Anchorage Daily News

Amy Green always expected to see bears near her new Hillside home.

They just weren't supposed to show up in March when the Anchorage Bowl still looks like a snow globe.

"I thought I had at least a few more months of bear-free environment," said Green, who looked out her window across from Hilltop Ski Area on Monday to see a skinny young black bear wandering the street instead of snoring in its den.

"He stopped at the end of my driveway and sniffed my garbage can, because it was trash day, and looked around just kind of bewildered and ambled off," Green said.

The next day she found a notice on her mailbox warning of bear sightings in the neighborhood -- just one more sign that a black bear and a brown bear have been strolling the edges of Anchorage in recent days.

A snowmachiner came across a tall, thin brown bear on the Fur Rondy trail in East Anchorage on Saturday afternoon. At the same time, a couple walking their Labrador in Bicentennial Park snapped a photo of a black bear maybe 50 feet away.

They walked the same trail that will be used for the Tour of Anchorage ski race Sunday, said Ron Duvall, who posted the picture on his blog. On www.crosscountryalaska.org, a Web site where people update each other on local trail conditions, users reported seeing bears or bear tracks three days in a row this week in the Hillside area.

The sightings come as the Anchorage Assembly considers a proposal for the city to hire a seasonal wildlife officer who would have the authority to shoot problem bears. Grizzly maulings last year on popular local trails prompted the debate.

This week the state Game Board voted to boost brown bear hunting in Chugach State Park. Biologists hope one of the side effects will be to reduce the chance of the boldest bears wandering into town.

Bears usually head for their dens beginning in October and don't start leaving until around April, biologists said. They said the bears seen this week haven't shown any signs of being aggressive.

"Really, moose are much more dangerous this time of year than bears are," said wildlife biologist Rick Sinnott, with the Alaska Department of Fish and Game.

So why would bears be awake right now?

Sinnott said they may simply be on a brief outing, stretching their muscles, before returning to their dens.

As fresh snow covered trails all afternoon, Sinnott said he saw no sign of the bears Thursday. Fish and Game researcher biologist Sean Farley said he may fly over the region this weekend to look for tracks.

"Generally if a bear is out this time of year, it is pretty unusual," he said.

Something may have disturbed their dens, Farley said.

Or, he said, "the animal went into the den in the fall in pretty poor condition and has finally run out of its body reserves ... it's basically gotten too skinny in order to continue to hibernate and now it's forced to get out and forage for food."

Even in winter, bears may be closer than you think.

Sinnott said black bears sometimes den in cottonwood trees in Bicentennial Park, climbing up through the top of the hollow tree like a chimney and then sleeping away the winter at the bottom.

Farley said he could see two Hillside dens from his Raspberry Road office. One belonged to a 731-pound grizzly that was shot after it was hit by a Land Rover near Cal Worthington Ford in Midtown. Another was home to the brown bear that mauled a jogger in August and was later shot by Fish and Game officials.

Those high-profile encounters and others prompted Assemblyman Bill Starr to propose a plan for the city to hire a kind of bear cop whose job would include keeping dangerous bears out of the city. After a brief round of public debate Tuesday night, the Assembly postponed the proposal for more public hearings scheduled for April 14.

Meantime, Green sounds a bear horn every time her 7- and 8-year-old kids go outside and is thinking of putting up an electric fence.

She last saw the neighborhood black bear disappearing into the Hillside woods.

"He was young, maybe a year or two. Big, but skinny," she said.

"He just looked confused."

Find Kyle Hopkins online at adn.com/contact/khopkins or call him at 257-4334.

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