Bears and the Big City
I know an artist who recently had to abandon her studio because a grizzly killed a moose calf a few steps from her window. She doesn't live in Alaska's bush. She lives in the largest city in Alaska.
In this land of contradictions, one of the most bizarre involves Anchorage, a city of 250,000 people surrounded by some of the best bear habitat in the world. When bears and people cross paths in Anchorage, the man most likely to be called is Rick Sinnott. Sinnott is the Anchorage area state Fish and Game biologist who responds to people who tell him a black bear is stealing sunflower seeds from their bird feeder. Last summer, Sinnott and other Fish and Game employees answered more than 1,500 phone calls about black bears and 300 about grizzlies in the Anchorage area. On heavy days, the phone rang 20 times with people asking for help with bear encounters.
Most of the bears who meet Anchorage residents come from Chugach State Park, a 500,000-acre preserve that provides bears with thick alders for shelter, devil's club berries and cow parsnip seeds to eat, and good water to drink. Like a cupped hand extending from Eklutna to Girdwood, the park wraps around the densest cluster of people in Alaska. At last count, Sinnott estimated that 250-300 black bears and 55-65 grizzlies live within mingling range of Anchorage.
When bears get a taste for dog food, bird seed, and garbage, they lose. Fish and Game officers shot 48 blacks and five grizzlies in the Anchorage area from 1995 to 1998. As of mid-July, six black bears and two grizzlies have been killed this year. Because the city meets the ocean on one side, people have nowhere to move but into bear country.
Problem areas include Anchorage's Hillside region, Girdwood, Indian, Rainbow, and Eagle River. Bear conflicts in the Anchorage area have increased steadily in the 1990s. About three black bears were killed each year during the summers of 1991 to 1994. During the next four years, Fish and Game officers shot an average of 13 bears each year. Sinnott said the increase happened because bears have become conditioned to human food and because hunting seasons have been closed both in the park and expanding residential areas.
Chris Kleckner is working with Sinnott to find out more about urban bears. A graduate student at the University of Alaska Anchorage, Kleckner has radio-collared 13 black bears. Each week, he tracks them to discover where they move and what they eat. Kleckner also sets up bear traps (often baited with donuts) in people's backyards.
"The main part of the management program is to educate people," he said. "Human behavior is the initial cause of bear encounters. It's a lack of thought--leaving out garbage when you live in bear country, filling a PVC pipe full of sunflower seeds for birds." When a bear shows a preference for garbage or goes porch-to-porch munching bird seed, it usually becomes one of the bears killed "in defense of life or property."
Sinnott said relocating bears is expensive, and it rarely works. Bears have returned home after being moved 100 miles, and the danger of placing a bear with bad habits in someone else's backyard makes it an option Fish and Game almost never chooses. Most problem bears end up like the one that was shot by Fish and Game officers on June 22, 1999, because it was feeding from garbage cans in an Eagle River subdivision.
Some people think bears have no place in Anchorage, but Sinnott said a recent survey indicated that many in the city enjoy the novelty of living in an urban area bounded by a wild one. "I think most people realize the risk of them being injured by a bear is extremely small, and they think having bears in town is kind of neat," he said. "They like to write home about it."
