Category Archives: New Jersey

The Bear Hunt

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Ken described in detail the elevated stand he was going to build in the woods. I tried to ignore him, but my tiny office at the front of the laboratory was a natural gathering place for the guys to drink coffee and tell stories. It was my first job out of college, typing and answering the phone for an oil service company on the outskirts of Denver.

On his break from polishing thin sections of rocks, Ken told us how he would use the stand to lie in wait for the bear, bow at his side, his holstered handgun to be used only if necessary. To lure the bear he planned to use . . . doughnuts. The chemist and geologist snickered, egging him on.

None of it squared with the hunting I had grown up with in Kansas where for a few days each November orange-capped pheasant hunters filled the local coffee shops. The only other hunter I knew, a neighbor who traveled further afield, cooked up big pots of chili, which I reluctantly tried, made with antelope or was it moose? Baiting and killing bears was new to me.

Photo Credit: peupleloup via Compfight cc

Photo Credit: peupleloup via Compfight cc

Maybe I am misremembering the doughnuts or maybe Ken made it up to impress the new girl. Either way, I was rooting for the bear.

Thirty-some years later I don’t know anyone who hunts bears, but have come to an uneasy acceptance of the fact that it’s part of life in the West. What I didn’t know until I read this article in the New York Times is that New Jersey also has a bear hunt. The season opens today, December 8th, and lasts for six days. It’s not universally popular and was only reinstated a few years ago after a thirty year hiatus to allow the dwindling bear population to recover.

When the annual hunting season began in 2010 it was estimated that population had grown to approximately 3400 bears living north of Interstate 80, which cuts across New Jersey (although bears have now been documented in all 21 counties, the bulk of the population lives in the northern part of the state). With a human population of 1200 per square mile (compared to 17 per square mile in New Mexico), encounters between the two have become more frequent with bears routinely wandering through suburban neighborhoods, grazing in dumpsters, and causing schools to go into lock down mode. But up until September when a black bear killed a college student hiking with friends in Passaic County in a rare predatory attack, there had never been a fatality in New Jersey.

The goal of the week-long December hunt is simple:  reduce the bear population. Hunters are encouraged in the Hunting and Trapping Digest to shoot the first bear they see provided they are able to get a clean, safe shot. Males, females, cubs, mothers with a cubs–all bears are fair game, but only one bear per hunter. About 1600 bears have been killed in the last four years and the overall population reduced to approximately 2500.

It sounds easy enough until you consider the logistics of finding, killing, and dragging a dead 300-pound bear out of the woods.  In the first year of the New Jersey hunt 592 bears were killed, but since then the numbers have continued to dwindle down to 251 bears in 2013.    Even so, if I were a bear in New Jersey I’d keep a low profile this week.

As for Ken?  There never really was any doubt.  He got his bear rug, a freezer full of sausage and one big story.

 

NYC – What Kind of Bird Was That?

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I needed to see the feet–yellow or black? The roosting birds were not showing even a toe when Dave spotted them out the train window shortly after we pulled away from the station at the Newark Liberty International Airport. It was dusk and the white birds appeared to have settled in the trees next to the marshy wetland for the night, legs and beaks snugly tucked into their feathers.

At home I have bird identification guides stashed for easy reference: National Geographic next to the breakfast table, Sibley at my desk, and Peterson in the car. However, I didn’t have any of them with me on the train. Luckily, as with most things in modern life, there’s a smart phone application (app) for that.

Within moments I had Audubon available at my fingertips, not only photos and range maps, but also recordings of bird calls with a warning not to play them in the field (confusing not only to other birdwatchers, but also to the birds). Once I had the app it didn’t take me long to decide that what I had seen were egrets, but were they snowy egrets or great egrets? Based on their size, which I misjudged, I thought they were snowy egrets (Egretta thula).

Photo Credit: Drew and Didi via Compfight cc

Photo Credit: Drew and Didi via Compfight cc

Wanting to be more certain I sent an email to Marie Winn who wrote Redtails in Love and has a blog about birding in Central Park. She was kind enough to immediately reply to my question. She, too, had seen these birds on train trips in the area and thought they were probably great egrets (Ardea alba). But she said it’s hard to know for sure without getting a look at their feet (snowy feet are yellow and greats are black) or beaks (snowy bills are mostly black and greats are yellow). I trust that Marie’s guess is better than mine.

Photo Credit: mikebaird via Compfight cc

Photo Credit: mikebaird via Compfight cc

The rest of my trip was a bust as far as birdwatching: two robins on a lawn in New Jersey, a few sparrows flitting around on the High Line, and a row of pigeons on the arm of a light post next to Central Park, which made me certain that Pale Male was not in the vicinity.

NYC – Day Trip to New Jersey

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The line to buy train tickets at Penn Station was unexpectedly long for a Sunday morning–red shirts behind us, green in front.  We were all headed for New Jersey. The hubbub subsided when we reached the tracks and conductors directed the Patriots’ and Jets’ fans to a separate train.

Ours was a short, quiet ride to Cranford, the town where Dave grew up.  We walked the mile and a half from the station to the neighborhood of two-story, one garage houses, scuffing our feet through piles of oak and maple leaves.   To Dave’s surprise Maryland Street still dead-ends at the edge of the woods, a few doors down from his former house.  He played in the woods as a kid, riding his English racer on the trail in the summer and sledding with his brothers, one piled on top of the other on their Airline Racer, on snowy winter days.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/32455386@N05

On our way back downtown we paused to jump on the hopscotch grid at the Walnut Avenue School and picked up a few  red and yellow leaves–mementos of our trip to New Jersey.

Mementos of Autumn