace without any hounds on his immediate trail when he paused to look in our direction for a split second.” Parrott said. “After transitioning from iron sights to my scope, I rested the crosshairs behind his shoulder. The bullet hit slightly forward of my intended point but put the boar down on his right side without another step.”

Parrot and his guide Billy Barber posed with the massive bear immediately after the hunt.
Parrott and his guide, Billy Barber, posed with the massive bear immediately after the hunt. Dan Parrott

Parrott and Barber quickly closed the distance between themselves and the bear in order “to ensure a clean and respectful end.” At about the same time, the hunting party they’d split off from earlier in the morning got a shot on a bear of their own. “Within 15 minutes, two bears were harvested and all of the hounds were safe and accounted for,” Parrott recalled. 

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With the big bruin down and the rest of the crew from Stormy Ridge fast approaching, Parrott paused to take stock of the monumental task that now lay before him. “After I got the bear, I just sort of looked at it, and I thought: I’m not even sure where to start with cleaning him,” he said.

Eventually, the other hunters and guides showed up. The crew used ratchet straps to attach the giant bear to a plastic sheet and dragged it out of the woods with a side-by-side to a front end loader on a nearby road. Then, with a heavy-duty strap affixed to one of the bear’s legs, they lifted it up into the bed of a pickup truck.  “There’s no way I could have ever packed that thing out on my own,” Parrott said. “The head and the hide alone weighed close to two hundred pounds.”