Anchorage Daily News

While Anchorage residents this summer worried over how to manage problems with local grizzlies, Kenai Peninsula residents solved their problems the old-fashioned way -- by killing lots of bears.

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A record number were dead by the time snow finally encased the Peninsula in winter, said area wildlife biologist Jeff Selinger. He was still tallying the numbers this week, but figures the total is going to end up right around 40 bears shot in self-defense, run down by cars, killed by authorities after being perceived as dangerous, or gunned down illegally and dumped.

It is the second time in three years the death toll has climbed above 20.

The last time so many bears died in such a short span was from 1992 to 1994 when the three-year average hit 23. State biologists then called the kill rate a "cause for alarm.'' And by 1998, the state had declared the Kenai brown/grizzly bear a "species of special concern" -- akin to an animal being placed on the federal endangered species list as "threatened.''

It was the belief in 1998 that the Kenai bear population numbered between 200 and 300 animals and was largely isolated on the Peninsula.

Given these beliefs, biologists worried that killing bears at the rate of more than 20 per year could decimate the population. Ground-breaking work by former state biologist Sterling Miller in the late 1980s and early 1990s concluded that brown/grizzly bears can only sustain a human-caused mortality of about 6 percent per year under the best conditions.

If people kill more bears than that, he concluded, bear populations plummet.

Even at the high end of the population estimate for Kenai bears, a 6 percent harvest equals 18 dead animals. This summer's kill -- which happened despite the absence of a hunting season -- is more than twice that. And it comes only one year after a record kill of 29 bears in 2006.

"Obviously, there's a problem,'' said George Matz of the Kachemak Bay Conservation Society.

"The allowable annual (kill) should not exceed 14-21 bears if the population is estimated to contain 200-300 bears,'' Alaska Department of Fish and Game researcher Sean Farley warned in 2006. But he cautions that calculating how many dead bears is too many is not a straightforward numbers game.

In the game of survival, some bears are more valuable than others. The death at human hands of a productive sow has a far greater impact on the population than the loss of a new-born cub, which faces a high likelihood of dying of natural causes before reaching breeding age. Much the same applies for the death of a yearling.

A lot of the dead bears on the Kenai this year were cubs or yearlings.

Then, too, there are the Kenai wild cards. Nobody knows for certain how geographically isolated Kenai bears are.

A study Farley did of Anchorage bears found some of the animals crossing Knik Arm to the north of the city with some regularity in order to reach feeding areas in the Susitna Valley. He notes it would be no more difficult for bears to cross Turnagain Arm south of the city to exit or enter the vast wilderness of the Kenai.

And there is the big question of Kenai bear numbers.

"We don't know how many people there are on the Kenai,'' Matz said, "let alone how many bears. A lot of people say, 'well, there's too many bears.' But that's all anecdotal.''

The state's bear population estimate for the Kenai is based on the acreage of available bear habitat and the carrying capacity of similar habitats in other areas where bear numbers are known. Farley considers the number unreliable. He'd like a better estimate, but doing the studies necessary to get one is costly.

Area wildlife supervisor Jeff Selinger in Soldotna, who works closely with Farley and spends a lot of time in the field on the Kenai, said he is confident there are at least 250 to 300 bears and might be more. Certainly, he said, there is no sign that existing kill rates are depressing the population.

"We have a healthy, vibrant, brown bear population on the Kenai Peninsula,'' he said. "We don't have empirical data in the form of a census, (but) all the anecdotal information points toward a healthy, viable population.

"The fisheries people have been doing stream research down here for years,'' and they have noted no decrease in bears congregating on salmon streams. In some cases, the opposite is the case. Grizzly bears now gather at the Russian River where they never gathered before.

Along the lower Russian, the attraction is salmon carcasses. The lower river is not a good place for bears to fish for salmon, but it's easy for them to catch the carcasses tossed in the river by anglers who filet fish.

Nine of the dead bears on the Kenai this summer were killed in and around the Cooper Landing stream. The dead include one of two young bears the state spent a significant amount of time and money trying to save.

That bear was captured and transplanted to a remote corner of the Kenai National Wildlife Refuge north and east of the Russian. It ended up making its way south and west to North Kenai, where it got into trouble and was shot. Its sibling, meanwhile, ended up back at the Russian.

"That one will be back there next year,'' Selinger added.

Just as the bears that appeared at the Russian in previous years came back this year. Some later ended up shot near the river or in the community dumpsters in nearby Cooper Landing. Others got hit by cars. One mauled a young worker at the Kenai Princess Lodge.

Despite such problems, Selinger remains optimistic about the future of the bears in the Cooper Landing area.

"Seventy-five percent of our (dead) bears are garbage bears,'' he said, and most Kenai residents now seem willing to try to deal with garbage issues that attract bears into places where either the animals get killed or people get injured.

"(Bears) are not bad to have around,'' Selinger said, "but when we have as many as we've had around, people start to lose their patience with them. They don't like to feel that they need to take protection with them when they go for a walk in the evening.''

In the cases where that happens, he added, it is invariably because the bears are getting food in a neighborhood. People fail to recognize that bears are eating machines, he said. Once they find a good source of food -- wild or man-made -- they stay close to it.

"All it takes is one (person) in a subdivision who attracts the bears in there,'' Selinger said, because once the bears find the food -- fat-rich garbage, bags of dog food, bird seed caches -- they'll remember where it was and keep coming back again and again and again looking for more.

"If we really want to get on top of this problem, "it's going to take everyone getting involved. We don't expect thing to change overnight. It's going to be a long-term investment. It's going to take a shift in human behavior. But we've done it with seat belts. You kind of evolve as a society.''

Find Craig Medred online at adn.com/contact/cmedred or call 257-4588.

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