Several calls to the Haines Borough Police Department in the past week have reported a bear that police chief Gary Lowe said is following a similar pattern to a bear shot last October near the Haines School.
The bear from July 6-10 was seen on Deishu Drive and FAA Road, and near Haines Real Estate, the Haines Senior Village, and Parts Place, according to the police report.
Lowe said the department’s current goal for the bear is to “shoo him off and convince him that there’s greener pastures elsewhere.”
“We’re not going to shoot a bear if he’s just running around town, getting into garbage,” he said.
Lowe said the bear shot last October with a 12-gauge slug had become dangerously habituated to town due to “access to easy food” on a route that covered Deishu Drive, Fort Seward and downtown.
The Haines Borough Assembly that same month adopted a bear attraction nuisance ordinance that Lowe said has reduced bear access to garbage in the townsite.
“We certainly do not want a person injured or their property damaged, but the ordinance also looks out for the welfare of the bears,” Lowe wrote last year in a memo to the assembly. “A fed bear is a dead bear.”
Officers never found the injured bear after the October shooting, but Lowe at the time said, “I think it’s a fairly safe assumption that the bear crawled off someplace and died.”
This week, he said the department would take similar action against the most recent nuisance bear only in defense of life or property.
Lowe advised residents to report townsite bear sightings by calling the department at 766-2121 so officers can better track the animals.