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Public Safety Issues? - UPDATE September 22, 2015

Handsome cinnamon guyHandsome cinnamon guy - 9/21/15Not in this area. I just received copies of the bear complaints for 2015 in the local wildlife management area which is about 50-75 miles in diameter and includes Ely, Cook, Virginia, Hibbing and many other small towns. There were a grand total of 11 bear complaints—none from Eagles Nest Township where a dozen households have been feeding bears for over 50 years. Did the feeding make problems worse—or better?

I also asked for bear complaints for last year, which was a good food year. A total of 1 for the whole wildlife management area, and it wasn’t from Eagles Nest Township, either.

I can see why it took the Commissioner so many years to create a case against our research. There was/is no case. I will soon be asking for a Den Cam permit.

Meanwhile, volunteers will be checking on Ember and on Lily and her cubs.

Along the line of bear problems, or the lack of them, people often ask me what they should do if they see a bear. Of course, any advice sounds like you’d be in trouble if you did the opposite, which would be misleading. I generally say it doesn’t make much difference what you do. People have done everything all over the board, and bear attacks are rare no matter what you do.

There is a book of advice on what to do if you see a bear—the Alaska Magnum Bear Safety Manual. Dr. Steve Stringham wrote it as preparation for a course he taught on bear biology and safety at the University of Alaska. He said he reviewed all the books and many of the websites touting what he called “so-called wisdom about how to live in harmony with bears.” He said, “some of the conventional wisdom is valid.” But he found that “all too much of it is not,” so Steve wrote his own textbook. Steve has spent a lot of time around bears in Alaska and elsewhere. He is the Director of the Bear Viewing Association. He estimates that he has had over 12,000 close encounters with brown/grizzly and black bears.

Steve and I generally agree on bear behaviors, and his book reflects that, but he admits that his advice is more stringent than mine because he is dealing mainly with brown/grizzly bears and some of his precautions would be overkill for black bears. He lives on the Kenai Peninsula, which he says has more bear maulings per thousand people than anywhere in North America. His methods range from winning a bear’s trust to deterring it from what humans would consider misbehavior. His advice is far ahead of what he calls “simplistic agency mandates like ‘If it’s brown, fall down; if it’s black, fight back.’” Steve says some of his former students claim that his advice saved them from being mauled without harming the bears. You can see it on Steve’s website at www.bear-viewing-in-alaska.info.

On another topic, although earlier in the year we heard of 3 orphans in the community, none of the mothers we know well were killed. We know that to be true for most and hope it is true for one (Ursula) that disappeared, hopefully to a den. We lean toward that explanation because we believe if she had been killed her 3 cubs would likely return to a community feeding site. Ursula and her cubs were actively visiting community feeding sites around the same time the orphans were being spotted. We have recently seen Shadow, Braveheart, Faith, Lily, and Bow (and their cubs) at one feeding site or another.

Thank you for your contributions for bear food.

Thank you for all you do.

Lynn Rogers, Biologist, Wildlife Research Institute and North American Bear Center


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