When the winter that never was morphed into the spring that never came, it might have put the same stress on some Alaska wildlife as on the state's psychologically struggling citizenry. How else to explain the brown bear gone berserk at the mouth of the Kasilof River on the Kenai Peninsula?
By now, many have heard of the sow shot and killed after attacking birder watcher Toby Burke and his family, but it would appear that is merely the tip of this tale.
There was a lot of strange behavior going on before that.
"This bear had several run-ins with people prior," Jeff Selinger, a biologist for the Alaska Department of Fish and Game's Division of Wildlife Conservation in Soldotna, said Wednesday. And no, it wasn't because the bear was starving as some believed. "It had about a half-inch of fat still on its belly," Selinger said.
For a bear just out of hibernation, that denotes a pretty healthy condition. And there are none of the sometimes extenuating circumstances that might explain this bear's unpredictable behavior.
The sow wasn't lactating. So there were no cubs for her to protect.
There were no moose carcasses or other food found in the area. So this is not a case of a bear defending a kill.
And the bear wasn't rabid.
No, instead, what looks to have happened on the river not far south of the city of Kenai is a bear gone mad.
'Old and cranky'
"It was kind of erratic," said Selinger, who backtracked the bear's human interactions after its death. The animal appears to have "chased a little girl" just after it showed up near the river's outlet on Cook Inlet downstream from the busy bridge on the Sterling Highway.
Luckily, Selinger said, as the bear was running toward the girl "it hit a chunk of shelf ice, and it broke off." That put the bear in the water with the ice. The animal floated out into the inlet on its little berg, but it eventually made it back to shore in time to greet a man who drove down to the beach to scout fishing opportunities.
He saw the bear, noticed it coming toward him and decided it would be a good idea to get in his truck.
"The bear saw the truck and came after him," Selinger said. "It ran into the passenger side door."
The driver spun out of there to get away, and the bear slammed into the driver's door. It wasn't the animal's only odd behavior. It also ran into a fence and then attacked the fence.
"It was definitely an old bear," Selinger said. "Maybe it was just old and cranky."
A necropsy performed by state veterinarian Kimberlee Beckmen found the bear blind in one eye due to a ruptured cornea and probably partially blind in the other eye. That eye was fogged as if the bear had cataracts. All of which could explain it approaching people seen as nothing more than objects moving across the Kasilof wetlands, but the attack on the truck and a paw-to-hand battle Burke over a tripod would indicate there was a bit more going on, too.
Likely older than 20
The bear hasn't been officially aged yet, but the biologist estimated her at more than 20 years old based on her worn teeth. That doesn't make her old enough to have seen a spring like the no-spring spring lingering across Alaska.
One has to go back decades to find a season like this on the Kenai Peninsula, where the National Weather Service reported the third-coldest April on record. Couple that with heavy snows in March and near-record snows in April, and spring in the Kenai area ended up looking more like winter, which is not the way any mammals are accustomed to finding things.
All over Anchorage, people can be heard grumping about the non-arrival of spring, which officially swept across America on March 20. In Alaska this year, March 20 turned out to be the heart of the 2012-13 winter. And spring still doesn't appear anywhere close as the calendar rolls into May.
"The cool temperatures combined with the amount of snow received in April has left measurable snow from the season on the ground (in Anchorage) as of May 1st," the National Weather Service said. "This has happened only three times in Anchorage since snow depth measurements have been taken."
The story is much the same across the state.
"April 2013 was among the coldest Aprils in the past 74 years over much of Alaska," the Weather Service said.
That's enough to make any old bear grouchy, so maybe that explains the erratic behavior.
Contact Craig Medred at craig(at)alaskadispatch.com