Bear hunt kills up: Warm weather, large population cited

Mild weather and a large bear population have the number of kills during the first two days of New Jersey's annual bear hunt surpassing week-long totals for each of the past three years.

The New Jersey Division of Fish and Game Council reports 309 kills as of Tuesday night, with 199 coming from Sussex County alone.

"We had 8,200 permits to shoot, a lot of them came in over the weekend" prior to the hunt said Department of Environmental Protection spokesman Larry Hajna, who said hunters likely saw the forecast for the week calling for spring like temperatures and decided to actually go out. Snowy and cold weather kept hunters holding permits home the past few years and held down the number of harvests.

Field studies, modeling and scientific analysis of the population by the DEP coupled with  "reports of people seeing not just one or two bears but multiple bears in their neighborhood or yards confirms  that indeed the bear population is large this year," according to Hajna.

He said the parts of Sussex, Warren, Morris, Passaic, Hunterdon, Bergen, Somerset and Mercer counties included in this year's hunt have some of "the densest bear populations in the nation."

New Jersey's bear population also reproduces at a higher rate than the rest of the nation, Hajna said.

"It's not unusual to see two or three cubs per litter and as many as 5, because the state's forest provides many of the things they like, such as acorns," he said.

Hajna said most bears, when they encounter humans, will back off and walk away from the situation. But as they become more "habituated" with people "we have to treat the hunt as a public safety issue as well as providing ecological balance to the bear population. Bears are not designed biologically to co-exist in large numbers in given areas and need their own fairly large territory.," Hajna said.

He said that critics of the bear hunt who feel that education is the best solution to control the bear population need to realize there needs to be a "multi-faceted approach" that includes the hunt to keep the population numbers "steady and under control so the education efforts can work." People will know what what to do when they encounter a bear.

New Jersey's bear hunt goes through Saturday.