Anchorage Daily News

PORTAGE -- Winter will be arriving shortly, and Hugo, Joe Boxer and Patron are wasting little time insulating their cold weather abode with a thick mattress of tall dry grasses and branches. Earlier this month, the trio celebrated with a big Sunday dinner of raw rump of moose. It was their last meat dinner of the year. The rest of their meals will consist mainly of dog food, at least until it snows and they bed down for the winter.

The three bears reside at the Alaska Wildlife Conservation Center on a 160 acre spread several miles south of Girdwood, off the Seward Highway. The acreage is fenced off to separately accommodate wood bison, moose, caribou, elk, deer, musk ox, black bears and other orphaned and injured critters.

The nonprofit organization is dedicated to preserving Alaska's wildlife through public education. AWCC accepts injured and orphaned animals year round and provides large enclosures while they care for them.

Animals that cannot be released back into the wild are given a permanent home at the center, said Mike Miller, president of the wildlife center, which he founded in 1993.

Hugo, a female grizzly bear from Northwest Alaska, shares 18 acres of fenced land with Joe Boxer and Patron, brown bears from the Matanuska Valley.

Hugo was rescued from Hugo Mountain near Kotzebue several years ago by two men on snowmachines who found her with hundreds of porcupine quills embedded in her paws. She was severely dehydrated and malnourished and unable to walk or eat when brought to the center. She now has a permanent home there because she lacks the skills to survive on her own.

Joe Boxer and Patron were orphaned after a resident of Willow, in the Matanuska Valley, shot a brown bear sow that had killed a moose calf in his backyard. The man, not knowing the sow had cubs, was afraid that the sow might kill his dog. Once he spotted the cubs, he called area wildlife officials, who brought the cubs to the center.

The Alaska Railroad Corp. donates the meat; moose tend to walk along the tracks, and get hit by the trains along the railbelt.

Donations of pumpkins -- hundreds of them -- also arrive after Halloween, donated by grocers in Southcentral Alaska, Miller said.

In fact, a substantial amount of monetary support from Alaska businesses, including cruise lines, oil companies and other corporations, supplements income from admissions, annual members and the center's gift shop, he said.

Most of the center's annual $1 million budget comes from gifts and admissions. While sales at the center's gift shop were down this year, raising admission prices helped somewhat. The center also has various levels of annual membership and adopt-an-animal programs.

The wildlife center, in turn, provides a year-round setting for wildlife viewing and wildlife education, the latter headed by Miller's wife, Kelly, who has a degree in outdoor education. The Millers hope to greatly improve that experience once the center's new bear education and research sanctuary opens.

"People come here for enjoyment and we have an opportunity to educate them too," Miller said. "That's why we are building this $6 million bear interpretive center, with a 200-seat theater. I never wanted the center to be a roadside zoo."

Alaska is the only state to have black, brown and polar bears, all facing their own challenges in today's environment. Miller said he expects the interpretive center, which he anticipates will be completed within two years, to attract even more people, plus a lot of corporate sponsors.

So far center supporters have raised $1 million of the $6 million needed, and talks with potential sponsors continue, he said.

Since the center opened 16 years ago, Miller estimates more than 3 million people have visited. The center currently gets more than 200,000 visitors a year, from cruise ship visitors to schoolchildren.

Along with the bear interpretive center, Miller has been putting effort into the wood bison project, for which the center has fenced in 40 acres of U.S. Forest Service land adjacent to its own 120 acres.

Miller, who used to raise buffalo in the Four Corners area of the Matanuska Valley, between Palmer and Wasilla, said the center is currently "babysitting" 84 wood bison until they go into the wild.

Sixty wood bison, the northern cousin of the plains bison that roams in many of the Lower 48 states, came to the center from a remote part of Canada a year ago June, he said. The herd has since grown to 84 animals. Two female bison were recently released on Popof Island, in the Shumagin Islands, near Sand Point, to revitalize a bison herd that has been there since the 1950s.

Miller would like to release more of the bison, which are owned by the state of Alaska, into the Yukon Flats in Alaska's Interior, a region he said biologists have described as the best wood bison habitat on earth, with a potential for the herd to grow to 40,000 animals.

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