Voices Raised on New Jersey Black Bears

Whatever New Jerseyans - one of the states most consistently voting Democratic in national elections - were voting for when they elected Republican Chris Christie Governor last year, they seem to be getting another about face on one of their most contentious issues: whether or not to hunt black bears. The Fish and Game Council on March 9 presented its draft for a new "Comprehensive Black Bear Management Policy" to Bob Martin, the Acting Commissioner of Environmental Protection appointed by the new Governor. As hoped by some and feared by others, it contains strong recommendations for restoring the ten-day hunting season that had been shelved at the insistence of the last Governor, Democrat Jon Corzine.

There are two main things that make the bear issue especially difficult in New Jersey:
- It is one of the most densely populated states in the nation, yet the nickname "Garden State" is no joke. From farmlands and magnificent wetlands to the pinelands "down the shore" and the forested and lake-dotted highlands of the northwestern corner (where the "High Point" monument crowns a spot on the Kittatinny Ridge that reaches just a bit more than a thousand feet above sea level), Jersey's many human residents are wedged in among nature's finest. In the case of black bears, neighborliness is sometimes hard to work out, from either side.
- Discussion of the issue is carried on almost exclusively at the extremes. Cries of "nuisance" and "danger" are met with "abused" and "persecuted." And then the yelling gets personal, whether directed at politicians of one stripe and then the other, or at the verbal opponents themselves. There is very little reasoned argument, and very little opportunity to learn how bears and humans can actually find that neighborly coexistence.

In the spirit of full disclosure, I live in that northwestern corner, in a lake community first developed in the 1920s and 30s. I moved here just a decade ago from one of the ultra-suburban communities of the northeast corner (that takes only 40 miles around here) where deer may be referred to as 'rats with hooves' for their culinary selections among the expensive landscaping. I came here for the dark, the quiet, and the joy of being visited regularly by four-legged critters from chipmunks to, yes, bears. I am encouraging my property to revert to forest, and while it's a great reason not to mow a yard that's mostly on about a 30-degree grade, it goes far beyond that.

My corner of the state is the heart of bear country in New Jersey, and of the contention between those who consider the other large omnivores pests and those who consider them miracles. The State Division of Fish and Wildlife, on a map marked as updated in August 2009, notes "Black Bears Have Been Sighted In All 21 Counties" in the state, but does not indicate over what period or give other explanation of the density statistics depicted. Whatever the details, it is abundantly clear that the bears are seen most often in my northwestern corner. Around 1950, in fact, they were all in this corner, and there were only about a hundred of them, according to the History recounted in the new draft policy [p8]. In 1953, they were granted status as "game animals," which was then a protective measure because it enlisted the interests of the hunters who had brought the population down so low in keeping their prey of choice from vanishing from the state completely.

Now, that's become a major piece of the issue. Even quickly scanning the new draft policy, you can't really blame the bear-protectors, such as Janet Piszar of the Bear Education and Resource (BEAR) Group, for perceiving a bias in favor of hunters. At the very least, it seems that the regulators may have started from a conclusion that hunting was good and worked backward. Their policy starts with an endorsement of a 1997 bear-management plan [8], even though that didn't result in a hunt until 2003. And even in the executive summary of the new proposal, the Council "recommends a regulated bear hunting season, both to provide mandated recreational opportunity and to control the population in the most cost effective manner."

About every possible piece of the draft plan talks either about using hunters to control ursine overpopulation at their own cost or the positive collection of license fees and boosts to local economies through hunters' spending on "equipment, supplies, gas, food and lodging in pursuit of black bears. [26]" It talks about "transfer[ring] the killing of a species which can become a public nuisance or threat from the general public to a smaller group of people (hunters). [25]" It's that "nuisance or threat" that is the loudest cry of the hunting advocates.

The headlines tend to shout 'Bear invades kitchen,' at the very least. You usually have to read quite far down in the story to learn that the violated humans had left, say, a pan of brownies fresh out of the oven and just beyond the open screen door when they left the room. Bears are goofballs. They love sweets and aromatic things just as much as they love dying salmon or winter-killed possums. And they see no reason to consider a screen door that lets the aromas beckon them as any kind of barrier.

In fact, in 2002 New Jersey passed a law, NJSA 23:2A-14 (link follows), to prohibit feeding bears. It's a violation to "feed, give, place, expose, deposit, distribute or scatter any edible material or attractant with the intention of feeding, attracting or enticing a black bear; or store pet food, garbage or other bear attractants in a manner that will result in bear feedings when black bear are known to frequent the area. [emphasis added]" Janet Piszar and the BEAR Group complain that only four citations (which come with fines up to a thousand dollars) have been written under the law since it was enacted. But here's where I think they're asking a bit much:
- The law is to be enforced "by all municipal police officers, the State Police, and law enforcement officers with the Division of Fish and Wildlife and the Division of Parks and Forestry." Now, even though some NJ towns lack municipal police forces and therefore use the State troopers for local enforcement, with this kind of diverse responsibility, and with most of the enforcers carrying plenty of other responsibilities, it's not at all surprising that they haven't been burning through their ticket books on things like bird feeders hung too low.
- The law requires each offender to be given one written warning before getting a ticket. Since it's most likely that an officer will be writing either warning or ticket because the offender has reported a bear encounter, it seems to me unlikely that an offender/victim, once warned, will both report a repeat encounter and leave the evidence around that it was the human's fault. Especially in the fraught atmosphere of New Jersey bear politics, very few will say 'But I did leave the dog food out again. Where do I pay my thousand?'
- Most ridiculous, for everybody, are those parts of the simple statement of the offense that I emphasized. How does any officer determine that you intentionally left the dog food on the deck for the bear rather than your dog? And if you did, why would you call the police - a second time - to complain that the bear accepted your gift? How can anyone know what's going to attract a bear? In the photo attached, a bear was after the last six seeds in that bird feeder, or maybe it was the feeder itself that attracted the bear to my yard; after all, I received it as a gift brought to my yard by an unknown bear, from some neighbor I couldn't identify, a couple of years earlier.
-- And of course, there's that business of bears being "known to frequent the area." You won't see any mention in the news of bears walking down the street in my area, because their appearance is so ... frequent. But my old neighbors in the ultraburbs are subject to the same law. Do they get an out for failing to clean their barbeques, by saying (however truthfully) they hadn't heard there was a bear in their neighborhood? And by the way, one of the few ways I knew the bears were still frequenting my street last summer was the sound, every night in the wee hours, of somebody shoving around my neighbor's bear-proof garbage cans. Those neighbors used to be raided more successfully, and bears are persistent, inventive, and have long memories. In one of the first weeks with the good cans (invented for hazardous materials, the lids screw off), a bear carried my neighbor's can, in its teeth but unopened, up a dozen steps and half of my sloping "meadow" before my husband told it to "put that down." The bear complied.

Everyone does allow that the law is too vague. The draft policy of the Fish and Game Council recommends tightening it up. But they don't say how, and they don't include any plan for figuring out how. They do report on a study in which officers "inspected over 4,600 residential properties in high bear incident areas and found 98% were in compliance with black bear garbage management guidelines. [11]" But it would be a shame if the law were left in its wimpy state, no use to anyone except as ammunition to claim it isn't being enforced or it isn't needed.

For the same reason that the no-feeding law is least enforceable in the areas where bears are the biggest nuisances, the places the bears don't belong, the places where people are, a bear hunt is unlikely to contribute to control of nuisance bears. Think about it. The hunters are not going to be allowed into the ultraburb back yards, or even my yard, with their shotguns, compound bows, and (yes, it's there in the draft policy) muzzle-loaded firearms. The most troublesome bears, on the other hand, are not likely to be out in the deep woods where it's safe for the hunters to shoot at them. In one of its sillier passages, the draft policy lists hunting as supporting nonlethal aversive conditioning of bears: "Although some nuisance bears are eliminated during hunting seasons, others are pursued but not harvested, thereby imparting a negative experience on the bear. [27]" And certainly the bears that are harvested have learned their lessons, right? Even if they've never seen a house, let alone raided its garbage.

The Fish and Game Commission, and especially bear-hunt advocates such as the writer (who can match or outdo Janet Piszar's intensity) identified through the Wordpress blog http://njbearhunt.com as njhunt, bearconcerns, and Bennie Henderson, claim New Jersey's black bear population has grown steadily, right through the two most recent hunts in 2003 and 2005, and needs to be reduced. A local cable-news outlet, News12, quotes unnamed "state biologists" estimating "a 62 percent rise in the number of bears in Sussex and Passaic counties between 2002 and 2007." (Sussex has the most appropriate habitat, and Passaic is a strange mix of forest and inner city.) But Table 2 in the draft Management Plan shows 291 individual bears handled by DFW taggers (presumably statewide) in 2002 (89 cubs of the year, in their dens), 223 (42) in 2007, and 262 (53) in 2009. [40]

For myself, I'm sure of very few things. One of them is that I'd like to have fewer polemics in the statistics I get from my state officials. Another is that it's really quite simple to keep the bears from bothering me or my stuff. (The BEAR Group's excellent Web site offers a concise and attractive 4-page PDF document, called "What Do I Do If I See a Bear?" at http://www.savenjbears.com/bearproofing.html. Fish and Wildlife offers only a one-page report form to "Tell our biologists about any bears that you have seen," but you mail it in, and there's no indication of what will happen to it or the bear you've turned in.) And what I'm most sure of is that I'd rather see a bear raiding my birdfeeder and mystifying my (inside) cats than follow another dead one in the back of some hunter's pickup truck, for twenty miles down Route 23. That could be when I go ballistic.
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To read the statute against "Intentional feeding of black bears," start at http://www.state.nj.us/dep/fgw/njregs.htm, click on "New Jersey Permanent Statute Title 23" and scroll down to 2A-14.

A phone call to the Public Affairs officer of the Fish and Wildlife Commission the afternoon of 3/9 was not returned, though the draft policy was promptly posted to the Web.