A grizzly bear sow shot near the Russian River Ferry on Friday night may have survived, according to wildlife authorities with the Kenai National Wildlife Refuge who are keeping a wary eye on growing bear problems in and around Alaska's most popular salmon fishery.
With red salmon swarming up the Kenai River and into the Russian, people by the tens of thousands have descended on an area that has been attracting increasing numbers of grizzly and black bears for at least a decade.
In some part, the bears have been lured by carcasses of salmon that anglers toss in the river after cleaning their catch. While the people take prime filets, they usually leave behind fat-rich salmon eggs and brains. Those treats are hard for bears to resist.
The grizzly shot Friday had apparently been so tempted by the discards just downstream from four salmon-cleaning stations that she and her year-old cubs had taken up residence in a narrow V of vegetation between the busy Sterling Highway, the equally busy Sportsman's Landing campground and the Kenai River, said refuge officer Chris Johnson.
"The bears, we knew, were around,'' he said. The animals had been seen dashing out of the woods, grabbing carcasses with eggs attached and then running back into the woods to eat. Anglers fishing along the riverbank in the area had been able to avoid problems.
But a group of anglers who decided to bushwhack through the woods from the campground to a pool in the Kenai immediately adjacent to the highway ran into problems.
"They surprised the bear,'' Johnson said. "It started to take off and then veered and came right at him.''
One member of the party, who has not been identified, opened up with a .44-caliber handgun.
"The guy claims he hit it all five times,'' Johnson said. Authorities are skeptical.
They note the difficulty of hitting moving targets in bad light in a tense situation, and the bear's behavior when they tracked it after the shooting.
"The bear went quite a way, and we didn't see where it had laid down anywhere,'' Johnson said. "The blood trail was pretty light. It wasn't like it was lung shot.''
The animal appeared, he said, to have been hit somewhere low in the left, front-shoulder area. Johnson and others tracked the bear over the weekend toward Round Mountain but still have not found her.
"We've heard a few reports of people seeing a bear with blood caked on its shoulder,'' he said, "but nothing has been confirmed.'
"I saw the cubs last night,'' Johnson added Monday, but there was no telling whether the sow was with them. The approximately 100-pound, young bears were along the edges of the Sterling Highway near the campground and quickly jumped back in the woods, he said.
Grizzlies are notorious for their ability to survive physical injury. Bears with huge chunks of flesh ripped out of their bodies in fights with other bears often live for years.
A young bear that was apparently shot in the foot and wounded at the Russian last August recovered well enough to survive hibernation and return to the river this year, still limping on the bad paw. That bear's mother was shot and killed by Michael Oswalt from Anchorage, who was later charged with a number of wildlife crimes.
The 2005 sow shooting raised a storm of outrage from anglers and wildlife viewers who had grown fond of the bear and her three nearly adult cubs. Two of the cubs, including the one with the bad foot now known to many as Gimp or Gimpy, hung around the confluence of the Kenai and Russian until freeze up last year.
Butch Bishop, host at the Russian River Campground, and Johnson are worried about Gimp.
Johnson said he found out Monday that the bear had gotten into some people's backpacks Friday. The animal already had little fear of humans, and it's a small step to go from sorting through packs to deciding to take them away from the people carrying them.
"Time and time again, people are taking photos of him at five feet, trying to get that perfect photo of a bear,'' Bishop added. "I have to call him a good bear. He tolerates it.''
But all it would take is for the several-hundred-pound bear to be having a bad day, Bishop said, and someone could get seriously hurt. A young Alaska angler barely survived being bitten in the face in 2003 by an upset bear that came charging up the river and surprised him.
Bear problems have become an annual Russian River problem not only because of salmon carcasses, but because fishery management has steadily increased salmon runs for years.
From 1966 to 1975, the average return of Russian River red salmon in June, July and August averaged 48,400 fish. That almost doubled in the next decade, and for the decade that stretched from the mid-'80s through the mid-'90s, the average returns climbed to 115,620 -- tens of thousands of fish in excess of what fisheries biologist say are needed for spawning.
And despite efforts to increase harvests in years with particularly big returns, the runs have continued to swell. Over the last 10 years, the Russian return has averaged 136,740 fish.
Given this bounty of fat and protein, ecologists say it is little wonder the number of bears in the Russian River drainage appears to have increased, although grizzlies remain a species of concern on the geographically isolated Kenai Peninsula. Their status makes biologists especially concerned about losing productive sows, as happened with the shooting last year, and which might now have been replayed.
And the fishing season is only getting started. A 10-year veteran of the almost-always-full Russian campground on the eastern edge of the Russian-Kenai confluence, Bishop expects more problems.
"It's now an annual affair,'' Bishop said. "It's getting worse. It scares me.''
The bears, he said, are one potential danger. The number of people packing firearms because of fears of bears are another. Now, Bishop said, some people worry more about getting hit by a stray bullet than attacked by a bear.
"I don't have the answer,'' he added. No one does, but a growing number of people believe that part of it rests in doing something about the salmon carcasses.
Anglers are being encouraged to cut carcasses into chunks and throw them into fast water to make the waste less attractive to bears. Everyone thinks that could help, but compliance seems low so far.
"I think it's going to take a lot of education,'' Johnson said.
Daily News Outdoor editor Craig Medred can be reached at cmedred@adn.com.
