A team of Alaska Department of Fish and Game biologists and wildlife trooper came to town in response to public outcry over increased bear activity including damage to property.

“Last night I saw dumpsters getting hit everywhere,” biologist Carl Koch said Wednesday morning, his last day in town. “We saw five bears; all of them were wary and we couldn’t get close to any of them.”

A poor pink and fall chum run is one factor in bears’ increased presence in town, Koch said.

Koch came to town with the goal of collecting detailed information on bears, especially those causing damage. Damage to property, including to an ATV seat and homes, has been reported.

Larry Sweet reported being charged by a bear near Dusty Trails earlier this month. He went outside for a cigarette before bed and heard rustling in the woods behind him. “When I turned around there was a bear about four or five feet from me,” Sweet said. “I took a couple steps back because he snorted at me and then he came charging. That gave me time to turn and run to my car.”

Sweet said he likely would have been mauled had there not been a newly erected railing on a ramp between him and the bear. “That gave me time to turn and run to my car,” Sweet said. “It took me awhile to get to sleep. It got the old ticker pumping that’s for sure.”

He said when a bear becomes that aggressive, it should relocated at the least, and at worst, killed.

In early October around 3 a.m., a bear damaged the door to Nick Schlosstein’s and Leah Wagner’s yurt on Sunshine Street of Piedad Road. “It cracked our door pretty good,” Schlosstein said after being woken up by the sound at 3 a.m. “I moved our bear fence so it goes around the entirety of the yurt now. Now the whole place is surrounded by an electric fence.”

Doug Olerud said bears got into the dumpster outside his businesses a couple weeks ago. He started storing it inside. “Once they got into it, I wanted to remove the temptation from them,” Olerud said.

Dan Passalaqua lives on Chilkat Trail off Mud Bay Road. He said a bear has visited his home regularly for the past several months and sniffs around his porch. In September, a bear damaged his zodiac boat. “I noticed when I woke up one morning it was leaning to one side,” Passalaqua said. “The starboard side was flat and I went and looked at the back and it had a big muddy paw print and five nail punctures in it.”

He said he moved the boat and covered it in canvas.

Koch said he received many calls in recent weeks reporting bear activity. Haines Police have received more than 80 calls since September, and the Facebook page “Haines Chatters” has been dominated by residents discussing the issue. While many people are calling for the bears to be killed, others argue that people need to better manage bear attractants.

Koch said that the bears he encountered were so wary, that he couldn’t have “dispatched” them even if he thought it necessary. “I’ve had some folks say I should go to the dump and shoot them all,” Koch said. “This whole situation is more complicated and challenging than nonwildlife professionals think it is.”

Don Turner Jr. addressed the Haines Borough Assembly last week, asking it to address the bear problem. Koch and his team flew to town Sunday and stayed through Wednesday afternoon.

“The biggest issue I noticed was dumpsters,” Koch said. “Quite a few of them are woefully inadequate. If it’s just a plastic lid, it doesn’t do the trick. I saw one this morning that the bottom was rusted out and all the trash was dug out from the bottom because it was so weakened by rust.”

Koch also said the Community Waste Solution’s landfill needs to lengthen its electric fence to surround a pit holding fresh garbage, and more adequately bury the main pit. Koch said several metal containers filled with trash at the landfill need to be contained within an electric fence as well.

CWS’s new manager Craig Franke, who started in August, said he acknowledges issues at the landfill, and that they are already working on securing the new garbage pit. “That’s in process right now,” Franke said. “All we can do is start where we were and start marching forward,” Franke said. “I’m happy with a lot of the progress, but we still have work to do. We’ll just keep marching.”

He said it’s easier to secure the trash in the metal containers than in the pit, but that soon they will be secure. He said they likely won’t purchase “bear lids” in the near future, but it’s on the list of priorities.

Koch and his team’s arrival in town did little to assuage some residents about bears in the townsite. Mike Armour wrote a letter to Koch, saying bear attractants are not the root cause of the increased activity, but rather habituation to and lack of fear of people.

“Certainly atypical is the response these bears are displaying toward their normal distractants such as dogs and humans. In my direct experience they display very little fear or aversion to either and this leads them into places they might otherwise avoid and I believe accounts for the unusual number of bear/human interactions being recorded,” Armour wrote. “The numbers you’ve sighted in your letter are only a small fraction of what’s actually taking place on a daily basis in my neighborhood alone.”

Koch told the CVN he encountered four bears at the dump and about nine throughout town, and that all of them were wary and ran away when approached. “I’ve heard from a lot of people that (the bears) have no fear,” Koch said. “Every bear we tried to approach ran away.”

While bears can become conditioned to feeding off garbage, they’ll stop when it’s no longer available, Koch said, and the adage “once a trash bear always a trash bear” is a myth.

Koch released his telephone number to the public and was on standby to respond to bear sightings. He said he was able to respond to some calls, but Facebook comments advising people to not call him because the wildlife trooper would cite people likely diminished his ability to learn more about specific bears that people were concerned with.

“That was obviously not the case, because we didn’t cite anybody,” Koch said. “I don’t know how many things were going on that I could have found out about and that’s unfortunate.”

Koch said misinformation began when the wildlife trooper and his team asked a man to clean up unsecured plastic garbage cans that had attracted several bears to his property. They also found piles of trash in the surrounding woods. They advised he put an electric fence around his fish smoker and his relocate his trash containers within the fence. Social media posts indicated the man had been fined $500, in part, for having a BBQ grill.

“We talked to the gentleman about cleaning up the garbage and explained why. The trooper did say we’ll be back tomorrow to make sure it’s cleaned up,” Koch said. “The next thing I know social media blows up and they say someone was issued a citation for a BBQ grill. It was just a verbal warning and it was cleaned up and we were happy to see that.”

According to state law, people may kill a bear in defense of life or property, as long as the individual did not provoke an attack or cause the problem by negligently creating bear attractants.

Borough manager Debra Schnabel said she is going to create a “bear task force” that will include a wildlife biologist. The group’s goal will be to make recommendations to minimize bear attractants. She said she will work with Community Waste Solutions to do the same.

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