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Fifty-five years ago, I built a house (that is, paid for the building of it) in the northwest corner of Princeton Township, in New Jersey. It was on an unpaved road, running through woods and past an abandoned cornfield that had become a small meadow. My house looks out through trees and down that meadow.
Improbably, I developed a yearning, almost from the get-go, to see a bear someday in the meadow. While I flossed in the morning, looking north through an upstairs bathroom window, I hoped to see a bear come out of the trees. If this seems quixotic, it was. This was four miles from the campus of Princeton University, around which on all sides was what New Yorkers were calling a bedroom community. Deer were present in large familial groups, as they still are in even larger families. They don’t give a damn about much of anything, and when I walk down the driveway in the morning to pick up the newspaper I all but have to push them out of the way. Beforehand, of course, I have been upstairs flossing, looking down the meadow. No bears.
In 1966, in a conversation in Trenton with Lester MacNamara, the head of the state’s Division of Fish and Game, I learned that there were twenty-two wild bears in New Jersey. Most lived on or near Kittatinny Mountain, in Sussex County, up the Delaware River. Sussex was once under a vertical kilometre of ice, and it looks it. It looks like Vermont. Kittatinny is actually a component of one very long mountain that runs, under various names, from Alabama to Newfoundland as the easternmost expression of the folded-and-faulted, deformed Appalachians. Through Sussex County, it carries the Appalachian Trail. New Jersey bears are best off there, and they know they are best off there, but they are as curious as they are hungry, and they range widely looking for mates. MacNamara happened to learn, while I was with him in his office, that a farmer in Pottersville had shot and killed a bear up a tree, and MacNamara, on his telephone, was shouting mad. Twenty-one.
Pottersville is in Hunterdon County, and Hunterdon is the county next to Mercer, and Mercer is where I am. In 1980, a bear came through Hunterdon and into Mercer, skirted Princeton, and somehow crossed U.S. 1 and I-195 within five miles of the center of Trenton. In Yardville, a cop shot and killed it. New Jersey’s bear biologists would have preferred to get there first, shoot the bear with Ketaset, put it in a pickup after it conked out, and take it to Kittatinny before it woke up.
So please note: my ambition to see a bear in my back yard has not been completely insane. By the latest estimate, there are about twenty-five hundred bears in New Jersey now. Wild bears. Black bears. And perhaps not a few that have immigrated from Pennsylvania in search of a better life. In recent years, bears have been spotted in every New Jersey county.
Nassau Street is the main street of Princeton—town on one side, university on the other—and a bear has been seen there, close by the so-called “tree streets” (Chestnut, Walnut, Linden, Maple, Spruce, and Pine). I grew up on Maple Street. If I wanted to see a bear, I should have stayed put. Marshall Provost, a longtime friend of mine who recently left the Princeton police force to become a federal police officer in the District of Columbia, has told me that Princeton’s official attitude toward bears is “Just leave them alone.” He nonetheless investigated the Tree Street Bear: “I walked within ten feet of it. It was leaning against a tree.” Of another bear, he said, “It was all over Princeton. That guy travelled.” As did still another bear last June 19th. Nick Sutter, the town’s police chief, told me that it was seen at the Hun School and around Princeton’s Ascot-class neighborhoods—Elm Road, Constitution Hill—and on Chambers Street, in the middle of town. Princeton’s benign and respectful disposition toward wild bears is not in any way unusual or special in this exemplary state, whose municipalities, counties, and state agencies come on in choral unison about what to do when bears show up in your back yard.
“Just let ’em go.”
“Just leave ’em alone.”
“Be cautious,” an online article about Lawrence Township (Mercer County) said. “A black bear was spotted Sunday on Surrey Drive.” In Laurel Run Village, a development in Bordentown (Burlington County), a bear stood up six feet tall, looked around, and went off into the woodlot next door.
Essex, New Jersey’s second-densest county, with a population per square mile that outdenses the Netherlands, has had a number of recent sightings of wild black bears. On Memorial Day weekend, 2016, in West Caldwell, a bear was seen “in the area of Herbert Place and Eastern Parkway,” according to a piece by Eric Kiefer on the Web site Patch. The bear, or another bear, next played Verona, “on Crestmont Road in the area of Claremont Ave.” This was fourteen miles from the editorial offices of The New Yorker, which look out across the Hudson, over the Meadowlands, and far into Essex County.
In May, 2017, in Middletown Township (Monmouth County), bears were sighted on Nut Swamp Road and, a day later, on Packard Drive. In Manchester Township (Ocean County), a wild black bear went up a back-yard tree in a neighborhood called Holly Oaks, where it tried to look like a black burl weighing two hundred and fifty pounds. According to a piece by Rob Spahr, of NJ Advance Media, “officers used sirens, air horns and water hoses to move the bear.” The bear moved. Because it might return, police told residents, “Be vigilant.” They also recommended that citizens review the bear-safety advice of, as it is called now, the state’s Division of Fish and Wildlife, Department of Environmental Protection:
In the past three years, twenty-one bears have entered New Jersey homes, with no human fatalities. For example, Diane Eriksen, of West Milford (Passaic County), was under the impression that she was alone in her house. Hearing a sound in her living room, she went and had a look. A bear looked back. She beat a retreat and called 911. The bear, at the coffee table, helped itself to half a bowl of peppermint patties, scattered the wrappers all over the floor, and took off. The 911 call resulted in its death.
The state’s advisory continues:
To be sure, black bears are dangerous. Mistakenly described as “sedentary,” even “harmless,” they can be every bit as lethal as grizzlies. Years ago, a geologist I know lost both her arms to a black bear in Alaska’s Yukon-Tanana terrain. In 2002, a bear in Sullivan County, New York, removed an infant from a stroller, carried her into the woods, and killed her. In 2014, a Rutgers student was killed by a bear in Passaic County, New Jersey. Horrible as such events are, bear stories gathering in the mind across time tend to exaggerate their own frequency. In the past twenty years, fourteen people in the United States have been killed by black bears. In 2012, one person killed twenty children in Connecticut. In 2018 . . .
Police in the Borough of Middlesex (Middlesex County) posted a Nixle notification: “Be alert, secure garbage and NEVER feed or approach bears.” Lawrence Township told Lawrentians to bring garbage cans and bird feeders inside. Bordentown police went on Facebook to face down bears.
Evidently, there are fewer bears to face down than there were a year ago. Statewide, reported bear sightings dropped from seven hundred and twenty-two in 2016 to two hundred and sixty-three in 2017. Why this is so is not definitively known. With increased hunting, the bears have surely become warier. They could also have seen enough and gone back to the Poconos. But New Jersey bears are, of course, almost all native, and they are reproductively more fruitful than the nine hundred thousand black bears elsewhere in North America, whose average number of cubs per birth is a bit above two. The New Jersey average is 2.9. New Jersey sows have dropped as many as six cubs in a litter, and five, and four. New Jersey bears have a more concentrated forage of acorns, hazelnuts, beechnuts, and so forth—foods that build fat. Fat equals health, and, in winter, nourishment for the mother making milk for her cubs, which are born in the den.
In 2003, New Jersey decided that its bear population had increased to a size that needed “management.” Bear hunting, banned in 1971, was “reintroduced” and took place in early December, during deer season. In 2015, the bear-hunting season was greatly increased, with a new “segment,” in October, when black bears are much more active, and the licensee was permitted to use a bow and arrow or a muzzleloader, the gun that fired the shot heard round the world. There are more muzzleloaders in the United States today than there were people in Colonial America in 1775. In the late twentieth century, a muzzleloader in California ignited a fire that burned three thousand eight hundred and sixty acres. If something like that were not enough to make a bear wary, New Jersey’s over-all “harvest” surely has been. In fifteen years, New Jersey hunters have killed four thousand bears. Among conjectures about the cause of the decline in bear sightings, that one seems prominent. The fact that New Jersey bears are crepuscular—that is, they move about before sunrise and after sunset, and spend the rest of the day in a swamp—has more to do with sheer intelligence than it does with nature. New Jersey’s new governor, Phil Murphy (Monmouth County), came into office declaring that he was going to ban the bear hunt once more.
In the past several decades, I have done most of my shad fishing on the Upper Delaware River in Wayne County, Pennsylvania, opposite Sullivan County, New York. Pennsylvania estimates its population of black bears at twenty thousand, and a lot of them are in Wayne County, where I have never seen one, but they are around us all the time. In a storm, a big oak in mast, up a slope from my cabin there, fell not long ago. Its trunk broke freakishly—about twenty feet up—and the crown bent all the way over and spread the upper branches like a broom upon the ground. In the branches were a number of thousands of acorns. The next morning, there was enough bear shit around that oak to fertilize the Philadelphia Flower Show. But nary a bear. A neighbor, though, went around a corner of his cabin one day and almost bumped into a bear coming the other way. The bear was so afraid of this neighbor that it turned, ran down the bank to the river, jumped in, and swam to New York. Black bears are strong swimmers.
My ambition to see one in my own back yard came extremely close to success on the eleventh of August, 2016. My wife, Yolanda Whitman, was sitting in the living room and happened to look up. A bear came out of the trees and started across the meadow. And where was I at this milestone of a moment? I was in a basement recording studio in a new building on the Princeton campus making a podcast about Princeton basketball with Mitch Henderson, the head coach.
My résumé remains empty. Looking down from our windows, I have never seen a bear. Mitch Henderson will have to do. Meanwhile, as Yolanda watched, the bear reached mid-meadow and sat down. This was not before sunrise or after sunset. This was late morning. This bear was not afraid of anything. Rolling its shoulders, flexing, shrugging, soaking up the sun, it groomed itself. It sat there and groomed itself (!!!), while I, talking to Mitch, was in a cellar designed by Frank Gehry, and Yolanda, whose mind is full of presence, was taking pictures of the bear. ♦
