Searchers from Sitka recovered the body Wednesday of a local commercial fisherman who died in a brown bear attack during a hunting trip, according to Alaska State Troopers.
The call that Tad Fujioka, 50, was overdue could not have come at a worse time. On Tuesday evening, Sitka and the outer coast of Southeast Alaska were being lashed by a windstorm, with some gusts in excess of 50 mph.
Nevertheless, Fire Chief Craig Warren says Air Station Sitka launched a helicopter equipped with a forward-looking infrared, or FLIR, camera to search an area about 10 miles north of Sitka in Nakwasina Sound.
“The Coast Guard did fly the night of the report, and kind of looked around the area,” said Warren. “It was dense forest, they couldn’t see much through the FLIR. And then the next morning, we deployed teams out of the Fire Department before 8 a.m. The first team was on the ground there about 8:30 dropped in by the Coast Guard.”
Fujioka was believed to be returning to an area where he had shot a deer on Monday in much better weather, and had cached part of the carcass.
Warren says the department organized 25 members into three teams for the ground search, plus two Alaska Wildlife Troopers and an Alaska Department of Fish and Game biologist.
The Coast Guard flew two of the teams to a high point above the area where Fujioka was believed to be hunting, and another team was landed on the beach. His body was found by a ground team at about 11:30 a.m., not far from where he had cached the deer. Wounds indicated that Fujioka had died from a bear mauling.
The shock reverberated quickly around Sitka. Norm Pillen is the President of Seafood Producers Cooperative, where Fujioka was board chair.
“He was very involved,” said Pillen, “Our hearts go out to his family. It’s just … (I) can’t even imagine. It’s a huge loss to them, to the community, to the fishing industry and to SPC. We’ll miss him.”
Fujioka came late to fishing. Before becoming a troller aboard his boat, the Sakura, he worked in Sitka’s municipal engineering department. He brought precision and an attention to detail in fisheries allocation issues that made him a powerful advocate at Alaska Board of Fisheries meetings.
The next meeting scheduled for this January in Ketchikan. Pillen says Fujioka’s absence will be felt.
“He really could dive deep, and had tremendous ability for recall and digging into things and pulling out information that he needed,” said Pillen. “And we really appreciated that about him. It’s going to be a huge hit for the industry to not have him involved.”
Fujioka’s outside-the-box thinking wasn’t limited to fisheries. He was a long-time member of the Sitka Fish & Game Advisory Committee, which in 2021 was reckoning with an extraordinary number of brown bears killed by authorities or residents in Sitka that year, 14 in all. Overhauling Sitka’s entire trash pick-up system didn’t seem a practical solution, nor did shooting every bear that came into town, as some on the Committee suggested.
Fujioka’s analytical mind and understanding of bear behavior led him to suggest something small-scale and possibly effective, if it’s ever tried.
“What if you looked at it from the other way, and we had some booby-trapped garbage cans out there?” Fujioka told fellow committee members. “Maybe it would only take one or two bad experiences for a bear to associate that big black thing with an unfavorable experience.”
The bear that likely killed Fujioka was a brown bear sow with two cubs. She was seen by the Coast Guard helicopter in the area near where Fujioka’s remains were found, but ground searchers did not encounter her. Steve Bethune, the biologist who accompanied searchers on Wednesday, characterizes the incident as a defensive attack – rather than predatory – and says the sow had almost certainly claimed the deer carcass and was defending her food supply.
Bethune said some efforts were made Wednesday afternoon to locate the bear on the ground, without success.
Fujioka was known locally as an experienced and capable outdoorsperson. His death remains under investigation by Alaska Wildlife Troopers.
Robert Woolsey is the news director at KCAW in Sitka.
