Robert Melber said three bears walked by him just after the sun came up at the Delaware Water Gap on the first day of the state’s black bear hunt. He had come all the way from Arizona for this moment.
“I shot the biggest one,” he said.
Melber was the first hunter to show up at the state’s check-in station at the Pequest Wildlife Management area in Oxford, and then other pickup trucks began waiting on line to have bears weighed and examined by state biologists. Melber’s bear weighed 166 pounds after it was gutted, or about 200 pounds when it was alive.
State officials have said the hunt is necessary to control a bear population that grew to more than 3,200 in the area of the hunt, north of Interstate 78 and west of Interstate 287, and has remained at that level even after last year’s hunt killed 592 bears.
Patrick Carr, a supervising biologist with the Division of Fish and Wildlife of the state Department of Environmental Protection, said about 6,800 licenses had been distributed for this week’s hunt compared with 7,200 last year, and that 500 bears were expected to be killed. By the end of the day, state officials estimated 200 bears had been killed.
Carr said last week that the state’s goal is to reduce the population, not simply stabilize it, and that officials may consider expanding the bear hunt after analyzing several years of hunting results. This is the fourth bear hunt the state has held since 2003, but the first time in 40 years that such a hunt has been held in consecutive years.
Animal rights advocates have said the hunt is not necessary and that the number of nuisance complaints about bears would diminish if people took better care of their garbage and the state used other measures to control the bear population. About a dozen protesters stood along Route 23 near a bear check-in station in Franklin on Monday, and planned a candlelight vigil for the evening.
Early Monday afternoon a protester was arrested after going onto the check-in station property and was charged with protesting without a permit, according to an attorney for the protesters.
Hunters showing up at Pequest Monday morning included a married couple from Newark, each with a bear, two teenagers from Wayne who shot and killed the same bear together, and a man who killed a 650-pound bear at Picatinny Arsenal in Rockaway Township. State officials handed out patches to hunters, proclaiming them “Wildlife Management Cooperators,” and pamphlets with recipes for cooking bear meat.
Mark Rogalo, a hunter from Boonton Township, had a deer and a bear in the back of his truck as he pulled up to the Pequest station. He said he encountered the bear about 10 minutes after getting out of his vehicle on Wildcat Ridge in Rockaway Township. Biologists have said bears are more active than usual because they are looking for food after a bad acorn crop. Rogalo said they were active in Rockaway Township for another reason.
“It’s garbage day in White Meadow Lake,” he said.
One man indicated an awareness of controversy surrounding the hunt as he wiped blood off the nose of a bear before photographers and TV cameras began to take pictures.
“That’s all we need, more bad press,” said Frank Colazzo, of Wayne.
Jimmy Collazzo, his 15-year-old son, and 18-year-old K.C. Abel, also of Wayne, described how the 250-pound male bear walked toward them after they encountered it on a ridge in Independence. They said they had used bagels, molasses and corn as bait and sprayed themselves with a “bear bomb” so that they smelled of bacon. They said they each fired four shots until the bear stopped moving.
“I’m pretty pumped,” Jimmy Colazzo said. “We’re going to remember this for the rest of our lives.”
“It’s kind of weird,” said K.C. Abel. “We shot a bear.”
They said they plan to eat the bear and have it stuffed by a taxidermist to have part of it mounted on a wall. Frank Collazzo said he anticipated protesters at the station, and added that he was grateful they were not there so that “it’s a little better experience for the kids.”
Animal rights activists went instead to Franklin, even though the DEP, citing safety concerns because of the proximity of Route 23, initially denied them a permit to protest on state property there. Protesters said they were offered a permit late in the afternoon to stand in an area off to the side of the Franklin station, low-lying land that they referred to as a ditch.
“We respectfully declined,” said Angi Metler, head of the Animal Rights Protection League of New Jersey.
They stood across the highway where they said they could be seen by traffic. Metler said the protesters’ numbers reached 25 at one point during the day and that they plan to hold candlelight vigils every evening during the hunt, with a larger all-day protest on Saturday, the last day of the hunt. After the sun went down Monday, about a dozen protestors held up glow sticks and signs as some of the passing motorists honked their horns.
Mike Tutko, of Hackettstown, had the largest bear during the early part of the day at Pequest. He showed up with a male bear that weighed an estimated 650 pounds when it was alive. That was not quite as large as two bears killed during last year’s hunt, said state black bear biologist Mike Madonia. One bear was 709 pounds undressed while the other was 606 after being gutted, or about 700 pounds when alive.
Tutko said he killed the bear at Picatinny Arsenal, where he has a permit to hunt as a military veteran. He said another hunter had chased the bear toward him. Asbury Park Press
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