There’s anger among some about bear management, as bear break-ins and property damage have followed the recent mauling in town.
Around the Small Tracts Road and Fort Seward Area, residents this week described frequent sightings of bears roaming and feeding around the neighborhood. Fruit trees have been one target, with some frustrated over snapped limbs and proximity of the animals to homes as bears harvest cherries.
Small Tracts resident Don Turner Jr. said a bear opened a chest freezer in his shop building and ate an estimated $400 worth of frozen shrimp and halibut.
According to some residents, the monetary cost of those incidents is one thing; more important is a sense that town is no longer as safe.
Jenny Lynn Smith, a close friend of Toni Smith, the victim in last week’s bear attack, described her friend as “having done everything right,” and having been attacked regardless. “We’re a soft target, and once (the bears) know that…” she said. “Do we have to saw down all our fruit trees and not plant gardens?”
The Alaska Department of Fish and Game has said the recent attack was likely a defensive mauling, not a predatory attack.
For Jenny Lynn Smith, the frustration is compounded by the fact that, in her eyes, the bear interactions are a man-made problem, in the sense that people have stopped doing what was effective in the past.
The Chilkat Valley is undoubtedly bear country, and is announced as such on the biggest sign outside the visitor center. Bears have been in the area for a long time. But multiple long-time residents argued this week that past decades saw fewer bears in the townsite. Mainly, they said, because they used to be shot.
“When I was growing up, if there was a bear in town, the next day there was no bear in town,” Smith said.
Turner Jr echoed that sentiment.
“I came here in 1966,” he said. “Until the early 90s, if a bear came to town and started monkeying around and not just passing through, people shot them. There were no repercussions, and Fish and Game didn’t get all excited.”
Under modern regulations, if residents shoot bears in defense of life and property, they must turn in parts of the bear to state authorities, along with a form justifying their actions. Perhaps more significantly, the law bars people from shooting bears in defense of life and property if the bear has been attracted to things like garbage or human food.
It wasn’t always like that.
“When we shot them all the time, they didn’t hang around,” Turner said.
Whether that type of management is a good thing — widespread killing of bears in town — is a different issue.
Smith said her solution to bear interactions in town would be to “open the dump and have the powers that be shoot those bears. If they really wanted to make us all safe, they would open the dump and kill the ones that came.”
Some say they think changes in bear dynamics are a little less straightforward, that there are other complicating factors besides just how many are shot.
Longtime resident Tim Ackerman remembered only one instance growing up encountering a bear near the Fort Seward area. Bears in town were less common, he said, but also, more animals were indeed shot. For instance, in the 1960s, he said, when the town had a problem with a pack of wild dogs, ordinary citizens had a clear system to address the problem.
“Any dog that wasn’t on a leash, they smoked them,” he said. “That’s how they dealt with it. They just did open season on wild dogs. Same thing with bears, if they became problematic.”
But Ackerman also points to factors like food availability, like salmon stocks that have dipped in the past half century. He’s flown his drone over traditional spawning areas this summer and seen low numbers behind Chilkoot Lake. In Herman Creek, he reported spawning channels “completely empty.”
“In some ways it’s a man-made problem,” he said. “The more fish they take out of the Chilkoot and the Chilkat, the less the bears have to eat. Then the bears are traversing back and forth between the rivers and everything smells so good. Everyone’s cooking a steak out on the grill. You can smell bacon and eggs frying for 20 miles.”
He also pointed to more direct human influence. This year he’s seen multiple instances of human food waste dumped outside — a potent bear attractant. One, he said, was a large pile of rotting produce at the end of Well Field Road. Another was a pile of greens on Lutak Road past the ferry terminal.
The food waste is relevant particularly given the circumstances of the recent bear mauling: law enforcement reported finding a pile of human food waste next to the site of the attack.
Some, including state authorities, are focusing on preventative measures to cut down on the attractants in town, rather than just the number of bears themselves.
State biologist Anthony Crupi said last week that bears are typically attracted to town in early fall by an abundance of fruit and pointed to programs in town working to pick fruit off trees.
The Takshanuk Watershed Council is currently running a program to coordinate volunteers to pick fruit from trees in town.
Residents who sign up can receive assistance clearing trees before they attract bears — a potentially large harvesting task.
Other organizations, like conservation organization Defenders of Wildlife, offer reimbursements for measures like electric fencing and bear-resistant trash cans.
Last year, the organization funded 139 such trash cans for residents in Haines.
Aside from the law, state biologists have encouraged residents to focus on those types of measures in part because simply shooting more bears, Fish and Game area biologist Carl Koch said this week, poses challenges of its own.
“Just shooting every bear that gets into garbage is, in the long term, ineffective,” Koch said. “Garbage is a food niche bears will exploit. Here in Juneau, if I remove a bear from garbage and don’t secure the garbage, I know I’m going to be back for another bear very soon.”
On top of that, Koch said, certain bears can do outsized damage, and removing or killing other bears might not address the problem. “One bear in Juneau got into maybe 40 or 50 cars in a year. It took two or three years to catch that one animal. If we removed a bunch of others it wouldn’t have solved that particular problem.”
“It’s a complicated problem,” Koch added. “But people are making an effort. Haines has done a lot.”