Police shot and killed a large black bear in an East Anchorage neighborhood Sunday evening, after a state official says the animal had fed off garbage and become aggressive toward people.
Police described the bear as “extremely agitated.” It was first spotted around 8:30 p.m. on the 2300 block of Foxhall Drive, just northeast of the intersection of Northern Lights Boulevard and Baxter Road. An officer shot the bear a few blocks south, and it was declared dead shortly before 10 p.m.
Dave Battle, the Alaska Department of Fish and Game’s Anchorage area biologist, said the man who initially reported the bear was charged by it Sunday evening. The man told police he’d also seen aggressive action from the animal last week.
“He actually had a firearm on him, and was very close to pulling the trigger when the bear stopped,” Battle said. “It pulled up short on its charge, but he thought he was gonna have to shoot it.”
Battle said the bear weighed more than 400 pounds, and didn’t have any sign of prior injuries.
“It was a very large male black bear — one of the bigger bears that I’ve ever seen around town,” he said.
The bear’s size, Battle said, was a result of it feeding off unsecured trash at homes in the area over an extended period of time.
“It’s a gradual progression where they come in initially, they might be more skittish — they run in at night, and they grab some trash and they leave,” he said. “And they start expanding their hours as nothing happens to them and they keep on getting rewarded with good food, and gradually they just become more and more brazen.”
Sunday’s shooting brings Anchorage’s tally of bear deaths so far this year to 16, Battle said. That includes 13 black bears killed by responding agencies and three by citizens who reported defending their lives or property. He called that tally “average to high.” Last year, there were 14 black bears killed by agencies, plus six more by citizens.
Battle said Anchorage’s bear hotspots shift annually, with Peters Creek and the Chanshtnu Muldoon Park emerging as new venues for bear encounters this year. Bears are also frequenting some older haunts like Baxter Bog, near the site of Sunday’s shooting.
“All through East Anchorage, up and down, they very frequently follow the greenbelts,” he said. “And they’ll just poke their nose out into neighborhoods that are near the greenbelts.”
One consistent draw for bears each year, Battle said, is homeless camps. This summer, unsanctioned encampments have grown after the city closed the mass shelter at the Sullivan Arena, leaving hundreds of people with nowhere else to go. Many went to camp in the city’s greenspaces.
“It’s just something that we’ve seen over and over again, that it’s very difficult to get homeless camps to secure trash and keep food and stuff out of their tents,” Battle said. “It’s — you know, they do a lot of things that we tell everybody not to do when they’re camping.”
In 2015, Battle responded to one of Anchorage’s most notorious bear deaths at a homeless camp in Muldoon, where a homeless man killed a black bear cub with a handmade spear. Battle said Monday that that cub had been foraging for food in the camp for weeks, but residents didn’t contact Fish and Game.
“And that’s why the guy had a spear — he had made it to defend them from bears, but I don’t believe we’d gotten any reports of that bear, at least not from the homeless camp,” Battle said. “And we finally got the report when he actually killed it.”
Homeowners who do not secure their trash can also lure bears into a neighborhood, like the black bear killed Sunday.
“Once bears start coming around one house and are getting rewarded (with) food, very often they start checking out the other houses,” he said. “And then those neighbors start calling us and (say), ‘I don’t know — we don’t have anything out for the bear but, you know, it keeps coming up onto our deck.’”
Battle urged people not to put up bird feeders from April through November, because “during those months, bird feeders are bear feeders.” The most important factor in keeping bears out of neighborhoods, however, is storing trash in bear-proof containers or indoors until it’s pickup day.
“The biggest thing around town is just secure your trash,” Battle said. “Don’t wait for a bear to get into it before you secure your trash — just go ahead and secure it.”
Fish and Game urges residents to call 911 if a wildlife encounter involves an immediate threat to personal safety. Online forms to report other wildlife encounters, as well as mandatory documents to report any killing of bears in defense of life or property, are available on the department’s website.
Chris Klint is a web producer and breaking news reporter at Alaska Public Media. Reach him at cklint@alaskapublic.org. Read more about Chris here.
