Park Ranger Jacques Turcotte shot the young female brown bear on Saturday evening near the boat ramp at Chilkoot State Park.
“We can attribute a few incidents to this bear,” Turcotte said. “One being trampling an unattended tent, tearing up a couple campsites, going through totes, pushing a boat off a trailer, getting up on a picnic table, and stealing people’s dinner.”
Southeast Park Superintendent Preston Kroes was alongside the new ranger. He said the young brown bear was the same one he hazed on July 27. Kroes said she was one of the two bears that have been going through the campgrounds.
“We don’t know the fate of the other one, but yeah it was the two, two-and-a-half-year-old juvenile siblings and they split,” Kroes said.
Community members identified her as the cub of a bear some called Lulu, who was herself the cub of famed Chilkoot River corridor sow Speedy who spent her life in the area and was popular with locals and tourists.
Photographer Tom Ganner posted photos of the now-dead cub who some called Zulu. He captioned the post: “The fed bear…now the dead bear.”
The Chilkoot bears are habituated to people, but Turcotte said that this bear started to associate people with food. They’ve been actively looking for this bear for a couple of weeks, he said. Turcotte and Kroes had conversations with the Department of Fish and Game about force escalation from hazing it to euthanization.
“It went to more of a food conditioned state where it was starting to associate people with food, which is obviously problematic,” Turcotte said.
Both Kroes and Turcotte said they got a lot of photos and videos from people of these incidents and noticed the bear’s distinctive fur pattern and markings or scar on its right side.
On Saturday, they drove on the road along the river, back to the campground where they found a bear. They got out of their vehicle to identify her.
“[We were] making sure it was the one we were looking for…it bluff charged me twice in the course of identifying [it],” Turcotte said, “even though it had various routes of escape, both across the road, up and down the river, along bear trails.”
Bluff charges are meant to scare or intimidate.
“It’s when a bear charges you…they’ll clack their jaw and huff, then take their forearms and hit them on the ground,” Turcotte said.
“[The bear] bluff charged me and once we identified it, that’s when I dispatched the bear,” he said.
Turcotte has been on the job less than two weeks when he used a standard 12-gauge shotgun with rifled slugs to shoot the bear.
“In terms of humaneness it was very quick and suffering was at a very minimum which is what we strive for,” he said.
But critics say the factors that led to her euthanization are preventable.
“It’s such a shame to see a bear get killed without addressing the root causes,” said Shannon Donahue, executive director of the Great Bear Foundation, a nonprofit dedicated to bear and bear habitat conservation. She would not comment on the State Park’s decision to kill the bear since she was not involved in the decision making process.
“The Chilkoot River Corridor is a place that has a high risk of conflict because of its prime brown bear habitat,” Donahue said. It’s a place where people enjoy a number of different activities from fishing to bear viewing to the lake and camping. “And it is necessary to manage it actively for those things. So you wind up with this dynamic that allows bears, if it’s not actively managed, bears are at high risk of getting human food.”
Despite that high risk, Kroes emphasized that this is only the second time that he knows of that they’ve had to put down a bear in Chilkoot State Park.
“Two bears in, you know, four or five decades compared to the free for all that took place here in town.” Kroes said, referring to the summer of 2020 when 49 brown bears were killed in the Haines borough.
Kroes said he thinks the incidents between bears at the campground and campers have been blown out of proportion. “One incident was brought up as 15 different incidents. It just got out of hand with the rumor mill,” he said.
Kroes said that the state’s job is to protect the resources from people and then the people from the resources and then also people from people.
“We really don’t want it to come to killing a bear. It’s a last resort, and when we do it, it’s because it was necessary,” he said.
But Donahue said there has not been enough management and enforcement if a bear is food conditioned.
“It’s a lot harder to direct a bear after it’s made that [food] association, than it is to prevent it in the first place. And you prevent that by having active management, having rules about food storage,” she said.
By food, Donahue doesn’t just mean the food that campers have or picnic baskets, but also the fish that people are catching, tackle boxes, even coffee grounds and things like that.
“If you establish food storage regulations then the key that we’re missing is enforcement,” she said. “So state parks really needs to figure out how to staff that corridor appropriately so that we can prevent this kind of problem.”
The Chilkoot River corridor is dangerous to bears and people right now, she said.
There hasn’t been a park ranger here for almost three years, so with Turcotte’s new arrival enforcement is a priority for him. He already cited someone for leaving food out which came with a $300 fine.
“People can expect an increased presence, of course now that I’m here, I’m very excited to do my job and get out there and take care of both our visitors and our resources. They both need some attention,” he said.
He said he’ll give people the benefit of the doubt also. “If they come here and they’re not familiar, you know, [I’ll] educate them first, and if it’s a continuing problem, or if the bear actually does get the food, then that’s when the citation will come. Just to really hammer home that. Is something to be taken seriously,” Turcotte said.
Donahue is relieved that there is a park ranger now and is optimistic. She believes some new energy and a fresh perspective can improve things. “I think there’s only so much that one person can do at the peak of the season after a whole season, or years, really, of lack of management there. And so I am very heartened that there is a ranger up there now. But you know, one person can’t cover that corridor, everyday during peak hours,” she said.
Turcotte is tasked with managing more than 68,000 acres which includes parks, campgrounds, and marine parks.
Donahue believes there’s an opportunity to step in and fill some of the gap.
“When I worked for state parks I was the bear monitor. I was up against that issue of not being able to – just being one person working a standard full time work week – I couldn’t be there all the time,” she said.
Donahue had a lot of volunteers but that program is no longer active. “I would love to see the state parks invest in more staffing, bring back the bear monitor program and consistent backup from law enforcement,” she said.
At the Chilkoot campground, the bear was removed after she died so she wouldn’t be an attractant for other bears – to have a carcass for them to feed on.
“We removed the paws and the skull, and those are being sent to Fish and Game so they can do tests on them. And then we disposed of the carcass,” Turcotte said.
Turcotte said before euthanizing the bear, she was acting peculiar.
“It was kind of standing on the road, stumbling and whirling, whirling around in tight circles with its head down low.” Turcotte was previously a bear guide for about six years out of Admiralty Island and Chichagof. “I have never seen a bear behave quite like that before. So we’re not, we’re not sure if there was something going on with the bear neurologically or whatever.”
The Department of Fish and Game will run tests but results will likely take several months to return, according to Kroes.
Editor’s note: This story has been updated to correct the spelling of Chichagof.