Some 3000 Black Bears roam Northern New Jersey and they have been expanding their range south throughout the State over the last decade..........Bear sightings have occurred in all 21 Garden State Counties.........The southern-most Bear that Dept of Fish & Wildlife folks have had to relocate has been in Cumberland County.........The density of bears up North near NYC is about 3 per square mile, showing that Black Bears can figure out how to carve out a living in smaller spaces than previously thought........It is just a natural progression for the bruins to spread out through the rest of the state which is still a good 30% or more forested

N.J.'s black bears migrating farther south

|By Jacqueline L. Urgo-phily.com

Black Bear in Newton, NJ

VINELAND, N.J. - Until a 230-pound cub bounded across Landis Avenue - a sight so odd that onlookers at first thought it was a huge dog - New Jersey had no proof that American black bears had migrated so far south.

A spate of bear sightings over the last few months have stretched south from Princeton to East Windsor to Winslow Township, down into Gloucester County.

Unconfirmed reports also placed bears in wildlife management areas in Atlantic and Cape May Counties.

All 21 of the Garden State's counties have had sightings during the last 10 years. Last December, a hunter shot a record-sized 829-pounder in the woods near a North Jersey high school.

A few unverified reports in Vineland had come in during that last week
 in June when the cub climbed 35 feet up a backyard tree and was
captured in a relatively urban part of this central Cumberland County
 city of 60,000. Bears reportedly had been roaming near a trailer park
on the other side of town, according to the state Department of
Environmental Protection.

State biologists had theorized for some time that bears eventually
would range far south from their heavily forested homes in
 northwestern New Jersey. As they fashioned a plan to tranquilize
 and remove the bear from Tara Batson's sycamore on Howard
Street - a tricky operation around a spiky fence and an
air-conditioning unit - they saw the migration had begun.
"I think it was a once-in-a-lifetime thing . . . at least I hope so,"
 said Batson, a social worker for the state, recalling her surprise
when a neighbor called her at work June 29 to tell her a
bear - yes, a bear - was nestled in one of her treetops.

"It's logical that as the bear population expands, its range
 would move south, and that's what has been happening
for the last 10 years," said Kelcey Burguess, principal
 wildlife biologist for the bear control unit of DEP's
Division of Fish and Wildlife. "But this was as far south
 as we've been called to help with relocating a bear."

In the unit's research area, a roughly 900-square-mile range
 concentrated mostly in Sussex and Warren Counties,
 the state estimates as many as 3,400 bears - about three
per square mile, said Burguess, whose unit has been
 studying the state's black bears since 1980.
It is unclear how many more bears are spread elsewhere,
 he said.