By Marc Donadieu
Glacier City Gazette
With spring in full swing, our resident black bear population is out searching for food. Could your trash can’s contents be next? A number of Girdwood residents were caught off guard by the bears’ early seasonal appearance after seeing tipped trash cans and strewn garbage. With some basic precautions, you can protect yourself, your trash and even the bears because for them eating trash can become habit forming death sentence.
Dave Battle is the Area Biologist for Anchorage and Game Management Unit 14C for the Alaska Department of Fish and Game. Every year his office receives calls about problem bears and raided trash receptacles. Much of the time, it’s the result of humans not taking the proper precautions to prevent an avoidable situation. The early arrival of the black bears seems to have caught a few people off guard.
“Anecdotally, I think they definitely came out a little early this year,” Battle said. “We knew of several that were coming out around March. We had such a mild winter. It’s very normal for them to come out throughout the winter. They might get up, particularly if we have a warming trend in the middle of winter. If it gets above freezing and some of the snow melts, they get wet. They’ll get up and wander around a bit. Hibernation isn’t a temperature thing; it’s a reaction to a lack of food.”
Battle said he has received only one call from Girdwood so far, and it was due to an obvious trash problem. A black bear came onto someone’s deck who had a lot of trash sitting around. He acknowledged Girdwood has had bear issues in past years, but the number and type of complaints vary from year to year.
To keep bears away, Battle had a few tips. He advised people to store garbage, animal feed, meat scraps, fish and anything else that might attract a bear be kept inside secure buildings like a garage or bear-resistant containers. If you’re cleaning fish, wrap the carcasses in a garbage bag and freeze them until the morning of trash pick up. This practice helps keep down the scent while narrowing the window of opportunity for a rummaging bear to feed on rubbish.
“The bear-resistant containers Alaska Waste are using now are switched,” Battle said. “They went to a different one last year, and we are still evaluating how good those are. The old containers that they used to use were pretty good. I rarely every got a call about a bear getting into those. Most of the time, if a bear can’t get into something in 20 minutes it’s going to move on.”
Bird feeders are another issue that attracts bears, Battle said. Between April and October, bird feeders are bear feeders. Black bears are crafty and resourceful in pursuit of easy seeds. Feeders that are obviously out of a bear’s reach still present a problem.
“Even if you think you’ve got your bird feeder up high enough to where bears can’t get to it, birds are messy,” Battle said. “They kick all of that stuff out, so you’ll have a bear right below the bird feeder.”
Battle isn’t sure how many bears are in the Girdwood area because a survey is expensive to perform, especially when his budget only has $500 to manage bears. He gets an indirect index of bear numbers by keeping track of harvest and road kill data. Spotting bears in dense forest presents challenges that are not present when other animals are surveyed.
Battle said animals like moose are fairly easy to survey. Once it snows, he can do aerial surveys before their antlers start to drop to get a good sex and age composition. With sheep and goats living on high on ridge tops, they are easy to count aerially. However, bears present a different set of challenges that makes them difficult to gather accurate numbers.
“We don’t do any sort of surveys for bears in this area,” Battle said. “Bears are dark colored animals in dark colored woods. So much of Anchorage, Girdwood, Chugach State Park, and the national forest are densely wooded, and bears are not out in the winter. The only way to do that reliably in a densely forested area is DNA stuff with hair snares where you put barbed wire out and bait these areas so bears come to them. The barbed wire catches the hair of the bear so that you can get DNA.”
Over the past few years, Battle has observed another bear related phenomenon due to advances in technology. After spotting a bear, the next thing a viewer typically does is take a photo. Because smart phones and point and shoot cameras don’t have the zoom range of DSLR lenses, amateur photographers approach wild bears too closely while trying to capture the perfect shot or a selfie. Such behavior can only lead to trouble.
“Keep a safe distance,” Battle advises. “Another thing that we’ve seen in the last several years is camera phones have encouraged people to get too close to wildlife. That’s something we’ve seen over and over again. A zoom lens is your friend. Camera phones don’t have good zoom, so people want to get close to them. Keep your distance.”
With spring in full swing, our resident black bear population is out searching for food. Could your trash can’s contents be next? A number of Girdwood residents were caught off guard by the bears’ early seasonal appearance after seeing tipped trash cans and strewn garbage. With some basic precautions, you can protect yourself, your trash and even the bears.