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New Jersey Outdoor Alliance

TRENTON, NJ --(Ammoland.com)- After reading about New Jersey Sierra Club Director Jeff Tittel’s belief that a bear hunt is unwarranted and unfounded because it will not help to manage bears in New Jersey (op-ed, “Unbearable hunt,” Dec. 8), as well as similar comments from others in the animal rights community, it occurred to me that one has to overlook some very compelling evidence to the contrary in order to cultivate such faith.

To reach the animal activists’ conclusion, one must disagree with the findings of both a Superior Court and Appellate Court judge, each having ruled that the state of New Jersey had put together a viable, comprehensive bear management plan. The two courts agreed that the hunt should proceed.

People would also need to turn a deaf ear to avoid hearing the pervading wisdom of biologists, wildlife managers and state agencies across America that argue persuasively in favor of hunting as one of several necessary bear management tools.

To agree with the conclusion of animal activists, one must close one’s eyes to the negative psychological effects associated with human-bear conflicts in residential, commercial and camping venues. It also requires an exceptional degree of callousness to ignore claims of economic loss caused by bears to agriculture-related businesses. This insensitivity would also extend to financial harm that would befall employers and employees of hotels, camps and other businesses as a result of lost tourism should a bear-human conflict result in injury or worse.

To agree with the animal activists requires one to show complete disregard for human safety. We would have to be ignorant about the ways black bears respond to periods of declining food sources and lack understanding about the perils associated with bear habituation — the reasons for increased bear-human conflicts. They may, in fact, also be the cause of recent livestock and pet deaths by black bears as well as reported physical encounters between bears and humans.

Animal activists want to promote the rights of bears, but to do so at the expense of the public health is emotional thinking. Difficulty distinguishing between emotions and thoughts may be the reason for animal activists’ sensational claims that the bear hunt is a grand conspiracy of New Jersey’s governor to curry favor with hunters, roll back environmental progress and turn the Garden State over to developers and polluters. Regardless of their origins, they are radical accusations.

Emotional thinking may also be the spark that ignited a handful of activists to hold a bear hunt protest in Trenton last week. They lectured using spurious claims based on manipulated data and research. They even earned the Truth-O-Meter “Pants on Fire” rating from truth watchdog PolitiFact for their claim that 99 percent of New Jerseyans are against the bear hunt.

Finally, for the animal activist to believe that, during a time of dwindling habitat and prolific bear population expansion, bear-human conflict can be managed solely by garbage containment and public education is to defy common sense and rely on wishful thinking. While limiting food sources and educating the public about black bears is useful, it does nothing to address the primary reasons for increased bear-human conflicts: growth of the bear population, loss of habitat and habituation.

Hunting is the tool that addresses these causes.

The New Jersey Outdoor Alliance believes that a black bear hunt is a responsible, pragmatic, environmentally sound, science-based method for bringing the black bear population in line with the cultural carrying capacity of available habitat, which is the goal of environmental stewards. It also provides food for the hunter and his or her family while aversively conditioning bears, which provides a measure of lasting public safety.

Anthony P. Mauro is chairman and co-founder of the New Jersey Outdoor Alliance, New Jersey Outdoor Alliance Conservation Foundation and New Jersey Outdoor Alliance Environmental Projects, dedicated to conservation and environmental stewardship.

JOIN NJOA: http://www.njoutdooralliance.org/support/njoa.html

About:
NJOA – The mission of New Jersey Outdoor Alliance is to serve as a grassroots coalition of outdoorsmen and outdoorswomen dedicated to environmental stewardship. We will champion the intrinsic value of natural resource conservation – including fishing, hunting and trapping, among opinion leaders and policy makers. We will support legislation, and those sponsoring legislation, that provides lasting ecological and social enrichment through sustainable use of the earths resources. Visit: www.njoutdooralliance.org

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By Jim Stabile

Photo by Chris Wyman Photography Highland Lakes, NJ Fish & Wildlife worker Linda Morschauser is dwarfed by the heaviest and perhaps largest black bear ever recorded in New Jersey. At the Franklin check-in station on Friday, the final official live weight estimate for the bruin was 829.5 pounds. The bear was taken in the woods about 1/2-mile from Jefferson High School. / Chris Wyman

AmmoLand Gun News

JEFFERSON, NJ --(Ammoland.com)-A Morris County deer hunter who shot one of the biggest black bears taken in North America was disappointed.

“I would have traded getting two bucks instead of the bear,” said Bruce Headley, 62, of Weldon Road, Milton. Headley’s 829-pound live weight black bear was one of fewer than a dozen over 800 pounds in 35 states and most of Canada.

Bruce and his family prefer venison, but he missed a shot at a buck on opening day of bear and deer season, Dec. 5, at the 150-acre property that has been in his family for nine generations. It abuts the 3,200-acre Mahlon Dickerson Reservation, Morris County’s biggest park.

Headley had seen the big bruin in his backyard in late September “under a yellow delicious apple tree shoving apples into its mouth,” about half a mile from Jefferson High School. He wasn’t hunting for it, but was one of 7,294 other hunters who bought $2 bear hunting permits.

The next time he saw the giant bear was at 11:15 a.m. Dec. 9 while at his deer stand in the woods where he’d been since before daybreak, about three-eighths of a mile behind his house.

Neighbor John Pessagno, hunting about 350 yards away, called him on his cellphone after 11 a.m. to tell him five does had passed and were heading toward him. Headley saw only one doe come and bed down nearby.

“I was looking to see if a buck might be coming when I saw the bear coming up an old tote road,” Headley said. “I waited till he came to a clearing about 45 yards away, and when he did, I shot at him; I knew I hit it at least three times.”

After the bruin went 50 yards and dropped in a rocky, small ravine, Headley called neighbor Gordon Galfo, who drove over with his four-wheeler, then got Adam, Headley’s 21-year-old son, and Passagno, to help.

They chainsawed a path to the bear, used a “come-along” — a hand-operated crank with a cable — and pulled the bear up on a heavy-duty plastic rescue sled. They next picked it up with a front-end loader and put it onto Galfo’s pickup truck for the drive to the Franklin bear checking station.

It took them about three hours to get the bear out, including getting the equipment and help and clearing the path.

“It took longer to get organized than to get it out,” said Headley, who has hunted since he bought his first license at age 14.

He donated the big bear to the Division of Fish and Wildlife, which hopes to have it mounted and displayed at the Pequest Natural Resource Education Center, so others can see the biggest bear ever taken in New Jersey.

“If the hunter wants to donate the bear and the conservation groups are willing to cover the cost of having it mounted, I think the Pequest Natural Resource Education Center would be a great location,” said Division of Fish and Wildlife Director David Chanda.

“It would be a nice compliment to our conservation education programs,” he added. “After all, the black bear represents a truly remarkable success story.

“Especially when you consider that they were all but wiped out by the industrial revolution in the early 1900s, and now as a result of tremendous habitat and management programs developed by professional wildlife biologists, black bears have been sighted in all 21 counties and will forever remain a part of New Jersey’s landscape.”

Bear Biologist Kelcey Burguess of the Division brought it to Wildlife Preservations in Woodland Park, formerly West Paterson, the studio of famed taxidermist George Dante, whose work is on display worldwide.

Dante’s clients include permanent and traveling exhibits of the Museum of Natural History, the Bronx Zoo, and dozens of museums and zoos. The New Jersey Federation of Sportsmen’s Clubs has offered to pay for Dante’s work on the bear.

The day before Headley brought his bear the Franklin checking station off Route 23 — driving past anti-hunting demonstrators who shouted and made [rude] gestures at successful hunters — John Noon of Sussex had brought in 776-pound bear he shot in Stokes State Forest. That bear was a record until Headley’s bear was weighed.

Hunters killed 469 bears in this year’s hunt that coincided with the six-day December firearms deer hunt, fewer than the 592 killed during the 2010 bear hunt, because fog, heavy rain and warm weather reduced the harvest this season. About 800 cubs are usually born every January.

Hunters had to bring their bears to one of five check-in stations where biologists extracted a bear’s tooth to age the animal, took a DNA sample, weighed and measured the bears and determined the location of where the bear was shot.

The division is preparing on a comprehensive report on this year’s season, which again included bears known to have caused damage and other problems. New Jersey’s bears annually cause tens of thousands of dollars worth of damage by breaking into homes, killing pets and livestock, damaging crops and preventing many homeowners from feeding birds or leaving barbecue grilles or garbage outdoors.

For this year’s successful bear season, 7,502 hunters bought 9,082 permits and had a 6-percent success rate, harvesting 140 male bears; 329 females. Of these, 19 percent had been handled during year by biologists: 311 in Sussex; Warren, 98; Passaic, 25; Morris, 33; Bergen, 1, and Hunterdon, 1.

The largest bear shot during the 2010 hunt had an estimated live weight of more than 750 pounds (651 pounds when field dressed) and was taken in Montville Township, near the Boonton border.
Heavyweight Contenders

Garden State adult male American black bears (Ursus americanus) weigh on average 400 pounds. Males are called boars; females, called sows, average 175. Headley’s bear was a boar. Cubs are born in January and most weigh an average of 80 pounds by their first December. Sows aggressively chase their cubs when the reach ages of 16-18 months, so they can breed again.

Pennsylvania’s state record bear, estimated at 879 lbs., was shot in 2010 in Pike County, but weighed 700 lbs. on June 7, 2009, when it was caught, tagged, weighed and released by N.J. bear research biologists off Old Mine Road, in Hardwick Township, Warren County. Six bears heavier than 800 pounds have been shot by hunters in Pennsylvania since 1992.

The U.S. record wild black bear, shot in North Carolina in November 1998, had fattened by eating discards near a pig farm. It weighed 880 lbs. A 805-pound black bear was killed by a hunter in Manitoba, the province where one that was 856.5 lbs was killed when struck by a vehicle on a road near Winnipeg in 2001.

New York’s record black bear, shot in Franklin County in the Adirondacks in 1975, weighed 750 lbs.

Bears can grow as big as 900 in captivity if they’re overfed, which is what happened to the wild one that roamed last year in Pike County, Pa., and had been fed by workers at the Fernwood Resort. The Monroe County hunter who shot it with a crossbow said he didn’t know that.

2011 Black Bear Season Harvest Data

(Below is is preliminary harvest information and subject to revision.)

Black Bear Harvest by Bear Hunting Area

Bear Harvest by Check-in Station

Jim Stabile

About Jim Stabile:
Jim has been writing about the outdoors since 1961 and is a current contributor to Gannett Sunday Papers. Jim was an editor at Outdoor Life Magazine in NYC and the editor of Michigan Out of Doors Magazine. He is currently an Officer in the New York Metropolitan Outdoor Press Association and still an active hunter, enjoying success in his 61st year of deer hunting.

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