Bear in mind — Unarmed birder fights off unusual brown bear attack on Kasilof Beach

Photo by Joseph Robertia, Redoubt Reporter. While not often spotted on popular recreational beaches, it is not uncommon for bears to patrol shorelines, looking for potential meals washing up in the surf, like this one photographed two years ago. A brown bear sow attacked a family of birdwatchers out for a walk on the Kasilof Beach on Sunday.

By Jenny Neyman

Redoubt Reporter

The details of a bear attack Sunday afternoon on the Kasilof beach were about as ripe for tragedy as they come.

A family with three of their kids — one just a baby in a backpack — unarmed, out for a walk along the shore. An adult sow brown bear, seemingly “deranged,” acting erratically and aggressively, not responding to attempts to haze it away.

The family is caught in the open sand, with no cover or protection, no chance of making it back to their vehicle, no one around to help and nothing with which to defend themselves but a bird-spotting scope and tripod.

And yet, the encounter ended about as well as it possibly could, the only casualties being the tripod, one of the baby’s mittens and the bear, which was shot and killed by Alaska State Troopers.

“After it was all done my overwhelming sentiment that I was left with was I just felt grateful. It could have ended so many different ways and, really, no one was hurt. It never laid a paw on any of my family and I didn’t get torn up so I just felt really grateful,” said Toby Burke, of Kenai.

Burke, 48, a wildlife biologist with the Kenai National Wildlife Refuge, was at the Kasilof River at about 3 p.m. Sunday with his wife, Laura, their 11-year-old daughter, Grace, 8-year-old son, Damien, and 7-month-old baby girl, Camille, snoozing in a pack on Laura’s back.

“So, little people,” Burke said, from his office Monday. Then a pause. “Little people.”

“We were not armed. We just came out on the beach to recreate. We didn’t have bear spray, we didn’t have any firearms with us,” he said. “We weren’t even that far from our vehicle, and it’s a fairly high-use area. And even the day we picked to go there, it was windy and cool but it was still sunny and people were coming out to walk their dogs. It just, I guess, caught us by surprise.”

The Burkes are avid birders and were at the north beach of the river to conduct a shorebird survey in the estuary. With binoculars and a heavy-duty spotting scope and tripod, they spotted some yellowlegs, black-bellied plovers and ducks at a distance. They’d arrived a little early for the tide to be fully in, though, so decided to walk down along the shore toward the river mouth to kill some time.

They cleared the dunes and were heading south down onto the sand, but stopped when they spotted a brown bear ahead, about 400 meters away.

“We just stopped in our tracks and said, ‘Oh. We’re not going to be going down there,’” Burke said.

They saw no one else in the vicinity, though they had noticed vehicles of two other parties walking north along the beach. Just then a dune buggy came zipping along. Burke tried to get the driver’s attention to indicate the presence of the bear, but he’s not sure if the driver noticed as he headed toward the bear.

“It was like a homemade dune buggy, really loud, so we thought, ‘OK, this guy is going to drive it into the next county. At least into the flats away from the beach area,’” Burke said.

Sure enough, the bear retreated into the dunes. The buggy stopped at the river mouth, then turned and zipped back the way it had come.

As the Burkes watched, the bear re-appeared.

“The bear in the dunes was acting really erratic. Like it was deranged. It would run out on the beach and back into the dunes. It looked like a very unhealthy bear, not just its appearance, but its behavior. I’ve had experience with bears with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. And I even said to my wife, ‘That looks like a candidate to be destroyed or shot,’” Burke said.

They lost sight of it in the dunes. Then it reappeared about 300 feet away, near a chain-link fence that denotes private property.

“It was just walking. I thought, ‘This bear’s a little curious but not showing any particular interest in us.’ But it was getting closer so we thought, ‘We need to get out of here.’ But again it disappeared and we couldn’t see it,” Burke said.

They were about to head for their van when, “All of a sudden it popped up behind us in the dunes and was right there — 50 or 60 feet from us,” he said.

The bear had circled back behind them, and this time is it was more than curious. The Burkes grouped together and tried to haze the bear away, waving their arms, clapping their hands and shouting.

“It didn’t leave. It decided to charge into us. Then I just told my family to get behind me and I was using my scope and tripod to try and fend it off,” he said.

On the hunt — Game board loosens bear, wolf, moose restrictions

By Jenny Neyman

Redoubt Reporter

Moose numbers may not be what they once were on the Kenai Peninsula, but hunting regulations moved a small, spiked step closer to what they have been in the past, as the Alaska Board of Game enacted measures liberalizing harvest opportunities for several species and extending predator control measures on the Kenai Peninsula, during its Southcentral Region meeting March 15 to 19 in Kenai.

Moose

The board passed several measures relating to moose hunting, meant to balance harvest opportunity while protecting the diminished population.

Moose numbers in Units 15A and 15C have fluctuated over the decades but have shown consistent decline since the 1980s, largely due to limited habitat availability — particularly in 15A in the northwestern central peninsula, and also predation, road kills and hunting pressure. Two years ago the board enacted strict hunting regulations to limit the moose harvest and improve the ratios of bulls and calves to cows, with only bulls with a 50-inch-or-greater antler spread or four brow tines on one side being eligible for harvest. According to ongoing studies done by the Alaska Department of Fish and Game, moose are still struggling in 15A.

“To me the most telling statistic is the declining moose abundance trend we are seeing. Not only are we well below our intensive management objective, but our population is declining annually with no sign of stabilization or growth,” said Doug Vincent-Lang, director of the Alaska Division of Wildlife Conservation.

There’s better news in Unit 15C, south of Tustumena Lake, where moose numbers are higher and the bull-to-cow ratio has improved since 2011.

“We have information that suggests habitat is not limiting moose production in this unit to the extent that it is in 15A. Bottom line is that we’re below harvest goals but within population goals,” Vincent-Lang said.

Proposal 143 suggested loosening the hunting restriction to bulls with a 50-inch or greater antler spread, or four brow tines or a spike on one side — essentially moving some of the wiggle room in the rebuilding moose population to potential harvest.

“It’s been stated that you can’t bank moose, and I think that’s very true, particularly in 15A,” said Jeff Selinger, Kenai area wildlife manager for Fish and Game. The department recommended adoption of the amended Proposal 143.

Not all hunters want the extra wiggle room in harvest, however. Several members of the public and representatives of area Fish and Game Advisory Committees requested that the board leave the 2011 restriction in place to help the moose population continue to rebound.

“An overwhelming majority of the moose-hunting public supports leaving the restriction as it is. They’ve seen it has had a positive impact. Let’s leave it in place a good four to five years to make a big impact,” said Bob Ermold, with the Kenai-Soldotna Advisory Committee.

Board members, rather, saw the population as stable enough to support additional harvest.

“There has been public testimony asking us to retain (the current regulation). That being said, I think it’s important to retain the structure but allow opportunity to harvest a few more moose. I think that’s an appropriate step for now,” said Nate Turner, vice chair.

Science of the Seasons: Bearing study

Photo courtesy of Dr. David Wartinbee. A polar bear rests on a gravel bar near Kaktovik during September 2010. Until sea ice reforms in the winter, bears are relegated to shore.
waiting for the sea ice to form.

Polar bears (Ursus maritimus) are an iconic creature that most of us have experienced as cuddly children’s toys or as friendly family groups interacting with penguins in Coca-Cola commercials.

Much of what we commonly see portrayed about polar bears is quite distant from reality. When viewing TV ads, I always want to point out that polar bears and penguins live worlds apart, penguins in the Antarctic and polar bears only in the Arctic. They only meet in fairy tales. I am also bothered by the anthropogenic portrayal of large family units of polar bears because in the real world they are mostly solitary predators who actively avoid contact with their relatives.

Polar bears are found throughout the northern hemisphere Arctic. There are populations in Norway, Russia, Canada, Alaska and Greenland. Most of their lives are spent as ice-pack hunters, looking for seals that have created breathing holes through the ice, or those basking on the ice. When the sea ice melts in the summer, the bears hang out along shore areas. Typically they fast during this onshore time, although they are happy to take carrion or feed on whale carcasses from Native subsistence hunts. They head back out on the pack ice to hunt seals again, as soon as the sea ice starts to reform.

In Alaska villages, like Kaktovik, polar bears are spending more and more time on land due to the earlier and more extensive summer sea ice melting. And the sea ice is reforming later in the fall than it used to, so bears are onshore longer these days. In these situations, they are not usually feeding, so social interactions are less intense.

One bear, two bears, more for you bears? Brown bear genetic hair sampling snares higher population estimate for Kenai Peninsula

By Joseph Robertia

Photos courtesy of John Morton, Kenai National Wildlife Refuge. A brown bear boar leaves a hair-collecting station during a population census conducted during 2010. The resulting report pegs the Kenai Peninsula’s brown bear population at 624, the highest probability point in the range produced in the study.

Redoubt Reporter

For years many people have anecdotally suggested there are more brown bears on the Kenai Peninsula than the thrown-about estimate of 250 to 300. Last week the Kenai National Wildlife Refuge released findings from its DNA-based mark-recapture study that confirmed the sentiment, with a new estimate of 624 brown bears.

But, does this mean that there are more bears, much less, as some suggest, too many bears on the peninsula?

“Just because we have 624 now doesn’t necessarily mean there are more bears,” said John Morton, a supervisory biologist with the Kenai National Wildlife Refuge who oversaw the project. Rather, he said that the 624 number may simply reflect a more accurate estimate for a population number that has been here for years.

“It’s still at the low end for coastal brown bears, and not really a lot for the entire peninsula when you consider its overall size and resources. But it is a more solid and scientifically based estimate compared to the 250 to 300, which was useful at the time, but was based on densities from the Susitna area.”

The new estimate — comprised of 200 males, 200 females and 224 cubs — was derived after refuge biologists spent more than a month collecting hair samples in 2010. Bear habitat across the peninsula was divided into cells forming a grid. Each cell had a lure station baited with a mixture of fermented fish oil and cow’s blood, surrounded by barbed wire. As the bruins passed the wire — stepping over or going under it — their hair got caught in the barbs.

Using two helicopters with two, four-person crews assigned to each one, the two crews leapfrogged each other from one sampling point to another, deploying and retrieving traps and collecting hair samples, from 16 to 20 hair stations each day. That equates to checking each station about every seven to 10 days. The number of hair samples retrieved varied depending on location. Some stations had zero and some stations have had up to 721, but 12 samples seems to be the average.

“We got more than 11,000 hair samples in the end,” Morton said. “It was a lot of work, and I’m thankful that — given the

A tired bear census crew member rests in front of a helicopter used to shuttle crews from lure station to lure station.

nature of what we were doing, landing helicopters in remote areas where we knew there were bears — I’m glad no one was hurt.”

Despite the arduous nature of collecting the hair samples, the real hard work began when the collection phase was over. The hair samples were sent to a lab in British Columbia and had to be separated — brown bears from blacks, which took months. Then the samples had to be analyzed further and the data reviewed for accuracy. It was these latter points that resulted in the two-year delay of releasing the final number of 624.

“We took months to crunch the numbers, but it was best to have it peer-reviewed by people outside the refuge and outside of Alaska,” Morton said.

Having a more accurate estimate will bring some changes related to the brown bear population, Morton said, but it’s tough to say for certain what those may be, since state and federal wildlife managers often have different ideas and directives about how to manage bruins.

“We manage game collaboratively with the state, but at the refuge, our mandate is to conserve wildlife. We’re not interested in artificially inflating or deflating a population, so for us, I don’t see anything being too different in the short run for how we manage brown bears.”

Bear hunt draws crowd — Hundreds register for chance to bag Kenai brown bear

By Joseph Robertia

Redoubt Reporter

With nearly 600 people participating in a fall brown bear registration hunt — the first in several years on the Kenai Peninsula — it may be an understatement to say those looking to bag a bruin were eager to take to the woods in something other than a drawing hunt.

“I knew we’d issue more than the last one, since it’s been a number of years, but 569 is a little higher than anticipated,” said Jeff Selinger, area biologist with the Alaska Department of Fish and Game.

As of Monday morning, Selinger said that 569 was the number of registered hunters, with the vast majority being peninsula residents. Only 95 hunters were from other parts of the state, and only two were nonresidents, from Nebraska and New York.

Although, Selinger added that people were still registering daily for the hunt, which has no limit to the number of people who can register, so the number of overall hunters participating could grow even higher before the end of what is scheduled to be, at its longest, a 60-day hunt.

The hunt officially began Oct. 1 and is scheduled through Nov 30, although Selinger said that registration hunts for brown bears rarely go the full duration.

“They tend to be short, generally between two days and a week,” he said.

The last registration hunt for brown bear in more than a decade on the peninsula was in 2004. The hunt only lasted two days and had 274 hunters registered. With so many eager to bag a brown bear, the hunt was closed by emergency order to prevent an overharvest.

Booming memorial — Fuller’s friends salute Cooper Landing gunsmith with muzzleloader and bull-shooting session

By Joseph Robertia

Photos by Joseph Robertia, Redoubt Reporter. Don Neal, of Anchorage, lines up a shot during the 24th annual Bill Fuller Memorial Muzzle-Loading Gathering in Cooper Landing on Saturday, while, in the foreground, Dennis Poss, of Sterling, waits his turn to fire.

Redoubt Reporter

Mike Gephardt stared down the long, octagonal barrel of his rifle to align his peep sight onto the silhouette of a Dall sheep 500 yards away and several hundred feet in elevation on the side of a mountain. The ram was a cast-iron cutout, rather than flesh and bone, but the target not being able to run didn’t make this shot much easier, particularly considering the firearm Gephardt had chosen to use.

This was no modern, bolt-action rifle outfitted with the latest scope to magnify his target and sight it in the finely calibrated crosshairs. Oh no. Gephardt was using a muzzleloader — a black powder gun favored by trappers, traders and explorers of the 1800s, rarely used nowadays by modern hunters.

Still, Gephardt wielded the firearm as if he had grown up hunting buffalo on the plains. His fingers moved across the double triggers, first setting the action with the rear trigger, so that the front one became a hair trigger.

Tripped with the lightest of touches, his thick, calloused finger had only begun to make contact with the front trigger when the rifle made a thunderous boom. It bucked backward while belching a huge cloud of white smoke from the muzzle, along with a lead ball flying at 1,150 feet per second.

Just as the sweet smell of gunpowder was tickling Gephardt’s nose, through his earmuffs a familiar

Mike Gephardt, of Cooper Landing, fires a Hawken replica built by Fuller. Black-powder rifles tend to belch much more gunsmoke than modern firearms when fired.

“ding” could still be heard. It was the sound of his lead bullet flattening out as it connected with the Dall sheep target, something Gephardt and the small group of fellow black-powder enthusiasts watching from behind him call “the bang and clang.”

“That was pretty good,” said Sterling resident Dennis Poss, although his lips — and the toothpick sticking out of them — barely moved as he grunted the accolade.

“Or, pretty lucky,” Gephardt said.

Law or not — Cub rescuer recognizes safety concern, would do it again anyway

By Jenny Neyman

Redoubt Reporter

The situation was precarious, to say the least. Three fishermen in a drift boat were drawn by the terrifying, teeth-rattling cries of a brown bear cub caught in an eddy in the upper Kenai River. The cub seemed to be tiring from fighting the current and not making any headway in breaking free of the whirlpool and getting to shore, where, somewhere in the brush, the cub’s mother lurked.

The fishermen — Dustin Klepacki, a Kenai River fishing guide, Mike Polocz, Klepacki’s father, of Soldotna, and friend Charlie Mettille — decided to help. After several tries to nudge the bear out of the current with a landing net, but ending up just spinning the boat in the eddy, too, the current swept the cub against the boat, and it was pinned there just long enough for Polocz to push it into slower-moving water. From there it swam to shore. After resting on shore it let out another screech, which was answered by the sow, the Polocz said.

Luckily, the rescue had a happy ending, but there are many, many ways in which it could have ended unhappily, even tragically. That’s why wildlife managers with the Alaska Department of Fish and Game can’t condone the fishermen’s actions. They can understand the visceral impact a cub’s cries can have, they can empathize with the urge to help when seeing an animal in distress, but they can’t recommend handling the situation as Polocz, Klepacki and Mettille did.

“We don’t try to encourage that type of behavior. We understand that people value our wildlife, but I would really discourage any attempts to try to save an animal or interact that closely, particularly with a brown bear cub with a sow nearby,” said Larry Lewis, a Soldotna-based wildlife technician for Fish and Game. “The fact is that we do have rules and regulations that govern human behavior around wildlife. I would rather see people adhere to the regulations and the reasons for those regulations than to take matters into their own hands.”

Mettille recorded part of the rescue on a cellphone camera and Polocz posted the footage on YouTube. The video has gone viral, nearing 250,000 views as of Monday, catapulting the fishermen into their proverbial 15 minutes of fame. Polocz opted to allow online advertising on the YouTube clip, to try to make the most of the attention. Whatever money the ads raise, the fishermen agreed to donate 100 percent to a charity in Alaska that benefits abused or abandoned animals. If the amount doesn’t get too high, Polocz said that his company, Alaska H2O Pros, will match the amount.

“I’ve just been running in circles with this stuff. I’m not an attention tramp or anything like that but we’re thrilled to share the story,” Polocz said. “I think I was up at 2 in morning to do an interview with ‘Fox and Friends’ on Sunday, after flying back and forth to Anchorage doing the other interviews.”

Bear cub saved from river — Fisherman pushes cub out of eddy, back to mama

By Joseph Robertia

Photo by Joseph Robertia, Redoubt Reporter. A brown bear sow fishes for salmon on the upper Kenai River. This weekend, a sow with two cubs nearly lost one of her offspring in a whirlpool in the upper river, but Mike Polocz, of Soldotna, intervened to save the young bear’s life.

Redoubt Reporter

Mike Polocz, of Soldotna, was hoping to commune with nature when he made the decision to float the upper Kenai River last weekend. He never expected his commune to be such an intense experience.

“I’ve been on many fishing and hunting trips in my life and I’ve never experienced anything like this,” he said.

Polocz, owner of Alaska H20s Pros, was hoping for a fun weekend away from work, but with the bag limit for sockeye salmon being liberalized to double the normal harvest, he wasn’t interested in being among the big crowds of combat fishermen that had come to catch them. He wanted to do something a little less stressful and more serene, so he decided to target trout with his son and a family friend.

“We had put in at Jim’s Landing, and had just gotten through the final set of rapids when we noticed a brown bear sow and her cubs fishing for reds,” Polocz said. “As we got a closer look, though, one of the cubs wasn’t fishing. It was stuck in a whirlpool and drowning.”

Bold bear draws crowd — Young bruin peeks in van on Skilak Road

By Joseph Robertia

Photos courtesy of Heidi Hanson. A young black bear put on a lengthy show for vehicles along Skilak Lake Loop Road last week. The bear didn’t seem to mind people watching it, and even approached a van bearing a load of kids on a hiking trip in the Skilak Wildlife Recreation Area. The bear walked right up to the van and circled it, leading biologists to wonder if its lack of wariness comes from the bear being fed illegally by people.

Redoubt Reporter

While there have been numerous negative encounters between bears and humans in the Anchorage area, on the Kenai Peninsula problems with bears have been few and far between this season — until last week, when children in a summer program got a firsthand lesson on bear behavior.

“It was amazing. We got nearly a half an hour with him,” said Katherine Quelland, an individual service provider with Central Peninsula Community Services.

Quelland, along with two other adults and eight children, were returning from a daylong summer outing in the Skilak Wildlife Recreation Area of the Kenai National Wildlife Refuge.

“We were coming back from hiking the Kenai River Overlook Trail, where we hadn’t seen any bears or signs of bears, just lots of mosquitoes,” she said.

But while driving the 19-mile gravel road that winds back to the Sterling Highway, they noticed a couple of cars pulled over not far past, fittingly enough, the Bear Mountain trailhead. Drivers and passengers were watching a young, 2- to 3-year-old black bear that had appeared from out of the woods.

“It didn’t approach the cars at all, but it seemed interested in us. It came right up to us. It was searching the van and seemed to be sticking around waiting for something,” Quelland said.

With a van load of children, it was imperative to model appropriate behavior around the bruin, and Quelland said she and the other adults instructed the kids on what to do and what not to do. Then they just sat back and enjoyed the natural spectacle.

“They were really excited, so we told them to keep their voices down and stay in their seats to watch it, and it worked out that everyone got to see it because it came around all sides of the van,” she said. “It came very close. It put its paws on the van and got up and looked in the windows. It was totally comfortable with it all and at no time did it act aggressive.”

Almanac: Barely alive, widely famous — Mauling story garners lots of attention

Editor’s note: It is still a special occasion these days when residents of the central Kenai Peninsula make a big splash in a regional or national publication, but several decades ago the event was a bona fide rarity. Forty years ago this fall, what is arguably the peninsula’s most famous bear mauling occurred on the Kenai National Moose Range, and while it received strong newspaper coverage at the time and magazine coverage a year later, it really sparked interest in 1983 when it was included as the first full story in Larry Kaniut’s “Alaska Bear Tales.” Almost 30 years earlier, however, the rigors and joys of peninsula homesteading life received national attention when a Ridgeway couple was highlighted in a multipage, 13-photograph spread in Better Homes and Gardens. This week’s Almanac will recap the story of the bear attack, and next week’s edition will discuss the homesteading tale.

By Clark Fair

File photo by Joseph Robertia, Redoubt Reporter. A brown bear attacked Al and Joyce Thompson, of Ridgeway, during a moose hunt in 1972. The tale eventually made it into a book and a spread in Better Homes and Gardens.

Redoubt Reporter

“Wilderness Nightmare”
When state game warden Al Thompson, severely injured and with a piece of his scalp missing, staggered out of the wilderness and onto Funny River Road in September 1972, he slumped to the ground along the roadside.

His left arm was in a sling, and his face, hands and makeshift bandages — formed mostly by strips of muslin torn from game bags — were covered with dried blood. He was exhausted from the laborious task of hiking more than 10 miles out from the camp he had been sharing with his wife, Joyce, during a moose-hunting expedition gone horribly wrong.

Fortunately for Thompson, as he waited for Joyce to catch up to him, a vehicle drove up the graveled road and the driver, who knew Thompson, spotted him and she stopped. By the time Joyce emerged from the Funny River Horse Trail, Al was asking the driver to head on in to Soldotna, to notify the Alaska State Troopers and the hospital, and to have an ambulance sent his way.

Twenty minutes later, an emergency crew was loading Thompson into an ambulance, and the media storm cranked up shortly thereafter. Articles appeared locally in the Cheechako News and the Peninsula Clarion, but also in the Anchorage Daily News and Anchorage Times, before the story began to receive national attention — and, according to Joyce, to distort the facts.

In order to set the record straight, she wrote her own personal account, entitled “Wilderness Nightmare,” and, after having that account included in a 1973 issue of Alaska Magazine, she later handed it over to Anchorage high school teacher, Larry Kaniut, who was compiling a book of Alaska bear stories. That book, “Alaska Bear Tales,” went public in May 1983 and is now in its 19th printing.

According to Joyce’s narrative, she and Al had planned a 10-day, late-season hunt for a trophy bull moose in the high bench lands near the headwaters of the Funny River near the base of the Kenai Mountains. Although Al was hoping to kill his bull with a bow and arrow, he had also packed a .30-06 rifle and a .44-caliber Magnum, the first to use in case he couldn’t maneuver close enough with his bow after several attempts, and the second to use in case of bear problems.

After eight and a half hours, the Thompsons reached their intended campsite, where they fashioned a comfortable shelter from Visqueen, logs and branches, gathered firewood and tinder to cook and to ward off the cool of the season, and then promptly turned in for the night.

After seeing only small bulls on their first day of hunting, they spotted two large bulls the next time out. Unfortunately, Al couldn’t get close enough for a sure shot with his bow, so they decided to try again the following morning. They whiled away the evening at camp and then climbed into their sleeping bags, determined to have better luck the next day.

As they had done on previous nights, they slept armed. Al kept the top of his sleeping bag unzipped so that his arm could easily reach out to grab either the rifle or the pistol. The attack, when it came, however, was so sudden and so violent that he had no chance to use either gun.

Board OKs aerial wolf kills — Peninsula packs will be targeted to boost moose

By Jenny Neyman

Photo courtesy of Brad Josephs. Wolves on the Kenai Peninsula, such as this one seen in the Homer area, will be targeted for aerial kills as soon as this spring on lands outside the Kenai National Wildlife Refuge. The Board of Game passed predator control proposals Monday for Game Management Units 15A and 15C on the western Kenai Peninsula.

Redoubt Reporter

Starting as early as March of this year, wolves on the Kenai Peninsula will be subject to extermination from above, as the Alaska Board of Game on Monday voted unanimously to approve predator control measures authorizing the aerial killing of wolves in Game Management Units 15A and 15C.

The measures are presented to help boost declining numbers, low bull-to-cow ratios and calf survivability rates in a moose population that has seen better days.

“To me, this is a very clear-cut case. We can either sit, wait and hope, or we can be proactive and try to do something for our moose population,” said Ted Spraker, vice chair of the Board of Game and a retired Kenai-area wildlife biologist for the Alaska Department of Fish and Game.

On Monday, Gino Del Frate, Fish and Game management coordinator for Region 2, gave a presentation to the board outlining the proposals and the department’s reasons for recommending their passage — a change in position for Fish and Game, which didn’t used to support aerial wolf control on the peninsula.

Evidence of a struggling moose population has been predicted and noted for decades, particularly in 15A where the population is estimated at about half what it was 30 years ago. The board enacted intensive management plans for both 15A and 15C in 2000. Since then, 15A hasn’t once met the population target, and only one year met the harvest target.

The main problem in 15A has been identified as a lack of quality habitat for moose. Nutritious moose browse is most effectively produced by fire, and 15A hasn’t seen a big wildfire in 40 years. The Kenai National Wildlife Refuge, which covers about 80 percent of the land in 15A, hasn’t conducted any large-scale controlled burns. Doing so is challenging, what with oil and gas development, a busy airspace, expanding human development and a lack of a defensible firebreak between civilization and wilderness.

To add another wrinkle, the refuge has said it does not support aerial wolf control and will not allow it on the refuge, leaving Fish and Game only a small chunk of state- and privately owned land in 15A to possibly conduct an aerial wolf-control program on, if private landowners give their approval now that the board has.

With the limitation of available land on which to conduct aerial wolf kills, and

Photo courtesy of Brad Josephs. Wolves congregate in a pack near Homer.

the evidence that poor habitat is the biggest hindrance to a robust moose population in 15A, Fish and Game has been reluctant to pursue wolf predator control in the past. But declining moose harvest numbers has prompted the department to proceed, with the idea that killing wolves will free up moose for human hunters.

“In the past we have elected not to go ahead with an intensive management program up until about four years ago, and four years ago we started saying, ‘Well, let’s put it on the books, let’s talk about habitat, let’s talk about intensive management. That’s kind of where we are today. Successful wolf control alone is not going to increase the moose populations to objective levels. There’s going to need to be some habitat enhancement, and we are hopeful that that will happen,” Del Frate said. “However, wolf removal may allow for the reallocation of some moose to harvest by humans.”

Up on the rooftop… Family finds clatter is from black bear

By Joseph Robertia

Photos courtesy of Dennis Ogren. The shadowy bulk of a black bear is seen the evening of Nov. 12 outside the Ogren home in Ninilchik. The bear climbed up a ladder to the second-story roof, possibly seeking a way inside to the smells of apple butter Martha Ogren was cooking.

Redoubt Reporter

Like many homesteaders, Martha and Dennis Ogren believe in spending time in late fall and early winter putting up food for the rest of the year, to enjoy themselves and to share with guests.

But the spicy-sweet scent of a simmering batch of apple butter brought in an unwelcome visitor earlier this month — a black bear climbing the Ogrens’ roof in search of food.

“I’ve never seen anything like it in more than 60 years of living here,” Martha said. “And I haven’t seen a bear all summer.”

A black bear she estimated to be 1 to 2 years old showed up the evening of Nov. 13 at the Ogrens’ two-story home about 10 miles north of Ninilchik,