The Haines Borough’s bear task force is recommending the assembly consider hiring a seasonal public safety officer to perform outreach and assist police during bear season.
This year has seen a dramatic increase in bear activity with bear-related calls up by 600%, according to police chief Heath Scott. He said as of Sept. 1, police had received 258 bear-related calls in 2020. By contrast, at this time last year, police had received just 41 calls.
By some counts, as many as 22 bears have been shot in defense of property this year, according to state wildlife trooper Colin Nemec, 10 by law enforcement and as many as 12 by members of the public, although five are still under investigation.
At a meeting Sept. 10, task force members discussed theories about why bear activity has increased so much this year.
Fisherman Stuart DeWitt said he thinks bears at Chilkoot Lake have become desensitized to people because of all the tourist activity in the area. “The bears, they’ve lost their fear of humans,” he said.
Alaska Department of Fish and Game (ADFG) biologist Anthony Crupi pushed back against this idea, saying in general, the bears the department has collared at Chilkoot aren’t the ones causing issues in town.
Others cited unsecured bear attractants—garbage, fruit trees, chicken coops, compost and other potential food sources—as a primary cause.
“A lot of it comes down to us as community members to build a culture where it’s just not acceptable to have unsecured bear attractants,” Great Bear Foundation executive director Shannon Donahue said.
Interim manager and borough clerk Alekka Fullerton said it’s possible COVID-19 could be exacerbating the bear problem.
“We’re seeing a lot of people storing more food than they would in an average year, and I do think that has had an impact on our bear situation as well,” Fullerton said.
In addition to property damage, the increased bear activity is driving up costs for the borough, Scott said. Responding to bears is using up an increasingly large amount of police resources including overtime, ammunition and disposing of carcasses.
Under state law, pelts from bears shot in defense of life or property must be turned over to ADFG. Scott said skinning a bear in a manner that preserves the pelt comes at a cost to the department as it takes roughly four hours. However, to date, the Department of Fish and Game hasn’t received any pelts from bears shot by law enforcement, according to biologist Carl Koch.
Task force chair Derek Poinsette proposed hiring a seasonal worker to reduce the police force’s burden, a strategy that has proven successful in Juneau.
The municipality saw a decrease in bear activity after it hired seasonal community service officers who worked to educate the public about bear safety and patrolled for unsecured attractants, ADFG wildlife education specialist Abby McAllister said.
The recommendation that the assembly consider hiring a seasonal public safety employee for bear season passed the committee 3-2 with Scott and DeWitt the two “no” votes and ranger Travis Russell abstaining.
Scott expressed concern that hiring a seasonal worker for bear season without getting any supplemental funding might take away resources from the police department. During borough budget discussion earlier this year, Scott said his department lacks adequate funding to provide 24-hour enforcement, but the budget the assembly approved was flat funded compared to the previous year.
In addition to hiring a seasonal worker, the task force discussed the possibility of contracting with the Wind River Bear Institute to bring specially trained Karelian bear dogs to town as a nonlethal bear deterrent.
Fairbanks-based Nils Pedersen, who runs the Alaska branch of the institute, has offered his organization’s services to the community at recent bear task force meetings.
According to the organization’s website, the dogs are trained to detect bears, alert to their scent and herd them away from human-occupied spaces with the goal of retraining the bears to avoid these spaces altogether. The dog handlers also work to educate community members about how to reduce human-bear conflict.
This year, the Wind River Bear Institute’s dogs were used to mitigate bear risk in Girdwood and at firefighter camps near Fairbanks.
Bureau of Land Management Alaska Fire Service spokesperson Beth Ipsen and head of Girdwood Bear Aware Alayna Dupont said the Karelian bear dogs they contracted were effective, particularly as an educational tool.
In Girdwood, Pedersen and his dog team were in town for two weeks patrolling neighborhoods, responding to calls from residents, collecting data on bear behavior patterns and giving educational presentations.
Dupont said at this point, it’s hard to say whether the dog team had a lasting effect on bear behavior, but it did help change human behavior.
“We needed something to help with public perception. Human-bear conflict levels were getting so high. People were losing hope and starting to think the only tool in the toolbox is to kill all the bears,” Dupont said. She said having Pedersen and the dogs around “showed people that killing bears was not the only option.”
Pedersen said he drafted a tentative contract for Haines for a two-week “introductory bear conflict reduction plan,” similar to the one employed in Girdwood earlier this year. The proposed cost is roughly $10,000.
At the Sept. 10 meeting, the task force also approved a recommendation that the borough provide a dumpster so that people who have had bear break-ins can dispose of trash during times when Community Waste Solutions (CWS) is closed.
Poinsette said he plans to present these recommendations to the assembly at a future meeting.
The task force’s July recommendation that the borough assist CWS in completing an electric fence surrounding the landfill was never discussed by the assembly. Poinsette said he plans to revisit the July recommendation when he brings the other recommendations to the assembly.