April 21, 2003
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ANCHORAGE (AP) — State game officials will begin a media blitz next month urging Anchorage residents to help keep bears wild and alive — or face a $100 fine.
The campaign will encourage residents to keep garbage away from bears and stow bird feeders until fall to so bears don’t seek food on decks and in driveways.
Since 1995, at least 99 bears have been shot in the city after they became too bold seeking food from humans. Last year, only six were shot.
Bear experts credit the decline to broader awareness about correct handling of potential bear food.
Peninsula Clarion
In Talkeetna over the weekend I noticed several of the “Bear Necessities” posters telling residents and visitors alike how to avoid bear problems. Bears in homestead yards and in the streets of towns and cities are dangerously out of place. Environmentalists and the State Fish and Game officers have long been advocating human care to make our streets and yards less attractive to bears.
It’s so easy to inadvertently lure a bear into the yard. I did it. Greyfox hadn’t been here but a few months, his first summer here. It was hot, and no AC, no fridge, no power grid over at our old place. Putting away groceries after a trip to town, after filling the ice chest in the coolest, shadiest spot near the door (our “fridge”), I left a bag of apples on top of it. They’d keep longer there in the cool spot, I thought.
I wish I had thought beyond that. A little bear beseiged the family in our house, guarding its apple cache. It chased me up the steps and I had to fend it off with a broom to get in the door without letting the bear in after me. Doug got chased back into the house twice. Greyfox ended up shooting and wounding the bear and it was a sad episode all around. I’m all for bearproof storage caches, and garbage cans (always was), and I’m a lot more mindful of using them since being beseiged by that bear.
P.S. The bear image here is one I took, without any long lens, up close and personal, in a separate stupid human trick. That story is here.
Comments (3)
I’ve seen shows about the bear problems…it’s really sad.
But right now, I’m envisioning all these things that might be done to make a yard less attractive to bears.
You don’t wanna know…trust me.
ooooh… bears…
I can’t help it, they just look so damned snuggly! Good thing I live in a bear-free city, otherwise I’d have all kinds of stupid human tricks in mind. *lol*
Once you said, “Eating a Bear would be the closest thing I could think of next to actual cannibalism.”
I’ve never forgotten that.