The carcasses of the freshly filleted salmon that anglers toss into the Russian River each summer to nourish the ecosystem have become to local bears what the dumps of Yellowstone National Park once were to the grizzlies of northwest Wyoming.
Generations of brown bear sows, and some blacks, have brought their cubs to the popular, clear-water stream near Cooper Landing to partake of the ursine equivalent of some sort of free-food day at McDonald's.
This summer, it's all going to end.
Or at least a task force composed of employees of the Alaska Department of Fish and Game, the U.S. Forest Service, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and others is going to try to make it end.
Riverside fillet tables anglers once found so convenient for processing their catch will be gone from the Russian, said Bobbie Jo Skibo, coordinator for the Russian River Interagency Coordination Group.
Anglers who want to fillet their catch streamside will be directed to tables at the confluence of the Russian and Kenai rivers, where carcasses can be tossed into the fast and murky waters of the latter. It is significantly harder for bears to retrieve the waste there.
People who choose not to make the mile-long hike from the Russian River campground and parking lots to the confluence will be asked to take their catches home intact or, at least, do no more than remove the guts and gills at the river.
Gone is the policy that it was OK to fillet the salmon, chop the carcasses into chunks and throw the chunks back into the river, said Jeff Selinger, area wildlife biologist for Fish and Game.
The "Stop, Chop and Throw" campaign begun in 2006 solicited good cooperation from humans, he said, but not from bears. They appeared just as happy to come to the river to eat chunks of fish as to dine on whole carcasses.
Worse, Skibo said, stop, chop and throw might actually have encouraged bears to take up residence in the people-packed river corridor, the opposite of the campaign's goal.
When there were carcasses, she said, mother bears tended to dash from the woods, grab a meaty discard and haul it into the woods for their cubs. Last summer, Skibo said, "I watched a sow teaching her cubs to harvest these little chunks."
Chunks of salmon, she said, appeared to have become "popcorn-size" treats for the bears.
This problem is compounded by the tendency of even the smallest of pieces to concentrate in eddies when the Russian flows are low, Selinger said. Jams of salmon chunks become like bowls of popcorn enticing bears to the river.
MAULINGS, SHOOTINGS
Attracting bears in this way to a river where there were historically few good fishing sites for bears is bad for bears and the tens of thousands of people drawn to the state's most crowded salmon fishery, Selinger said.
The Russian has been the site of one near-death mauling, and the bears have suffered even more.
Last year, nine were shot and killed in the Cooper Landing area. Not all of those bears died at the Russian, but its salmon played a key role in luring most of those bears into contact with humans.
"Sows have been coming down there to raise their litters," Selinger said.
Once the female cubs grow into adults, they come back with cubs of their own. That has kept bear problems constant for close to a decade.
"I think we're still going to have issues for a while," Selinger said Thursday. He fears it could take years for the bears to learn that there is no more free lunch along the river -- if anglers cooperate with the new plan.
WILL ANGLERS GO ALONG?
Cooperation is not a given, though David Rhode, a middle-aged angler who grew up in Cooper Landing and has long fished the river, thinks most people will cooperate. Over the decades, he has noted the improving ethics of those who trek to a fly-fishing-only stream so popular that anglers regularly wait in line for hours to pay $11 for half-a-day parking in one of two campground parking lots.
"They're abiding by the fishing regulations now," Rhode said. "Probably most people are going take them (salmon) home whole. That's the optimistic view."
Rhodes, however, admits a lot of people are likely to miss the old system.
"The cleaning table thing was really nice,'' he said. "It was easier than your kitchen counter, and you always felt good. You figured a bunch of (rainbow) trout would be eating on the carcass.
"I think most fishermen are keyed to throwing the carcass back into the river because it is good for the river. But it is a bear attractant."
He knows well what that has meant.
"Twenty years ago," he said, "we didn't have the interactions with bears we have today."
Thirty or 40 years ago, it was uncommon to run into a bear along the river. Now, it is so common there sometimes seem to be as many people wandering the riverside Anglers Trail with cameras looking for bear photos as there are anglers looking for fish.
Officials expect some photographers to be unhappy about the removal of the fillet tables and the bear-attracting carcasses that came with them. Skibo said the plan is to direct photographers to the Russian River falls, about 2.5 miles upstream from the campground near Lower Russian Lake. The Forest Service maintains a viewing platform high above the water there for watching both salmon and bears.
Skibo noted it is safer to have people carefully watching bears from a distance than to have bears and people mixed together, paying less than full attention to each other because all are trying to fish. As a general rule, Selinger added, it's never a good idea to have bears hanging around near people getting the idea it's OK to be near people. "We don't want to habituate those bears to people," he said.
Habituated bears often end up threatening people in some manner, and the usual way to remove that threat in Alaska is with a bullet.
"They (the bears) got hit pretty hard last year," Selinger said. "There's no doubt about that. (But) I think we are making progress at the Russian."
MORE CHANGE NEEDED
Skibo said the interagency group is committed to see that continues.
"The expectation is we're going to have anglers who don't hear about this or who truly just don't want to comply," she said. "We're going to be encouraging anglers to take individual responsibility. We're going to be hitting them pretty hard from all sides with education and enforcement if necessary."
Since the new policy is voluntary, at least for now, anglers who fillet fish along the river can't be cited specifically for filleting, but enforcement officers have been given wide latitude to cite people for enticing bears.
The biggest problem Skibo anticipates is one of communication. The Russian has always been a busy place when the salmon are in, but in recent years it's also gone global.
"We have so many people who speak so many different languages and they turn over so fast," Skibo said. That can sometimes make it hard to get to everyone to understand the new rules. She is hoping anglers will help spread the word about the new scheme.
Meanwhile, Rhode noted, many in Cooper Landing are just hoping that people who decide to take their salmon away whole don't pull over along the Sterling or Seward highways to fillet fish, toss the carcasses in a ditch and create new bear problems.
Conceding that could happen, Selinger and Skibo both said they believe some sort of salmon-cleaning site at the Russian River campground is the ultimate solution. There has been discussion for years of a building a fillet station where anglers could go to clean their fish and throw carcasses into a grinder that would mulch them before pumping the nutrients back into the Kenai or Russian.
"We're still talking about brick-and-mortar solutions," Skibo said. "The engineering piece is what we're really missing."
By CRAIG MEDRED
cmedred@adn.com