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Description
One typical hot and muggy summer day in Northern New Jersey, I took a book and limped down the short path through the woods to the pond behind our house. I had sprained an ankle on my morning hike the day before, but was determined to spend at least part of my day outside. I also hoped that between my ankle and my book, I would keep from fidgeting long enough to see a beaver on its way to work out on the water. If I was lucky, one might even stop for a rest and a quick grooming on the log just off shore in front of the chairs, something my dad had witnessed about a week earlier. I eased myself onto a battered plastic pool chair injured-foot-first, twisting my knee sideways to let my ankle lie flat in a position that minimized pain in the latter but promised an ache in the former. A few careful wiggles made it work.

After about an hour passed with nothing more exciting than a sparrow, I ignored the first crunch of twigs to my left. Probably just the darn squirrels taking the withdrawals they'd made from our bird feeders for deposit in their private caches. Then snap! crackle! pop! went the underbrush, louder than any Rice Krispies I've ever eaten. I finished my sentence--it was Dracula, so I couldn't just put it down--then slowly looked up so I wouldn't startle the beaver back into the water.

Except it wasn't a beaver. It was a black bear.

My eyebrows shot up to make room for my wide-open eyelids. Black bears are so common where I live that local residents swap bear encounter tales the way veterans trade war stories. However, my family had moved from Massachusetts just six months earlier. We had one collective sighting in common and still considered each individual experience a treat.

"Oh no," I groaned, letting my book fall shut. "Not you again!"

Well, mostly.

Many bears in the continental United States suffer the reputation of their aggressive cousins, the grizzlies. My family lived in Utah and enjoyed camping when my sisters and I were all between four and twelve. Forget the fear of God... Go to a national park out west and the only religion they preach to children is Respect for Nature--especially wildlife and especially bears. Seven years living near Boston smudged the hard lines of the lesson but did not erase it, so when my family heard about the bears in New Jersey, we made sure that everyone else knew to get away. Noisily. Few animals appreciate surprises.

* * *

This is good to keep in mind for any sharp-toothed wildlife larger than a cat, of course, but some animals help humans keep their distance. Some could care less. Eastern black bears, the hippies of the Ursidae Family, fall into this small second category. They're so chill when it comes to human encounters that even mother bears, the most notoriously violent members of the species, prefer to avoid confrontation. When they feel threatened enough to suspect that retreat won't work, black bears huff and stamp their paws before resorting to a bluff charge. If they do attack, they usually back off if the person fights back. Between 1900 and 1980, only twenty-three people died in black bear attacks. Compare that to the fifty-one deaths caused, internationally, by shark attacks between 1999 and 2009, events so rare that a fatal lightning strike is over thirty-eight times more likely to occur.

Long before I knew any of these statistics, about a month before I hauled myself across the yard to relax by the pond, I became the first person in my family to see a bear in our new home. My parents and sisters waited all spring to see one, keeping an eye on the narrow corridor to the right of our house, which connects the state parks on either side of the road. But wild animals rarely come or go where people want them to. The reports started to pour in from new friends at work, church, and school, but none of them spotted one. "Not for lack of looking," my family insisted over the phone. No one deliberately went out to find a bear, of course, but mom goes for daily morning walks, dad takes long weekend runs and bike rides, my youngest sister wanders a little too freely in the forest after school, and my other sister likes to paddle around the pond in our old blue canoe. They had been in the house and the woods for five months. It was about time someone saw a bear.

Enter the carefree college student, fresh out of finals week for the summer and eager to explore the new neighborhood in spite of the sweltering temperature. Hiking home after one lunch in the woods, I let my dog off the leash so she could satisfy her olfactory curiosity without clotheslining me on trees every two minutes. The forest grew stuffy as I hit the layer beneath the relatively open ridgeline, where the dense leaves cut off the views over the treetops and the relief of the breeze. The still air between the far-flung tree trunks felt oven-hot and the humidity added an unwelcome simmer. I bowed my head to watch my step among some loose rocks and swipe a t-shirt sleeve across my forehead, and when I looked up the next moment there was a black bear loping up the trail less than forty feet in front of me. I stopped in my tracks, stunned. The hind legs reached the curve in the path that tucked into a stand of thick, high bushes, and then vanished in a second. I blinked once in surprise and, as soon as I registered what I had just seen, I grabbed the dog and put her back on the leash. To this day, I cannot believe my luck that she did not spot the bear first and gallop up the path to make friends.

Fear kicked in then. Was the bear alone? It had seemed sort of small, maybe only my dog times two. What if it was a cub? What if it had cubs? My eyes darted wildly around the forest in every direction that did not require me to look completely away from the path in front of me, to be sure that there were no other bears nearby. Once I identified all the dark blobs among the trees as boulders, I turned my attention to suppressing the imagined headlines swirling around in my brain--BEAR MAULS HIKER, DOG; HIKER'S SAVINGS TO PAY FOR DOG'S FUNERAL--and focusing on my dilemma. The bear was ahead of me on the only trail out of the forest that I knew. There was a trail a half-mile back, but that was hard to find and ran into a tangle of other paths, none of them well marked. The dog would not make it over the cracked and tumbled rocks uphill and, as I was still not convinced that the bear was alone, the last thing I wanted was to scramble downhill toward the old road and run into one of its relatives. Forward was the best direction.

I took a few seconds to dredge my memories of the park rangers out west and remembered first that no animal likes surprises. I scanned the ground in quick glances so I could keep the path in my peripherals, then lunged for the nearest stick and knocked it against the nearest tree. Half went flying, which made my dog wince, while the half in my hand crumbled into rot. Darn humidity. The next stick remained whole, but hardly made any noise against the tree. Starting to feel desperate, I stared back up at the path. I swallowed, set my jaw, and ran my other sleeve across my forehead to mop up the sweat so it wouldn't roll down to sting my eyes right when I most needed to see. Then I started up a stream-of-consciousness conversation with myself, the bear, and the dog, in the loudest voice I could sustain.

"Okay, bear," I began. "I'm coming now, just so you know, so you can get out of the way." Gripping my stick in one hand and all but six inches of the dog's leash in the other, I started edging up the path. "I mean, I know I'm the one who should probably get out of your way, since I moved out here, which was your home before the builders came, but I'm on my way home now, and this is the fastest, well, the only way I know." When I reached the turn in the bushes, the bear was nowhere to be seen, only smelled by one excited dog's keen nose. I tugged her along and, to be safe, kept up my conversation. "I don't want to meet you and I know you don't want to meet me. And I'd prefer if you didn't eat us because I kind of want to finish my book and my sister would kill me if you ate the dog. So just...don't come out or I'll give you a really stupid name, like Winnie." Et cetera.

I survived, of course, to earn the title of First Lawrence to See a Bear in the New Home. My dad, who usually manages to see all the most interesting wildlife first, contested the claim by arguing that I only saw a big furry backside, but I was not about to fuss over the fact that the end I saw was not the end with, you know, the teeth. My point is that, although I had no plan in advance and I did not feel prepared, even my basic, frayed knowledge allowed me to follow almost all the suggestions offered on a half-dozen state websites for dealing with unexpected, non-aggressive bear encounters.

Most tips for avoiding a bear in the first place fall into one of three basic categorise. First, for the third time, do not surprise a bear. Conversation and trail songs are great ways to let any kind of wildlife know that you're in the area, as are rattling keys hung from a backpack or belt loop and hiking sticks or poles knocked together. Second, do not approach a bear for any reason. Two useful sub-rules in this category are: back away if you encounter one that is unwilling to move, and, if you must bring your dog into bear country, always keep it on a leash. Third, never, ever, EVER feed a bear. Do it on purpose and you create the expectation that you or other hikers will be giving handouts in the future. Do it on accident, by failing to stow food securely or dispose of it properly, and the bear will associate places where humans hang out with easy meals.

This third rule is the one causing the most problems between black bears and humans today. Caught in a shrinking habitat and a changing climate, bears see--and smell--trash cans, compost heaps, and camping stashes as viable food sources. Although usually up to 80% vegetarian (hippies, remember) a black bear's desire to avoid working for its food easily overpowers its instinct to shuffle for shoots and nuts or start digging around for roots. There is one exception to this rule: honey. Black bears will work harder for honey than for any other kind of food, clawing and gnawing away wood and ignoring dozens of bee stings to get at the sticky sweetness they love. In fact, the original Winnie-the-Pooh was inspired in part by a black bear named Winnipeg that lived at the London Zoo. Although the imaginary bear's honey-yellow fur appeals more to children, it is not entirely out of place. Black bears on the coasts may sport coats that stick to their names, but those in the northwest and north central United States may have pelts ranging from cream to brown to the typical black.

* * *

The bear that introduced my family, including my visiting aunt and uncle, to its preference for quantity over quality in its diet was a standard black-colored black bear. As we sipped sweet tea on the concrete patio below our small deck, I had to raise my voice to speak over the sounds of a rollicking high school graduation barbeque next door. I finished detailing my run-in with the bear in the woods for my aunt, and my youngest sister began to lament her personal lack of sighting. Just then, my dad and uncle strode briskly up from the edge of the woods where they had been looking toward the pond and told us to get up on the porch as quickly as possible. A bear was headed our way. From the safer, superior vantage of the porch, we watched as it wandered out of the woods, sniffing the air as it sauntered across our lawn in the direction of the barbeque. Then it stopped--right under my dad's bird feeder.

My dad had enjoyed the feeders strategically placed outside his study windows in Massachusetts, where the chipmunks shimmying up the pole amused us as much as the finicky little finches who only liked one kind of seed in the mix. He had been eager to get a look at the New Jersey native species, but he was no foolish newbie in the woods; he knew that a bird feeder was an open invitation to bears and raccoons looking for an easy snack. So dad rigged a pulley system to suspend the feeder about fifteen feet in the air between two fat trees that stood ten feet apart, then tied the loose end of the line to a third, slightly smaller tree another four feet away. The traumatized raccoon we caught in our flashlight beam every night for a week knew that the system didn't keep out all the big critters...but how would it fare against a bear?

All seven of us crowded up to the railing and scrambled onto the picnic table for the best possible views as "our" bear brought its nose out of the barbeque-perfumed air to stick its snout to the ground beneath the feeder. A long pink tongue, surprisingly like my dog's, flicked out from the narrow snout a few times to lap up the seed shells scattered by messy squirrels and food-fighting goldfinches. Then it was back up in the air with the head to investigate the source of pure bear food.

On four paws, the bear looked quite far from the feeder. It began to pace back and forth, its head turned upwards, looking so much like an agitated polar bear that I had once watched measuring its cage at a zoo that I began to worry for the poor little black bear. Then, halfway through its path between the trees, it reared up on its hind legs, eliciting a chorus of oohs and wows from its appreciative audience. The "poor little black bear" stood almost two-thirds of the way up to the feeder. This is actually on the smaller side of the species. At ninety to two hundred seventy-five pounds for a female and one hundred twenty-five to five hundred fifty pounds for males, black bears are smaller than the standard farmyard pig, which, unfortunately for classic cuties like Wilbur and Babe, can easily tip the scales at nine hundred pounds. The bear stalking our bird feeder was probably either a young male, maybe little more than a year old, or a typical female--about the size of the bear I had met in the woods.

"Ohmygosh!" I breathed. "What if that's the bear I saw? What if it-  I think it is!"

"Might be," my dad said with a chuckle. "Can't be that many bears around here."

"It does seem the size you thought yours was," mom said, playing along with my fancy.

"Oh, I don't care if really is, let's just say it is!" With a lawn, a flight of stairs, and a railing between us, I was ready to join that black bear in hippie friendship and admiration.

If there is anything frightening about a typical encounter with an Eastern black bear, it's probably a tie between their determination and their strength. Back when I still thought I could trick my cat into doing what I wanted it to, I bought a little toy ball with a hollow space in the middle for a tasty treat. The idea was that the cat would play with the ball for hours trying to get at the goody, but my cat lost interest after just a few minutes of clever moves had convinced him that the treat was not about to come out. Don't try that trick on a bear. Replace the ball with a locked cooler and you'll either lose your food or spend the next few days trying to decide if the mangled plastic qualifies as "art." Dangle pure seeds near the ground and you'll lose the feeder. Dad's pulley system was too high to reach, and the bear knew it. It didn't even bother to raise its paws. Instead, we watched as the bear's head followed the line from the feeder to the tree. The body followed the head's lead as the bear walked on hind legs over to the tree nearest the pulley and set its forepaws against the trunk.

Bears are intelligent animals, smarter than German Shepherds, which are generally considered the smartest dogs. Our bear took one look at the pulley system and shuffled around to the other side of the tree trunk to get closer to the line attached to the third tree. It batted at the rope near the knot and went back to looking up the second tree. Just as we in the peanut gallery began to wonder whether we could congratulate dad for outsmarting a bear, it lifted its paws--its claws were suddenly not only visible, but obvious--and hiked itself up the trunk.

"Oh ho!" my aunt crowed as my sisters and I smothered our smiles and gasps behind our hands. One more tug upward and it was high enough to drape a paw across the line, open its snout, and bite the rope. "Looks like that's it for your feeder!" my uncle said with a grin that my dad could not help but match. I knew that my dad was probably worried about the feeder, but I guessed he was willing to sacrifice one pulley system for such an excellent first bear sighting.

Had the bear been after the lunch we had almost started to serve instead of a flimsy rope, our delight would have turned to awe and fear…and had there not been the smell of barbeque in the air, that bear would have torn the entire pulley system down. Black bears don't like to work for their food if they can help it, you will recall, and with scents of chicken and steak, hot dogs and hamburgers wafting through the trees on the other side of the forest corridor, our feeder did not hold the bear's attention. After a few seconds' tugging produced no result, it half-slid, half-jumped down the trunk, strode out under the feeder for one final glare upwards--"This isn't the end, fiend!" I intoned on the bear's behalf--before turning toward the barbeque. A few paces further, it stopped to overturn a stump for a quick rummage through the roots before giving up for good and ambling off into the undergrowth.

Names are important in my family, especially for me, the resident word lover and budding young writer. From our cat Ripley to my sister's fish Arnold, and from my jade plant Edna to my mom's minivan Fudge, every living or lifelike thing of importance in our household earns a name, either spontaneously or after long deliberation. So when I made my decision, I formed an unspoken alliance. "If I see that bear one more time," I announced, "I'm going to name it."

* * *

If I see that bear one more time now, I'll be lucky. After a two-year ban, the state of New Jersey has decided to host a hunt.

I will not call the decision immoral or unprovoked. While waiting for a sighting of our own, my family read, heard, and saw stories of bear encounters in the paper, from friends, and on the news. One bear, fresh out hibernation, killed a dog. Euthanized. Another decided to hibernate beneath a porch, and when state officials pulled out its tranquilized body, they found two young cubs with her. Lived, thanks to benevolent homeowners. Two wandered university and hospital campuses, stopping traffic to cross the road like any idling college tour or recovering patient out for a walk. Both lived.

Incidents like these have increased 130% in the past four years along with the black bear population. Today there about 3400 of them in New Jersey, more than three times the number predicted in a 2005 study by East Stroudsburg University. However, the state did not abolish the bear hunt until 2008, a fact probably factored in to the five-year forecast.

The bear boom isn't the only problem, though. New Jersey's human population has increased 12.6% since 1990, and people take up valuable land. Over 5.5 million of New Jersey's 8.7 million people own individual houses and, unfortunately for bears, New Jersey also has one of the highest median incomes in the United States--over $70,000, according to the US Census Bureau. An excess of people with money to burn in pursuit of the "American Dream," which seems to demand bigger homes and larger lawns every year, creates neighborhoods like the one I live in: branching systems of roads with inside out leaves of treeless lawns that creep into the remaining forest. On paper, there's plenty of forest: over 40% of the state qualifies by the Department of Environmental Protection's standards. However, most of that land consists of small parcels that break up the "large tracts of continuous forest" wild animals need to thrive. A typical black bear consumes eleven to eighteen pounds of food every day and requires at last five square miles of territory in which to forage, or up to twenty-seven square miles for males.

Now, I'm a college student. The campus I live on is barely a quarter mile across and I happen to live at the opposite end from the food--erm, I mean, the Student Union. Maybe I'm supposed to eat at the campus restaurant, which offers variety and healthy options, but I've got work to do if I want to graduate and I value graduation over food quality. If I stay in my dorm room I can microwave some macaroni, chow down on a bag of chips, and polish off with a piece of chocolate. I save valuable time walking across campus, waiting in line for food, and getting distracted by well-meaning friends...time that I instead devote to reading Sister Carrie with the hand not holding the fork and writing the third paper I've ever needed an extension on after I finish eating in ten minutes.

Black bears are a lot like college students. They love good food, but successful survival comes first. If passing from point A to point B means crossing a neighborhood full of trashcans bursting with literal junk food, which is easier to access than a natural diet scattered across their territory...well, you can count on that bear moving in. You don't have to hand a bear a jar of honey to make it like your home as much as you do; all they need to feel welcome is a whif of accessible food and some kind of shelter for the winter.

Sandwiched between two undeveloped state parks, my neighbohood gets enough bear traffic that we have figured out some basic precautions for keeping our trash in the cans and out of bear mouths. We keep garbage in the garage, which we close whenever we are not working nearby, and we put the cans on the curb on collection day instead of setting it out the night before, which my family could do in Utah and Massachusetts. But Lawrences seem to like tempting fate. We dug a vegetable garden next to our driveway and fenced it with plastic netting to keep out deer, squirrels, and ground hogs, even though it would do nothing to stop a bear. One successful growing season in the house and it's so far, so good. Shelter is different matter. The woods are full of freestanding erratics, boulders small as pebbles or bigger than houses dragged and dropped by the mile-deep glacier that surfed down from Canada twenty thousand years ago. Clusters of erratics create crannies and crevices perfect for a hibernation home. So do the random pits that iron-hungry miners dug across the local landscape back in the eighteenth century. Our neighborhood is prime real estate, for black bears and humans alike.

But officials don't want them moving in. Even though the state's Division of Fish and Wildlife acknowledges that the "growing bear population [is] expanding into" human habitats just "as human populations [are] expanding into good bear habitats," it does not seem to acknowledge that the present situation is a result of their earlier decision. Banning the bear hunt meant that more bears lived long enough to reproduce more often and grow old. There are simply more bears to see now than there were two years ago, and more people living deeper in bear territory to see them. It's reasonable to assume that if you live in the woods, you are more likely to see a bear...but what about those bears strolling down an academic row or through a hospital parking lot?

It may sound extreme, but neighborhoods are a bear's "gateway drug." If they successfully scavenge in developed areas nearer their original habitats, they will feel comfortable expanding into more urban areas. Unfortunately, urbanized black bears don't stay hippies for long. They're college students at their worst, drunk and looking for a fight. Easy access to food becomes an addiction they can't kick, so that almost all tranquilized bears relocated to forests find a way back to human environments. First they're a nuisance, stopping traffic, prowling around properties, and overturning trashcans. Then they become aggressive, breaking into buildings and attacking pets when they cannot access the food they have learned to expect. Humans who don't expect to see a bear outside of the woods sometimes make matters worse by mishandling an encounter. Urbanized black bears are dangerous. It's a fact I acknowledge, and I am not going to waste time arguing that New Jersey should call off and re-ban the bear hunt. But that doesn't mean that I'm happy about it.

Three aspects of this year's planned season rankle more than the rest: price, limit, and location. Bear hunting permits will sell for only $2 and an educational seminar. "This is not about making money," Department of Environmental Protection Commissioner Bob Martin told the press in July. "This is a wildlife management tool." I fail to understand why it can't be both. The Division of Fish and Wildlife expects to sell over 10,000 permits and, while they expect hunters to "harvest" _ bears, they will not close the season early unless over a quarter of the state's population is killed. No matter how drastic the decrease, this hunt will provide only a temporary solution, and the expected $20,000 profit will hardly make a ripple in the state budget. However, most of the 10,000 people that have the money to buy hunting equipment and the time to spend in a seminar or in the woods can probably afford to pay the $28 suggested by the New Jersey Fish and Game Council. The far weightier profits from the original proposed permit price could contribute to black bear research and to the development of more humane methods for preventing unpleasant encounters in the future.

The hunt will take place over five days in December. For understandable safety reasons, hunters may not shoot bears within 450 feet of buildings or playgrounds. Most hunters will go deeper into the woods. This means that the hunts will take place primarily in the forested areas where most people expect bears to live and where, in fact, bears not yet exposed to urban environments are more likely to live. The dangerous bears and the nuisance bears live closer to neighborhoods and developments than the bears simply going about their business. Put simply, the hunt will target not the animals that cause the most problems, but those either unexposed or not yet "addicted" to the convenience of urban areas. Reports of aggressive bears will go down in the immediate, but the bears that live too near neighborhoods to be hunted or that have already sampled urban easy living will wander back to the streets come spring. To paraphrase a high school friend of mine, it's like putting a band aid on a cut that needs stitches. It's not enough.

I will not call the hunt immoral or unprovoked. But it's a shame. Black bears are not endangered and are actually listed as animals of "least concern" for conservation purposes, but that doesn't stop them from being fascinating creatures. They're as much a part of North America as Native Americans...and about as decimated and displaced. I wish I could say that I knew exactly what we as a species have to do to minimize our impact on the environment and give other species as much room as possible without going back to the Stone Age. I can't and I don't. But I think I can say that a short-term solution like a cheap hunt will not help anyone in any lasting way--not the state, not the citizens, not the hunters, and certainly not the bears.

***

One typical hot and muggy summer day in Northern New Jersey, I took my book and hobbled up the short path through the woods from the pond to our house, keeping my eye on the black bear that was watching me. When I was far enough away that neither one of us posed a threat to the other, I stumped across the grass as quick as I could, determined to get up the stairs and onto the porch before I missed anything. Propping my bum foot on the picnic table bench behind me, I leaned my elbows against the rail and strained to see through the thin tangle of leaves and low branches.
I heard the porch door behind me slide open a crack. "What's going on?" my mom whispered, guessing that some sort of wildlife had come to pay a visit.

"Bjorn's back."

"Bjorn?" she asked, stepping out sideways so she wouldn't have to make noise opening the door further.

"Yeah, that's the bear's name."

"How d'you know it's a guy?" asked my youngest sister, who had bolted off the couch as soon as she heard my mom's question.

"I don't," I said with a careless shrug.

"Then it'd be Bjorna," mom joked.

I grinned. "Exactly."

We watched as Bjorn kicked one paw in front of the other, ambling along the edge of the pond like a child playing by a stream. Instead of wandering down by the water or coming closer to the house, he marched straight forward to the old pool chairs. Through the leaves and branches, my mom realized that Bjorn was investigating them, maybe sniffing or even flicking out a tongue for a taste if he was even more like the dog than we knew. I complained that I couldn't see him from my angle and, as though he had heard me, Bjorn chose that moment to step up onto the chair I'd vacated. Once again our hands flew to our mouths to smother excited exclamations that might upset our visitor. He put a paw on the other chair and leaned over for a sniff, lost interest, and returned to my chair, running his snout along the edge of the back and turning around in the seat to make sure he didn't miss any trace of me.

"Did you forget to shower today?" my mom teased.

Once Bjorn satisfied his curiosity, he turned around in the chair to survey the pond from a human's point of view. Whatever he saw did not impress. With a familiar swing and twist of the head that my dog accompanies with a huff, he stepped down one paw at a time and proceeded in the same direction he had been heading before.

When I remember Bjorn trying out my chair, I can't help thinking of Goldilocks. He didn't go on to sample vegetables from our garden or cozy up with the lawn mower underneath our deck for a nap the way Goldilocks tested all the comforts in the Bear's house. Instead, he inspected the addition to the environment and left peacefully when he realized that it was not "just right" for him. Unwarranted invasion is more of a human thing. If land is there, we take it. If the ground isn't flat, we level it. If the earth is too rocky, we till it. If the bears are too bothersome, we kill them. What we tend to forget is that our habitat isn't right for bears for the same reasons that theirs, unaltered, is no longer right for us: a vastly different food supply, exposure to conditions our bodies cannot tolerate, and a strange population that demands a share of space.

If I see that bear next year, I'll congratulate it for avoiding the hunt. If I see that bear next year, I'll know whether to congratulate it as Bjorn or Bjorna.

Description
One typical hot and muggy summer day in Northern New Jersey, I took a book and limped down the short path through the woods to the pond behind our house. I had sprained an ankle on my morning hike the day before, but was determined to spend at least part of my day outside. I also hoped that between my ankle and my book, I would keep from fidgeting long enough to see a beaver on its way to work out on the water. If I was lucky, one might even stop for a rest and a quick grooming on the log just off shore in front of the chairs, something my dad had witnessed about a week earlier. I eased myself onto a battered plastic pool chair injured-foot-first, twisting my knee sideways to let my ankle lie flat in a position that minimized pain in the latter but promised an ache in the former. A few careful wiggles made it work.

After about an hour passed with nothing more exciting than a sparrow, I ignored the first crunch of twigs to my left. Probably just the darn squirrels taking the withdrawals they'd made from our bird feeders for deposit in their private caches. Then snap! crackle! pop! went the underbrush, louder than any Rice Krispies I've ever eaten. I finished my sentence--it was Dracula, so I couldn't just put it down--then slowly looked up so I wouldn't startle the beaver back into the water.

Except it wasn't a beaver. It was a black bear.

My eyebrows shot up to make room for my wide-open eyelids. Black bears are so common where I live that local residents swap bear encounter tales the way veterans trade war stories. However, my family had moved from Massachusetts just six months earlier. We had one collective sighting in common and still considered each individual experience a treat.

"Oh no," I groaned, letting my book fall shut. "Not you again!"

Well, mostly.

Many bears in the continental United States suffer the reputation of their aggressive cousins, the grizzlies. My family lived in Utah and enjoyed camping when my sisters and I were all between four and twelve. Forget the fear of God... Go to a national park out west and the only religion they preach to children is Respect for Nature--especially wildlife and especially bears. Seven years living near Boston smudged the hard lines of the lesson but did not erase it, so when my family heard about the bears in New Jersey, we made sure that everyone else knew to get away. Noisily. Few animals appreciate surprises.

* * *

This is good to keep in mind for any sharp-toothed wildlife larger than a cat, of course, but some animals help humans keep their distance. Some could care less. Eastern black bears, the hippies of the Ursidae Family, fall into this small second category. They're so chill when it comes to human encounters that even mother bears, the most notoriously violent members of the species, prefer to avoid confrontation. When they feel threatened enough to suspect that retreat won't work, black bears huff and stamp their paws before resorting to a bluff charge. If they do attack, they usually back off if the person fights back. Between 1900 and 1980, only twenty-three people died in black bear attacks. Compare that to the fifty-one deaths caused, internationally, by shark attacks between 1999 and 2009, events so rare that a fatal lightning strike is over thirty-eight times more likely to occur.

Long before I knew any of these statistics, about a month before I hauled myself across the yard to relax by the pond, I became the first person in my family to see a bear in our new home. My parents and sisters waited all spring to see one, keeping an eye on the narrow corridor to the right of our house, which connects the state parks on either side of the road. But wild animals rarely come or go where people want them to. The reports started to pour in from new friends at work, church, and school, but none of them spotted one. "Not for lack of looking," my family insisted over the phone. No one deliberately went out to find a bear, of course, but mom goes for daily morning walks, dad takes long weekend runs and bike rides, my youngest sister wanders a little too freely in the forest after school, and my other sister likes to paddle around the pond in our old blue canoe. They had been in the house and the woods for five months. It was about time someone saw a bear.

Enter the carefree college student, fresh out of finals week for the summer and eager to explore the new neighborhood in spite of the sweltering temperature. Hiking home after one lunch in the woods, I let my dog off the leash so she could satisfy her olfactory curiosity without clotheslining me on trees every two minutes. The forest grew stuffy as I hit the layer beneath the relatively open ridgeline, where the dense leaves cut off the views over the treetops and the relief of the breeze. The still air between the far-flung tree trunks felt oven-hot and the humidity added an unwelcome simmer. I bowed my head to watch my step among some loose rocks and swipe a t-shirt sleeve across my forehead, and when I looked up the next moment there was a black bear loping up the trail less than forty feet in front of me. I stopped in my tracks, stunned. The hind legs reached the curve in the path that tucked into a stand of thick, high bushes, and then vanished in a second. I blinked once in surprise and, as soon as I registered what I had just seen, I grabbed the dog and put her back on the leash. To this day, I cannot believe my luck that she did not spot the bear first and gallop up the path to make friends.

Fear kicked in then. Was the bear alone? It had seemed sort of small, maybe only my dog times two. What if it was a cub? What if it had cubs? My eyes darted wildly around the forest in every direction that did not require me to look completely away from the path in front of me, to be sure that there were no other bears nearby. Once I identified all the dark blobs among the trees as boulders, I turned my attention to suppressing the imagined headlines swirling around in my brain--BEAR MAULS HIKER, DOG; HIKER'S SAVINGS TO PAY FOR DOG'S FUNERAL--and focusing on my dilemma. The bear was ahead of me on the only trail out of the forest that I knew. There was a trail a half-mile back, but that was hard to find and ran into a tangle of other paths, none of them well marked. The dog would not make it over the cracked and tumbled rocks uphill and, as I was still not convinced that the bear was alone, the last thing I wanted was to scramble downhill toward the old road and run into one of its relatives. Forward was the best direction.

I took a few seconds to dredge my memories of the park rangers out west and remembered first that no animal likes surprises. I scanned the ground in quick glances so I could keep the path in my peripherals, then lunged for the nearest stick and knocked it against the nearest tree. Half went flying, which made my dog wince, while the half in my hand crumbled into rot. Darn humidity. The next stick remained whole, but hardly made any noise against the tree. Starting to feel desperate, I stared back up at the path. I swallowed, set my jaw, and ran my other sleeve across my forehead to mop up the sweat so it wouldn't roll down to sting my eyes right when I most needed to see. Then I started up a stream-of-consciousness conversation with myself, the bear, and the dog, in the loudest voice I could sustain.

"Okay, bear," I began. "I'm coming now, just so you know, so you can get out of the way." Gripping my stick in one hand and all but six inches of the dog's leash in the other, I started edging up the path. "I mean, I know I'm the one who should probably get out of your way, since I moved out here, which was your home before the builders came, but I'm on my way home now, and this is the fastest, well, the only way I know." When I reached the turn in the bushes, the bear was nowhere to be seen, only smelled by one excited dog's keen nose. I tugged her along and, to be safe, kept up my conversation. "I don't want to meet you and I know you don't want to meet me. And I'd prefer if you didn't eat us because I kind of want to finish my book and my sister would kill me if you ate the dog. So just...don't come out or I'll give you a really stupid name, like Winnie." Et cetera.

I survived, of course, to earn the title of First Lawrence to See a Bear in the New Home. My dad, who usually manages to see all the most interesting wildlife first, contested the claim by arguing that I only saw a big furry backside, but I was not about to fuss over the fact that the end I saw was not the end with, you know, the teeth. My point is that, although I had no plan in advance and I did not feel prepared, even my basic, frayed knowledge allowed me to follow almost all the suggestions offered on a half-dozen state websites for dealing with unexpected, non-aggressive bear encounters.

Most tips for avoiding a bear in the first place fall into one of three basic categorise. First, for the third time, do not surprise a bear. Conversation and trail songs are great ways to let any kind of wildlife know that you're in the area, as are rattling keys hung from a backpack or belt loop and hiking sticks or poles knocked together. Second, do not approach a bear for any reason. Two useful sub-rules in this category are: back away if you encounter one that is unwilling to move, and, if you must bring your dog into bear country, always keep it on a leash. Third, never, ever, EVER feed a bear. Do it on purpose and you create the expectation that you or other hikers will be giving handouts in the future. Do it on accident, by failing to stow food securely or dispose of it properly, and the bear will associate places where humans hang out with easy meals.

This third rule is the one causing the most problems between black bears and humans today. Caught in a shrinking habitat and a changing climate, bears see--and smell--trash cans, compost heaps, and camping stashes as viable food sources. Although usually up to 80% vegetarian (hippies, remember) a black bear's desire to avoid working for its food easily overpowers its instinct to shuffle for shoots and nuts or start digging around for roots. There is one exception to this rule: honey. Black bears will work harder for honey than for any other kind of food, clawing and gnawing away wood and ignoring dozens of bee stings to get at the sticky sweetness they love. In fact, the original Winnie-the-Pooh was inspired in part by a black bear named Winnipeg that lived at the London Zoo. Although the imaginary bear's honey-yellow fur appeals more to children, it is not entirely out of place. Black bears on the coasts may sport coats that stick to their names, but those in the northwest and north central United States may have pelts ranging from cream to brown to the typical black.

* * *

The bear that introduced my family, including my visiting aunt and uncle, to its preference for quantity over quality in its diet was a standard black-colored black bear. As we sipped sweet tea on the concrete patio below our small deck, I had to raise my voice to speak over the sounds of a rollicking high school graduation barbeque next door. I finished detailing my run-in with the bear in the woods for my aunt, and my youngest sister began to lament her personal lack of sighting. Just then, my dad and uncle strode briskly up from the edge of the woods where they had been looking toward the pond and told us to get up on the porch as quickly as possible. A bear was headed our way. From the safer, superior vantage of the porch, we watched as it wandered out of the woods, sniffing the air as it sauntered across our lawn in the direction of the barbeque. Then it stopped--right under my dad's bird feeder.

My dad had enjoyed the feeders strategically placed outside his study windows in Massachusetts, where the chipmunks shimmying up the pole amused us as much as the finicky little finches who only liked one kind of seed in the mix. He had been eager to get a look at the New Jersey native species, but he was no foolish newbie in the woods; he knew that a bird feeder was an open invitation to bears and raccoons looking for an easy snack. So dad rigged a pulley system to suspend the feeder about fifteen feet in the air between two fat trees that stood ten feet apart, then tied the loose end of the line to a third, slightly smaller tree another four feet away. The traumatized raccoon we caught in our flashlight beam every night for a week knew that the system didn't keep out all the big critters...but how would it fare against a bear?

All seven of us crowded up to the railing and scrambled onto the picnic table for the best possible views as "our" bear brought its nose out of the barbeque-perfumed air to stick its snout to the ground beneath the feeder. A long pink tongue, surprisingly like my dog's, flicked out from the narrow snout a few times to lap up the seed shells scattered by messy squirrels and food-fighting goldfinches. Then it was back up in the air with the head to investigate the source of pure bear food.

On four paws, the bear looked quite far from the feeder. It began to pace back and forth, its head turned upwards, looking so much like an agitated polar bear that I had once watched measuring its cage at a zoo that I began to worry for the poor little black bear. Then, halfway through its path between the trees, it reared up on its hind legs, eliciting a chorus of oohs and wows from its appreciative audience. The "poor little black bear" stood almost two-thirds of the way up to the feeder. This is actually on the smaller side of the species. At ninety to two hundred seventy-five pounds for a female and one hundred twenty-five to five hundred fifty pounds for males, black bears are smaller than the standard farmyard pig, which, unfortunately for classic cuties like Wilbur and Babe, can easily tip the scales at nine hundred pounds. The bear stalking our bird feeder was probably either a young male, maybe little more than a year old, or a typical female--about the size of the bear I had met in the woods.

"Ohmygosh!" I breathed. "What if that's the bear I saw? What if it-  I think it is!"

"Might be," my dad said with a chuckle. "Can't be that many bears around here."

"It does seem the size you thought yours was," mom said, playing along with my fancy.

"Oh, I don't care if really is, let's just say it is!" With a lawn, a flight of stairs, and a railing between us, I was ready to join that black bear in hippie friendship and admiration.

If there is anything frightening about a typical encounter with an Eastern black bear, it's probably a tie between their determination and their strength. Back when I still thought I could trick my cat into doing what I wanted it to, I bought a little toy ball with a hollow space in the middle for a tasty treat. The idea was that the cat would play with the ball for hours trying to get at the goody, but my cat lost interest after just a few minutes of clever moves had convinced him that the treat was not about to come out. Don't try that trick on a bear. Replace the ball with a locked cooler and you'll either lose your food or spend the next few days trying to decide if the mangled plastic qualifies as "art." Dangle pure seeds near the ground and you'll lose the feeder. Dad's pulley system was too high to reach, and the bear knew it. It didn't even bother to raise its paws. Instead, we watched as the bear's head followed the line from the feeder to the tree. The body followed the head's lead as the bear walked on hind legs over to the tree nearest the pulley and set its forepaws against the trunk.

Bears are intelligent animals, smarter than German Shepherds, which are generally considered the smartest dogs. Our bear took one look at the pulley system and shuffled around to the other side of the tree trunk to get closer to the line attached to the third tree. It batted at the rope near the knot and went back to looking up the second tree. Just as we in the peanut gallery began to wonder whether we could congratulate dad for outsmarting a bear, it lifted its paws--its claws were suddenly not only visible, but obvious--and hiked itself up the trunk.

"Oh ho!" my aunt crowed as my sisters and I smothered our smiles and gasps behind our hands. One more tug upward and it was high enough to drape a paw across the line, open its snout, and bite the rope. "Looks like that's it for your feeder!" my uncle said with a grin that my dad could not help but match. I knew that my dad was probably worried about the feeder, but I guessed he was willing to sacrifice one pulley system for such an excellent first bear sighting.

Had the bear been after the lunch we had almost started to serve instead of a flimsy rope, our delight would have turned to awe and fear…and had there not been the smell of barbeque in the air, that bear would have torn the entire pulley system down. Black bears don't like to work for their food if they can help it, you will recall, and with scents of chicken and steak, hot dogs and hamburgers wafting through the trees on the other side of the forest corridor, our feeder did not hold the bear's attention. After a few seconds' tugging produced no result, it half-slid, half-jumped down the trunk, strode out under the feeder for one final glare upwards--"This isn't the end, fiend!" I intoned on the bear's behalf--before turning toward the barbeque. A few paces further, it stopped to overturn a stump for a quick rummage through the roots before giving up for good and ambling off into the undergrowth.

Names are important in my family, especially for me, the resident word lover and budding young writer. From our cat Ripley to my sister's fish Arnold, and from my jade plant Edna to my mom's minivan Fudge, every living or lifelike thing of importance in our household earns a name, either spontaneously or after long deliberation. So when I made my decision, I formed an unspoken alliance. "If I see that bear one more time," I announced, "I'm going to name it."

* * *

If I see that bear one more time now, I'll be lucky. After a two-year ban, the state of New Jersey has decided to host a hunt.

I will not call the decision immoral or unprovoked. While waiting for a sighting of our own, my family read, heard, and saw stories of bear encounters in the paper, from friends, and on the news. One bear, fresh out hibernation, killed a dog. Euthanized. Another decided to hibernate beneath a porch, and when state officials pulled out its tranquilized body, they found two young cubs with her. Lived, thanks to benevolent homeowners. Two wandered university and hospital campuses, stopping traffic to cross the road like any idling college tour or recovering patient out for a walk. Both lived.

Incidents like these have increased 130% in the past four years along with the black bear population. Today there about 3400 of them in New Jersey, more than three times the number predicted in a 2005 study by East Stroudsburg University. However, the state did not abolish the bear hunt until 2008, a fact probably factored in to the five-year forecast.

The bear boom isn't the only problem, though. New Jersey's human population has increased 12.6% since 1990, and people take up valuable land. Over 5.5 million of New Jersey's 8.7 million people own individual houses and, unfortunately for bears, New Jersey also has one of the highest median incomes in the United States--over $70,000, according to the US Census Bureau. An excess of people with money to burn in pursuit of the "American Dream," which seems to demand bigger homes and larger lawns every year, creates neighborhoods like the one I live in: branching systems of roads with inside out leaves of treeless lawns that creep into the remaining forest. On paper, there's plenty of forest: over 40% of the state qualifies by the Department of Environmental Protection's standards. However, most of that land consists of small parcels that break up the "large tracts of continuous forest" wild animals need to thrive. A typical black bear consumes eleven to eighteen pounds of food every day and requires at last five square miles of territory in which to forage, or up to twenty-seven square miles for males.

Now, I'm a college student. The campus I live on is barely a quarter mile across and I happen to live at the opposite end from the food--erm, I mean, the Student Union. Maybe I'm supposed to eat at the campus restaurant, which offers variety and healthy options, but I've got work to do if I want to graduate and I value graduation over food quality. If I stay in my dorm room I can microwave some macaroni, chow down on a bag of chips, and polish off with a piece of chocolate. I save valuable time walking across campus, waiting in line for food, and getting distracted by well-meaning friends...time that I instead devote to reading Sister Carrie with the hand not holding the fork and writing the third paper I've ever needed an extension on after I finish eating in ten minutes.

Black bears are a lot like college students. They love good food, but successful survival comes first. If passing from point A to point B means crossing a neighborhood full of trashcans bursting with literal junk food, which is easier to access than a natural diet scattered across their territory...well, you can count on that bear moving in. You don't have to hand a bear a jar of honey to make it like your home as much as you do; all they need to feel welcome is a whif of accessible food and some kind of shelter for the winter.

Sandwiched between two undeveloped state parks, my neighbohood gets enough bear traffic that we have figured out some basic precautions for keeping our trash in the cans and out of bear mouths. We keep garbage in the garage, which we close whenever we are not working nearby, and we put the cans on the curb on collection day instead of setting it out the night before, which my family could do in Utah and Massachusetts. But Lawrences seem to like tempting fate. We dug a vegetable garden next to our driveway and fenced it with plastic netting to keep out deer, squirrels, and ground hogs, even though it would do nothing to stop a bear. One successful growing season in the house and it's so far, so good. Shelter is different matter. The woods are full of freestanding erratics, boulders small as pebbles or bigger than houses dragged and dropped by the mile-deep glacier that surfed down from Canada twenty thousand years ago. Clusters of erratics create crannies and crevices perfect for a hibernation home. So do the random pits that iron-hungry miners dug across the local landscape back in the eighteenth century. Our neighborhood is prime real estate, for black bears and humans alike.

But officials don't want them moving in. Even though the state's Division of Fish and Wildlife acknowledges that the "growing bear population [is] expanding into" human habitats just "as human populations [are] expanding into good bear habitats," it does not seem to acknowledge that the present situation is a result of their earlier decision. Banning the bear hunt meant that more bears lived long enough to reproduce more often and grow old. There are simply more bears to see now than there were two years ago, and more people living deeper in bear territory to see them. It's reasonable to assume that if you live in the woods, you are more likely to see a bear...but what about those bears strolling down an academic row or through a hospital parking lot?

It may sound extreme, but neighborhoods are a bear's "gateway drug." If they successfully scavenge in developed areas nearer their original habitats, they will feel comfortable expanding into more urban areas. Unfortunately, urbanized black bears don't stay hippies for long. They're college students at their worst, drunk and looking for a fight. Easy access to food becomes an addiction they can't kick, so that almost all tranquilized bears relocated to forests find a way back to human environments. First they're a nuisance, stopping traffic, prowling around properties, and overturning trashcans. Then they become aggressive, breaking into buildings and attacking pets when they cannot access the food they have learned to expect. Humans who don't expect to see a bear outside of the woods sometimes make matters worse by mishandling an encounter. Urbanized black bears are dangerous. It's a fact I acknowledge, and I am not going to waste time arguing that New Jersey should call off and re-ban the bear hunt. But that doesn't mean that I'm happy about it.

Three aspects of this year's planned season rankle more than the rest: price, limit, and location. Bear hunting permits will sell for only $2 and an educational seminar. "This is not about making money," Department of Environmental Protection Commissioner Bob Martin told the press in July. "This is a wildlife management tool." I fail to understand why it can't be both. The Division of Fish and Wildlife expects to sell over 10,000 permits and, while they expect hunters to "harvest" _ bears, they will not close the season early unless over a quarter of the state's population is killed. No matter how drastic the decrease, this hunt will provide only a temporary solution, and the expected $20,000 profit will hardly make a ripple in the state budget. However, most of the 10,000 people that have the money to buy hunting equipment and the time to spend in a seminar or in the woods can probably afford to pay the $28 suggested by the New Jersey Fish and Game Council. The far weightier profits from the original proposed permit price could contribute to black bear research and to the development of more humane methods for preventing unpleasant encounters in the future.

The hunt will take place over five days in December. For understandable safety reasons, hunters may not shoot bears within 450 feet of buildings or playgrounds. Most hunters will go deeper into the woods. This means that the hunts will take place primarily in the forested areas where most people expect bears to live and where, in fact, bears not yet exposed to urban environments are more likely to live. The dangerous bears and the nuisance bears live closer to neighborhoods and developments than the bears simply going about their business. Put simply, the hunt will target not the animals that cause the most problems, but those either unexposed or not yet "addicted" to the convenience of urban areas. Reports of aggressive bears will go down in the immediate, but the bears that live too near neighborhoods to be hunted or that have already sampled urban easy living will wander back to the streets come spring. To paraphrase a high school friend of mine, it's like putting a band aid on a cut that needs stitches. It's not enough.

I will not call the hunt immoral or unprovoked. But it's a shame. Black bears are not endangered and are actually listed as animals of "least concern" for conservation purposes, but that doesn't stop them from being fascinating creatures. They're as much a part of North America as Native Americans...and about as decimated and displaced. I wish I could say that I knew exactly what we as a species have to do to minimize our impact on the environment and give other species as much room as possible without going back to the Stone Age. I can't and I don't. But I think I can say that a short-term solution like a cheap hunt will not help anyone in any lasting way--not the state, not the citizens, not the hunters, and certainly not the bears.

***

One typical hot and muggy summer day in Northern New Jersey, I took my book and hobbled up the short path through the woods from the pond to our house, keeping my eye on the black bear that was watching me. When I was far enough away that neither one of us posed a threat to the other, I stumped across the grass as quick as I could, determined to get up the stairs and onto the porch before I missed anything. Propping my bum foot on the picnic table bench behind me, I leaned my elbows against the rail and strained to see through the thin tangle of leaves and low branches.
I heard the porch door behind me slide open a crack. "What's going on?" my mom whispered, guessing that some sort of wildlife had come to pay a visit.

"Bjorn's back."

"Bjorn?" she asked, stepping out sideways so she wouldn't have to make noise opening the door further.

"Yeah, that's the bear's name."

"How d'you know it's a guy?" asked my youngest sister, who had bolted off the couch as soon as she heard my mom's question.

"I don't," I said with a careless shrug.

"Then it'd be Bjorna," mom joked.

I grinned. "Exactly."

We watched as Bjorn kicked one paw in front of the other, ambling along the edge of the pond like a child playing by a stream. Instead of wandering down by the water or coming closer to the house, he marched straight forward to the old pool chairs. Through the leaves and branches, my mom realized that Bjorn was investigating them, maybe sniffing or even flicking out a tongue for a taste if he was even more like the dog than we knew. I complained that I couldn't see him from my angle and, as though he had heard me, Bjorn chose that moment to step up onto the chair I'd vacated. Once again our hands flew to our mouths to smother excited exclamations that might upset our visitor. He put a paw on the other chair and leaned over for a sniff, lost interest, and returned to my chair, running his snout along the edge of the back and turning around in the seat to make sure he didn't miss any trace of me.

"Did you forget to shower today?" my mom teased.

Once Bjorn satisfied his curiosity, he turned around in the chair to survey the pond from a human's point of view. Whatever he saw did not impress. With a familiar swing and twist of the head that my dog accompanies with a huff, he stepped down one paw at a time and proceeded in the same direction he had been heading before.

When I remember Bjorn trying out my chair, I can't help thinking of Goldilocks. He didn't go on to sample vegetables from our garden or cozy up with the lawn mower underneath our deck for a nap the way Goldilocks tested all the comforts in the Bear's house. Instead, he inspected the addition to the environment and left peacefully when he realized that it was not "just right" for him. Unwarranted invasion is more of a human thing. If land is there, we take it. If the ground isn't flat, we level it. If the earth is too rocky, we till it. If the bears are too bothersome, we kill them. What we tend to forget is that our habitat isn't right for bears for the same reasons that theirs, unaltered, is no longer right for us: a vastly different food supply, exposure to conditions our bodies cannot tolerate, and a strange population that demands a share of space.

If I see that bear next year, I'll congratulate it for avoiding the hunt. If I see that bear next year, I'll know whether to congratulate it as Bjorn or Bjorna.