By Joseph Robertia
Photo by Joseph Robertia, Redoubt Reporter. While hungry brown bears often turn their attention to local rivers once the salmon return, it is not uncommon for a few bruins to seek an easy meal by getting into livestock pens, smokehouses or beehives.
Redoubt Reporter
Seeing a hungry bear prowling private property seeking pets or livestock for an easy meal can be a shocking experience, but a new cost-sharing program to put up electric fences aims to reduce negative encounters between wildlife and private landowners.
“This cost-sharing is localized to the peninsula, too, due to the brown bears here being designated a species of special concern by the state. Because of that, we can use cost-sharing dollars to protect the population by providing an alternative to shooting them,” said Meg Mueller, a district conservationist with the Natural Resources Conservation Service field office in Kenai.
Under the auspices of the Natural Resources Conservation Service, the cost-sharing funds come through the Wildlife Habitat Incentive Program, re-authorized as part of the nation’s 2008 Farm Bill. Specifically, the project seeks to reduce potential up-close-and-personal interactions between people and bears at sites of human-induced bear attractants.
“Chicken coops, pigpens and other livestock areas, beehives, fish smokehouses, sheds with dog food or other animal feed — all of these are attractive items to hungry bears,” Mueller said. “And, since these things can’t be moved or taken indoors, a permanent electric fence around them can go a long way to reducing negative encounters.”
Bears spend as much as 80 percent of their waking day feeding or foraging for food. And it’s well-documented that when they are rewarded for their efforts with a fairly easy meal and experience no negative consequences while doing so, bears can quickly become habituated to the attractant. This can mean trouble to all parties.
“Sometimes encounters between humans and bears don’t turn out so well for people,” Mueller said. “But they almost never turn out well for the bear.”
When properly designed and installed, an electric fence provides an unpleasant experience to bears so that they quickly come to associate the attractant being off-limits.
“After receiving their first shock many bears appear to sense the electrical charge in the fence lines and learn to avoid them,” Mueller said. “Even the fence’s visual appearance can remind bears of their previous unpleasant encounter and they’ll avoid similar-appearing areas.”
When constructed by following the Natural Resources Conservation Service guidelines, these fences would be hard for a bear not to notice.
“The high visual appearance is as much a deterrent as the shock,” Mueller said. “So the fences should be 52 inches high with nine strands of highly visible wire, such as electrified tape or an electrified rope product like Electrobraid. The strands are affixed to permanent wooden posts, with each strand about 6 inches apart with every other one electrified.”
Site inventory and assessment is part of the technical assistance landowners will receive, in addition to the help with the purchase and installation of a fence. Cost-share funding will be based on the size of the area to be fenced off, the location on the peninsula and priority. Those living in remote areas with high frequencies of bear encounters will be given precedence.
Application packets can be obtained at the Natural Resource Conservation Service field office on Trading Bay Road in Kenai. For more information, call 283-8732 or e-mail Mueller at meg.mueller@ak.usda.gov.
“This is going to be a really good deal for the peninsula,” Mueller said. “Now that the word is getting out, we’re seeing a lot of interest.”
