Well before dawn on Oct. 15, Brian Melvin was 15-feet high in a climbing tree stand holding his 72-pound bow and waiting for a huge black bear that he knew was in the area.
“At first light I watched him cross a rural road, then come down a trail I knew he was using,” Melvin, age 39, tells Outdoor Life. “With many trail cameras I’d patterned him walking a corridor between a small swamp bedding area and a bait station.
“I knew he was only active in early mornings, and last Tuesday I was in the right tree at the right time at 7 a.m.”
Photo Courtesy Brian Melvin
Before long, the bear offered Melvin a shot at 45 yards. Melvin drew his Hoyt bow, anchored, and sent a heavy 535-grain arrow tipped with a Serv 2.0 broadhead deep into the bear’s chest—right behind its shoulder.
“It was a perfect hit, and the arrow drove deep into his lungs,” says Melvin, a sales engineer from West Orange, New Jersey. “But the arrow wasn’t a complete pass through. I watched him run off, cross a road, and head toward a big rock bluff in thick, tangled woods.”
Melvin immediately phoned his best friend Adam Mavromatis, who was in the area.
“Adam showed up at my stand right away, and we tracked the bear together,” Melvin says. “The blood trail was heavy, and we followed it passing very close to rural homes. He even traveled between two houses, within 60 yards of homes.”
They tracked the bear to a large rock bluff, where they spotted it bedded down. Melvin says the bruin was likely down for good, but he put a second arrow into the bear at 20 yards just to be sure.
The dead bear was very near private homes, and Melvin had promised landowners he would not field dress the bear near their property, which could have become a predicament as dragging a massive bruin like this one is no easy task.
Fortunately, the dead bear was at the top of a hill, and the hunters were able to roll it into a plastic sled and work it down a slope to their truck, where it was loaded into the bed.
“The hard part was dressing the bear, which we did at a friend’s house,” Melvin says. “It took seven of us to get it onto a hoist in a garage, then field dress it.”
Melvin decided to field dress the bear quickly because the temperature was getting warm, and he didn’t want the bear meat to spoil. From the garage, the hunters took the dressed bear to the Green Pond check state to register it with the state.
“At Green Pond they officially weighed the bear at 770.5 pounds,” Melvin says. “They also took a tooth to age the bear, and they’ll let me know how old it is.”
Melvin says his bear is of record size, with a live weight estimate of over 900 pounds.
“Even gutted, my bear is 70 pounds heavier than any other taken by an archery hunter,” Melvin contends. “The heaviest live weight bear taken by any means is about 825 pounds.”
Photo courtesy of Brian Melvin.
Melvin says that a standard computation of a dressed weight black bear to calculate its live weight is to add 18 percent of the dressed weight. This would put Melvin’s NJ bear at over 908 pounds – a size more like that of a large grizzly bear.
“He was a giant for sure,” Melvin says. “I had 10 bait stations set up, and over two dozen cameras trying to keep up with him. He had a real taste for sweets and was nuts for bait. He didn’t like meat, like fish heads, in his bait piles.”
New Jersey does not allow bear hunters to be within 100 yards of a bait station, which is why Melvin looked for hunting locations between thick swamp bedding areas and bait, to ambush his bruin.
Melvin says he learned about the giant bear three years ago, and actively targeted it during the two previous seasons. The bear lived in swamps but moved far and often from area to area. Melvin killed the bear on private land, asking permission for access wherever the bear traveled.
New Jersey has one of the densest black bear populations in the Lower 48. But despite having a bear population estimate of more than 3,000, the state had no hunting season for several years. New Jersey re-opened black bear hunting in 2022 after dealing with lawsuits filed by anti-hunting groups.
Read Next: Photos From the New Jersey Bear Season, the Highly Controversial Hunt That Wasn’t
Photo courtesy of Brian Mel
Melvin is having a full-body mount made of the bear by a taxidermist.
“I’ll never get a chance at a bigger black bear than that one,” he says chuckling. “I’ll be building a new house in year or so, and I guess I’ll have to plan on having that bruin somewhere inside.
“I was pretty obsessed with getting that bear and my fiancé’ is glad I finally got it. I don’t know how she’ll feel about where my mounted bear will be located inside our new home, though.”
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