Road kill — Hunters slay bear in front of wildlife watchers

Photo courtesy of Pamela Locke. A brown bear looks up from fishing in the Kenai River along the Sterling Highway below the Russian River confluence Saturday. A short while later, the bear was shot by two hunters, in full view of the people who had stopped to watch the bear fish and and swim.

*Update* Wednesday, Oct. 7: U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service reports that the bear carcass has been seized and charges are being forward against one individual in this case. Names are not being released at this point.

By Jenny Neyman

Redoubt Reporter

As Saturday dawned crisp, dry and with a respectable smattering of fall leaves still clinging to trees, Pamela Locke, her husband and 13-year-old son decided it would be a great day to go wildlife viewing.

They got a far more disturbing show than they ever wanted to see.

The family headed out from Sterling toward Cooper Landing. They came upon a group of cars and people along the side of the Sterling Highway, past the east entrance to Skilak Lake Road and before the Russian River Ferry parking lot, where the road curves along a treeless bend of the Kenai River.

They parked with the other vehicles in a nearby pullout and walked to the guardrail to see a subadult, male brown bear in the river below the embankment. He didn’t seem too concerned with the people, maybe about 10 or 12 ranging from one little boy about 4 years old on up to adults, Locke estimated. One guy got way too close, by Locke’s estimation, but it didn’t seem to faze the bear.

“The bear was kind of complacent. He was lying down over a big stump. He just kind of looked at the guy. I guess he was born and raised in the area. He didn’t mind people,” she said.

The family decided to continue on to Cooper Landing for lunch. They were headed home about 2:30 p.m. when they passed the same spot and saw cars and people still there.

“We were like, ‘Oh, he’s still there.’ So we stopped. He was swimming and fishing,” Locke said.

An Alaska State Trooper patrol car was on the scene, and troopers cautioned people not to park or stand on the road. Onlookers stood on the river side of the guardrail, Locke said.

After about 15 or 20 minutes, the bear started heading up the embankment, so the onlookers started heading back to their vehicles. The troopers stayed up by the guardrail, Locke said, which surprised her.

“They were mostly concerned about people not stopping on the highway. They didn’t seem concerned about people stopping to watch the bear,” she said. “After the bear started coming up, they approached the guardrail. I turned around and thought, ‘Gosh, what are you doing? There’s no people there now, why are you getting so close to that bear?’”

Locke said she could hear the bear sniffing and sort of grunting at the troopers. She wondered if maybe they were trying to keep it from getting up on the road.

Around that time another vehicle parked in the pullout and two men in camouflage and with hunting rifles got out and started heading toward the bear. Locke said she was walking back to her car next to another woman when the men passed them — one younger, one looking about mid-30s with a big moustache.

“At first I thought, ‘Well, they’re being cautious. They just want to see the bear but are carrying rifles for protection in case something happens. Then I realize they’re wearing full camo. The lady walking with me stopped them and said, ‘You’re not going to shoot that bear, are you?’ They were kind of smiling and laughing and said, ‘Yeah we are, if it crosses the highway.’ And she said, ‘You’ve got to be kidding me.’”

Photo courtesy of Pamela Locke. A subadult brown bear heads up an embankment toward the Sterling Highway along the Kenai River just south of the Russian River confluence Saturday. A short while later, the bear was shot by two hunters in full view of the group of people who had been photographing it swimming and fishing.

Locke said the troopers didn’t stop the men.

“They didn’t question them. They didn’t ask for a license. They didn’t say, ‘Hey, it probably isn’t the best situation to shoot this bear on a busy corner of the highway with all these people still there.’ They just let them go,” Locke said.

The bear started running up the embankment on the other side of the highway. The men ran after it.

“They got to the edge of the highway. The bear had run partway up the hill and they opened fire on his backside,” Locke said.

“The shooter, I could see him clearly, he was on one knee and his foot from his bent leg was maybe an inch off the highway. I will concede that they were technically off the highway when they started firing,” she said.

She doesn’t concede they were off the road when they finished firing. The men hit the bear twice in the backside, and it rolled down the hill and up by the side of the highway, she said.

“He wasn’t dead at that point, with all of us standing there with a wounded brown bear on the highway,” Locke said.

She said it did look like the men fired the last two shots to finish off the bear from the road.

“My husband said they were clearly standing on the highway when they fired those last two shots,” she said. “They had to be, since it rolled up toward them and they had to step back.”

The troopers got into their patrol car to leave after the bear was dead, Locke said. She flagged them down.

“I said, ‘You’re just going to let them shoot from the damn highway?’ They said, ‘Ma’am, they’re not on the highway,’ and he took off. He didn’t want to discuss it any further,” Locke said.

Trooper Garrett Willis, stationed in Cooper Landing, had responded to a report of traffic hazards in the area Saturday afternoon.

“We were just traffic control,” Willis said. “Our initial complaint was people parked in a no-parking area and parking over the white line, causing vehicles to take evasive action, because it was on a blind corner.”

Willis said the hunters did say they had a permit, and as far as he knew, the area across the highway was open to hunting.

“Once that bear crossed the road, that was a legitimate hunting area over there. I could not restrict them. If I was to stop them for shooting, then I’d be interfering in a lawful hunt. That’s why I could not stop them,” Willis said.

Locke and her family had seen more than enough after the shooting and left, too.

“I just left. I didn’t want to see any more. I don’t have any idea how they got that bear in their vehicle. They either had to park their vehicle up on the road right where the troopers didn’t want anybody to park, or they had to drag it up the highway. The whole thing was so weird to me. I was kind of in shock. I just wanted to get out of there. There’s a whole spectrum of levels on which it was just not right.”

Locke questions the safety of shooting from that area, especially with people standing nearby to witness it and who could have been in danger from a wounded bear if the hunters didn’t finish it off. She also questions whether what the men did even qualifies as hunting.

“It was like you could have been wearing a clown suit and shot this bear. It was not a hunt,” she said. “I equate it to shoving my way through a zoo and shooting a bear in a cage.

“I’m just disgusted at the whole situation. My family supports ethical hunting, but this is anything but sportsmanlike. And any decent hunter knows if you don’t have a clean shot you don’t shoot. It took at least five shots to put it down, aiming up the hill while it was running away. And the response of the officers. I would have expected more out of the patrolmen. The whole situation was just extremely distasteful, to say the least,” Locke said.

Larry Lewis, a wildlife technician with the Alaska Department of Fish and Game in Soldotna, said he got a call about the incident Monday morning, and said it is under investigation. Because of that, he couldn’t comment on the situation.

He did say that Fish and Game regulations prohibit shooting from on or across a roadway. He said there also is a federal regulation stating you can’t discharge a firearm within a quarter mile of the highway on either side of the road in effect from the east end of Skilak Lake Road and the Russian River parking lot.

Lewis also is president of the Kenai Peninsula Chapter of Safari Club International, and teaches hunter safety and ethics classes through Fish and Game and other venues. He said there isn’t a regulation against shooting in front of other people, but there are ethical principles that apply.

“That is an ethical concern. In our hunter education program and in our general dealings with hunters we try to discourage people from taking game in a manner that can disturb others,” Lewis said.

“It’s a public trust resource. Everyone enjoys wildlife in different ways. We try to discourage hunters from shooting game, even if it’s legal to take it, in such a way that might prove disturbing to others, such as to kill an animal that people are watching and photographing,” he said.

On the other side of the coin, though, there also is a hunter harassment law, where it is prohibited for a person to position themselves or something else in such a way as to prevent a hunter from taking game they are lawfully stalking.

“It works both ways,” Lewis said.

It is not open hunting season on brown bears on the Kenai Peninsula, Lewis said. There is a permit-drawn season in effect from Sept. 15 to Nov. 30, unless 10, reproductive-age sows have been taken in human-caused mortalities, whether that be by hunters, in a vehicle collision or defense-of-life-and-property shootings. Once 10 reproductive-age sows are killed, the permit hunt is over. Lewis said the count was at nine sows as of Sunday, and none of those were due to hunting.

Hunting isn’t the issue, Locke said. This was just a bad situation all the way around, she said.

“Alaska is a great state because we have lots of choices for outdoor activities. But those of us that had to witness this, our choice was taken away. We didn’t want to be involved in this,” Locke said.