When Bears Get the Munchies

By Daren Fonda/Hamburg

The smell of doughnuts tickled mama bear's nose. They were lying in a culvert, wrapped in a T shirt smothered with molasses. She was hungry. Why not tuck in? As soon as she did, a metal grate slammed shut behind her. She clawed at the cage, to no avail. Trapped in a backyard in Hamburg, N.J., all she could do was hunker down and wait.

It's a predicament facing a lot of black bears in the Garden State. And yes, we're talking about the same New Jersey known as the tollbooth capital of America; the nation's most densely populated state. A thriving community of about 1,200 bears roams around northwestern New Jersey, say officials, and others have been captured across the Hudson River from New York City. The animals, while rarely aggressive, are growing bolder--mauling trash cans, frightening Boy Scouts on camping trips.

Spurred by thousands of complaints, the state is clamping down. Next week, for the first time in 30 years, hunters will be allowed to shoot bears. The two-day target harvest is 175, and if that's not met, archers will try for kills in October. "People are fed up," says state wildlife biologist Bob Eriksen. "The bears are attacking dogs, disrupting barbeques. We handled 1,700 complaints last year--up 85% since 1995. All I do is bear control."

Driving upstate one afternoon, Eriksen, a soft-spoken, bearded 50-year-old, made several stops to appease residents. In Hope Township, he calmed Wayne Forte, whose English pointer, Bonnie, had tangled with a 300-lb. bear in the woods behind his house (the dog escaped unscathed). In Warren County, Eriksen surveyed John Suk's 140-acre cornfield, where another bear had chowed down, leaving a swath of husks in her wake.

In 1970, only 50 of the animals had made dens in the state, but three decades of conservation has allowed them to flourish. Now with homes--and the attendant edible trash--encroaching on bear habitats, ursine-human encounters have risen in kind. And it isn't just in Jersey. Since 1993, the continent's bear population has increased 75%, to 700,000, according to the North American Bear Center in Ely, Minn. Today 27 states sanction shoots.

In New Jersey, animal-rights groups are seeking a court injunction against the bear hunt. Last summer Governor Christine Todd Whitman pressured the state's fish and game council to reduce its target from 350 to 175. Instead of a hunt, foes argue, let the bears deplete their natural food supply, which would cause their numbers to drop--assuming, that is, they avoid the local Dairy Queen Dumpster. "Trophy hunting solves nothing," says Wayne Pacelle of the Humane Society of the U.S. "People should bear-proof their garbage and close their windows while cooking."

All of which sounds perfectly unreasonable to Hamburg resident Ethel Martin, 88, shaking her head as she watched Eriksen and his assistant Mike Madonia remove the 140-lb. sow they had trapped in her backyard with the shirtful of doughnuts. "I've lived here 62 years, never seen bears this much. One ripped off a window screen trying to get in. I was hospitalized with frayed nerves the last time it happened," says the widow.

To her dismay the bear in her yard will live, for now. When biologist Eriksen arrives, he finds the animal barely whimpering. Madonia shoots her with a tranquilizer and pours water over her belly to cool her down. They tag her, fit a radio transmitter around her neck and extract a baby tooth to study. Then they release her in a wildlife-management area, shooting her with rubber buckshot as she scampers off. That's what Eriksen calls "attitude conditioning," intended to instill a fear of humans. But that fear is often overcome when hunger meets the smell of stale baked goods and other human delicacies, most of which, the bears have learned, do not lead into traps.