In the aftermath of a bear attack in Far North Bicentennial Park, state wildlife biologists continued Wednesday urging city officials to close the Rover's Run trail to prevent more human-bear encounters.

Anchorage Mayor Dan Sullivan said the city has no intention of doing that, arguing that people should use their own judgment rather than the city stepping in and declaring the trail off-limits.

“It really becomes a good common sense thing for the public to use their good common sense when an area has been identified … when there's potential danger there,” he said.

The city has closed Rover's Run the past two summers after two bear maulings in the summer of 2008 and continuing concerns over bear encounters there. Other government agencies that manage land in Alaska, including state and federal parks, regularly have closed trails or sections of parks because of bear danger.

Black bears and the occasional grizzly are seen from time to time on trails throughout Bicentennial Park, as well as other areas of the Hillside, but Rover's Run has been problematic the past three summers. Spawning salmon in the South Fork of Campbell Creek have long attracted bears, and the narrow, bumpy dirt trail, which winds alongside the creek, can make it easy for people to surprise the animals.

Rick Sinnott, the Anchorage area biologist for the Alaska Department of Fish and Game, thinks people should avoid Rover's Run, and said he's having trouble understanding the city's rationale for not posting signs making the trail off-limits.

“The city closes trails all the time,” he said.

Tuesday morning, a 45-year-old man riding his bike to work was attacked by a grizzly sow with a cub at the east end of the trail. The bicyclist suffered a torn ear and puncture wounds to his calf, but was able to ride to the Alaska Native Medical Center for treatment. Sinnott said the biker surprised the bear, and that Fish and Game has no plans to go after the animal because it wasn't acting aggressively.

Two people were mauled in separate incidents on Rover’s Run in the summer of 2008, including a 15-year-old mountain biker who was badly mauled by a grizzly near where this week’s attack occurred.

The 2008 attacks led the city to immediately close the trail. That decision carried over to last year when the trail was shut down again for the summer, Sinnott said.

This year, under Sullivan, who took office last summer, the city changed course. Sinnott said he was in talks with the city to again close Rovers’ Run starting June 10 but that didn’t happen.

Sullivan said in an interview Wednesday that he thinks a bright colored warning sign telling people of the recent encounter is adequate. He also says the city doesn’t have the ability to enforce a closure.

Sinnott said not closing the trail is confounding to him. “Ship Creek Trail is closed because of an erosion problem,” he said. Similarly, he said, a foot bridge across Campbell Creek near where this week’s attack occurred has had a sign saying it was closed until further notice, Sinnott said. It’s ironic, he said, that the city would close the bridge but now choose to leave Rover’s Run open.

“It seems like an ideological argument, ‘We’re not going to let the bears push us around,’ ” he said.

“Some people have the theory that if you cede territory to the bears, then the bears will get bolder, and they’ll take it over.

“There’s no reason to believe that,” he said. The bears are drawn to city streams because that’s where salmon are, he said. Putting people in their paths won’t necessarily make them go away, he said. Closing the trail won’t necessarily keep people off it, he noted. But it does send a strong message that there’s potential danger in the area, he said.

There is an idea to build a new trail 100 to 200 yards south of Rover’s Run so trail users can still cross the park and link up to its northwest corner, and Sinnott said he supports that.

A recent telephone survey conducted for Fish and Game found 63 percent of Anchorage residents say it is acceptable to have brown bears in Far North Bicentennial park. The survey found 89 percent said they support temporary closures of trails at times when the risk of encountering a brown bear in the area is high.

State and federal land managers in Alaska regularly close trails when there are potential dangers, spokespeople say.

Tom Harrison, superintendent of the Chugach State Park, said it’s a subjective call. “If we anticipate a high-risk situation we will probably err on the one side (of caution),” he said.

“However,” he said, “there are bears in the woods.”

This year, the park hasn’t closed any parts or trails because of bears, Harrison said. But last year, it closed an area of Bird Point because of reports of an aggressive bear. The Albert Loop near the Eagle River Nature Center has been permanently closed in the summer for years because of a history of maulings, he said.

Morgan Warthin, spokeswoman for the National Park Service in Alaska, said closing decisions are made by park superintendents. On Tuesday, a backcountry unit in Denali National Park was temporarily closed because a bear ripped a tent, she said.

Sullivan said city parks are not state or national parks.

“Do we want our urban parks to be brown bear sanctuaries or do we want them to be places where people can recreate? … I think (that) is what the purpose of these parks were when they were created, as well as the trails.”

Sullivan said the city needs to critically examine the state’s effort to reintroduce salmon into the city’s waterways. Those fish, he said, are bringing bears into the city.

Read more: http://www.adn.com/2010/06/16/1327231/bear-conflicts-create-dispute.html#ixzz0r5f9CBo9

via Bear encounters create dispute over trail status: Bears in Alaska | adn.com.

“At what point do you say, this is not good policy? This is a city first. It’s not a wildlife viewing area. It’s not a sanctuary. It is first and foremost an urban environment,” he said.

ANCHORAGE, Alaska – An Australian tourist thinks it was an eagle that dive-bombed him as he was walking alone in Cooper Landing, about 100 miles south of Anchorage.

Brian Hard told The Anchorage Daily News a large bird swooped down Monday afternoon.

“It was a beautiful day and I was quite content, when all of a sudden I had this sensation of eagle grabbing on, sinking a talon into my head,” he said. “When it hit me, I kind of ducked down and its trajectory took it back up. I sort of looked up and its wings were spread; I had the sensation of being shaded. Looked like a young eagle to me.”

Hard says he feared a second attack before he made it about 100 yards to the home where he is staying.

“Skin was actually raised off my scalp,” he said. “I felt the bleeding.”

The visitor from Cape York Peninsula in Queensland wonders if he was mistaken for prey.

“Somebody suggested I kind of looked like a rabbit from the sky,” said Hard, who wears his gray hair in a ponytail. “I can sort of understand why it happened to me.”

Fish and Wildlife Service raptor export Phil Schempf in Juneau thinks the bird was a goshawk, which is more likely than an eagle to attack people close to their nests.

“Eagles tend to be pretty wimpy. I can count on one finger the number of eagle attacks I've seen,” he said. “I wonder if he was mixing up his birds and it was a goshawk. In your face, a goshawk looks pretty big.”

via Raptor attacks Australian tourist in Alaska: AP Alaska | adn.com.

ANCHORAGE, Alaska (KTVA-CBS 11 News)

The bear attack on Rover's Run is a reminder of what happens when people encounter bears. But is our city being proactive in protecting us from bears on the trails?

Although officials are saying Tuesday's mauling at Far North Bicentennial Park was minor, they do admit that it could have ended a lot worse.

They say it's time to explore what other options are out there to keep residents safe from bear attacks.

“I had to use bear spray to get my way out of a sow with some cubs and called 911,” said Rep. Charisse Millett, R-Anchorage, who had a dangerous encounter with bears before. 911 dispatchers told her they don't respond to bear attacks. “They said if the bears are threatening you and you are in dire straights we'll respond. I said with all due respect, at that point I am not going to be able to call you,” she said.

Millett says that flaw in the system is one of many in a city where so many people use trails that bring them face to face with bears that flock towards the salmon streams.

“We stock the streams and we get upset when bears come to feed,” said Millett. “We are creating our problems by stocking the streams. There is a whole group of people who love to fish and there is a whole bunch of people who love to view wildlife and there is a whole lot of people in Anchorage who like to use the trails.”

“Most of those encounter areas are places where people live or play everyday but there are also

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bears there,” said Rick Sinnott, a wildlife biologist, for the state Fish and Game.

In light of Tuesday's mauling, Fish and Game biologists strongly recommended closing down Rover's Run until they figured out the series of events that led to the attack.

“That's what we are hoping to avoid–situations where you've got a trail where we've had encounters before,” said Sinnott. “People have been mauled before. It seems like those situations for a few months in the summer time with all the other hundreds of miles of trails in town that those few miles of trails could be closed.”

But with the trails under the city's control, state officials say the municipality needs to work with them to come up with other options.

“Let's do a good job of marking our trails, and then when you go use the trails, file a trail plan,” said Millett.

“Relocate the real trail, the real Rover's Run, a little bit further away from the creek, so people have a safer place to exercise, run and stuff.”

A plan that could work two-fold for everyone's safety, to keep bears away from the trails while also keeping people away from the bears.

“Right now the bears are using it, they are fishing for salmon there, if you put a new trail in there you are kind of asking for these kind of maulings,” said Sinnott.

Sinnott says another idea is to make Rover's Run an winter-use only trail, when the bears are hibernating. Officials say this tactic has proved successful with the Albert's Loop Trail in Eagle River.

City officials say they're going to put up multiple signs around Rover's Run and encourage folks to check out their bear aware site.

via Protection Against Bear Attacks – KTVA.

ANCHORAGE – A man riding his bicycle to work Tuesday on a city trail was attacked by a grizzly bear, which swatted his ear and bit him on the leg, police said.

Sean Berkey encountered the bear on the east end of Rover’s Run trail at 5:30 a.m. as he headed to work at the Alaska Native Medical Center, where the 45-year-old works as a pediatric pharmacist. He had crossed a wooden bridge when he surprised the sow, who had a cub with her.

Berkey stopped his bike, and the bear charged. He momentarily used his bike as a shield, said Bruce Bartley, a spokesman for the Alaska Department of Fish and Game.

Berkey played dead — the accepted practice when attacked by a brown bear — and then tried to get away, but the sow came after him again, so again Berkey played dead.

“The bear swatted him and bit him once,” Bartley said, describing the injuries as “fairly minor.”

Berkey eventually got back on his bike and rode to the hospital where he was met by a police officer, said Anita Shell, an Anchorage police department spokeswoman.

It will be up to the municipality to decide whether to close the trail. It was closed two summers ago after a number of serious bear attacks on Rover’s Run, including one in which a 15-year-old girl competing in a bike race suffered a crushed skull and almost died.

Bartley said he doubted there would be any serious consequences for the bear in this case given that it was a sow that was surprised by the bicyclist and was defending her cub.

“By this guy’s account, this was absolutely a bear being a bear,” he said. “He stumbled on to a sow with a cub at close quarters.”

via JuneauEmpire.com – Updates » Tuesday, June 15th, 2010 » Anchorage man survives grizzly attack.

(CNN) — A bicyclist riding to work in Anchorage, Alaska, was attacked by a brown bear Tuesday, police said.

Sean Berkey, 45, of Anchorage, was riding his bicycle to his office at the medical center where he works as a pediatric pharmacist. He was crossing a wooden bridge when a young female brown bear with a cub began to charge him, police reported.

Berkey tried to place his bicycle between himself and the bear, but the bear was able to attack him, police said. He suffered an ear laceraton, puncture wounds to his right calf, and several scratches.

via Alaska man survives bear attack – CNN.com.

ANCHORAGE, Alaska – The 2010 bear season is here, and so far the bears are paying the price for encounters with humans in the Anchorage area.

On Friday, an Eagle River homeowner killed a young black bear that sneaked into a chicken coop and killed a bird. This occurred hours after a different bear “mouthed” the leg of a girl at a neighborhood playground near Elmendorf Air Force Base.

The Alaska Department of Fish and Game says so far six young bears have been shot in the municipality of Anchorage – most of them in Eagle River – over roughly the past two weeks.

The attack on the chicken occurred at about 10 p.m. Friday, as George Drummond sat dozing in front of the television at his home. A neighbor banged on his door and told him there was a bear in his coop.

Drummond, 62, looked outside to see a 150-pound black bear eating his favorite chicken, an Araucana named Goldie.

Drummond said he picked up a garden hose, set it on “jet” and sprayed.

“I was squirting it in the head and the face, and it just looked at me,” he said.

He then fired his tiny .25-caliber handgun four times into the ground to scare the animal away. The bear moved toward his neighbor, Drummond said.

“It kind of made an advance towards him. So he gave it a couple shots with the .45,” he said.

Dying, the bear crossed the road where Drummond said he killed it with two more gun shots from the .25.

A ranger also shot a black bear at the Eagle River Nature Center on Friday, said Department of Fish and Game area biologist Greg Sinnott. “It was trying to get in all the doors and couldn't be driven away.”

A black bear also reportedly walked up to four girls at a playground in the Moose Crossing military housing between Elmendorf Air Force Base and Fort Richardson, said Elmendorf Deputy Public Affairs Officer Stephen Lee.

“Three of them, I'm told, hit the ground, to kind of just play dead,” Lee said.

The fourth girl stood and talked to the bear, “Trying to make herself as big as possible to scare the bear away,” he said.

The bear, which looked to be about 3 years old, approached one of the girls who was laying down and “mouthed” her leg, Lee said.

The girl screamed and the bear split, running for the woods.

The girl had a mark on her leg but no puncture wounds.

Military wildlife agents searched for the animal but couldn't find it, Lee said.

Playing dead is normally considered a last resort and isn’t a good idea with all bears, said Valerie Connor, conservation director for the Alaska Center for the Environment.

The theory is if attacked by a black bear, fight back, but curl into a ball and protect your neck from brown bears.

via Fairbanks Daily News-Miner – Alaska bears paying price for human encounters.

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ANCHORAGE, Alaska — A teacher jogging along a rural Alaskan road was killed in an animal attack and authorities say wolves are the chief suspects.

The body of Candice Berner, 32, was found Monday off the road a mile outside the village of Chignik Bay on the Alaska Peninsula, which is about 474 miles southwest of Anchorage.

Authorities said the body had been dragged off the road to the village’s lagoon and was surrounded by wolf tracks.

In an autopsy report Thursday, the Alaska State Medical Examiner listed “multiple injuries due to animal mauling” as the cause of death for Berner, a special education teacher originally from Slippery Rock, Pa., who began working in Alaska in August.

The autopsy could not say which animals, said Col. Audie Holloway, head of the Alaska State Troopers, but wolves are the chief suspect.

“There’s no other carnivores in that area that are out and active,” he said.

Wolves, bears, foxes and other wildlife have disturbed bodies in the Alaska wilderness, but Holloway said the autopsy ruled out other causes that may have killed Berner. Additional tests could tie the death to wolves, Holloway said.

“If we’re able to actually prove which animal, it will be through some kind of DNA analysis or through some expert that can maybe testify or explain how they know that it’s a wolf,” he said.

Troopers have plenty of circumstantial evidence leading them to point the finger at wolves.

“There were wolf tracks all around the body, and drag marks associated with those wolf tracks,” Holloway said.

Tracks indicated more than one wolf was involved.

“From the number of prints at the scene, we’re thinking there probably were, possibly, two, three, maybe four,” Holloway said.

Wolf attacks on humans are rare and there has not been a documented case of a wolf killing a human in Alaska. But concerns over the large predators persist.

In 2007, villagers in the western Eskimo village of Marshall posted sentries at night on the town periphery to keep wolves out after a pack of wolves attacked and killed six sled dogs. A wolf killed by villagers turned out to be rabid.

In Chignik Bay, a community of 105 residents, villagers were already were on alert because of wolves running boldly nearby, said Johnny Lind, president of the village council.

In comments Thursday before the autopsy results were announced, Lind said wolf involvement was apparent.

“It’s obvious. Goodness. It’s obvious,” he said.

Since Tuesday, people were not traveling alone, school children were accompanied to school and armed patrols on snowmobiles were looking for wolves, he said.

“Everybody’s kind of staying close to the village,” he said.

Multiple calls left for the spokeswoman of the Alaska Department of Fish and Game, Jennifer Yuhas, were not returned Thursday.

Most adult male wolves in Alaska weigh 85 to 115 pounds but they occasionally reach 145 pounds, according to the Department of Fish and Game. Females average 5 to 10 pounds lighter than males and rarely weigh more than 110 pounds. Wolves reach adult size by about 1 year of age, and the largest wolves occur where prey is abundant year round.

Rick Luthi, the Lake and Peninsula School District’s chief operating officer, said Berner during her short time in Alaska tried to take in as many experiences as she could. The district distributed a photo of her on a district outing catching crab.

“She wasn’t going to miss anything about living in that area,” he said.

Under 5 feet tall, Berner had boxed and lately had been training for long-distance running.

“She was a gymnast by early training and was in very good physical condition,” Luthi said.

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A FEMALE special education teacher was mauled to death by a wolf while jogging in Alaska, authorities told local media.

The body of 32-year-old Candice Berner, originally from Pennsylvania, was found Monday night off a road leading to the Chignik Lake airstrip, The News Tribune reported.

Police investigating the case believe she was killed in an “animal attack, possibly a wolf attack” after locals reported wolf sightings.

The people who found the woman’s body while returning from clam digging say that a wolf stalked one of them earlier in the day, the Alaska Dispatch reported.

The woman’s death is still under investigation and her body is being taken to Anchorage for an autopsy, police said.

Candice’s father, Bob Berner, told The News Tribune his daughter was a “small and mighty” woman who liked to box, lift weights and run. She was running in training for a race, he said.

Berner was a traveling special education teacher based in Perryville who had just arrived in Chignik to work at the school in the area, said local school officials.

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ANCHORAGE, Alaska (AP) — Karl Wolfe had a half day to hunt for blacktail deer, but the outing ended just 15 minutes after he left his truck.

Hiking in darkness and a steady rain up a steep Sitka slope, Wolfe was attacked Sunday morning by a grizzly bear, which chomped down on his arm and knocked him to the ground.

Wolfe managed to fend the bear off by hitting it with his rifle and firing a round. He escaped relatively unscathed — just two bites that were stapled shut at the Sitka hospital.

Department of Fish and Game biologist Phil Mooney visited the site Monday, looking for clues to what triggered the attack and for signs of a wounded bear.

Wolfe, an experienced hunter, had no way to know he was about to have a bear encounter, Mooney said.

“This bear essentially gave him no warning,” Mooney said Tuesday. “It was very quick.”

Sitka is a community of about 8,600 on Baranof Island. Admiralty, Baranof, and Chichagof islands together are known as the “ABC” islands, sparsely populated with humans, heavily populated with bears that Alaska researchers have found are related more closely to polar bears than to other brown bears.

The attack occurred about 200 feet from a road that passes near Sitka’s old pulp mill and less than 300 yards above Sawmill Creek, where a few residual pink salmon remain and coho salmon are starting to come in.

“Bears have been up on that slope resting, and then they cross the road and fish at a stream below,” Mooney said.

Mooney called the site a “dog hair thicket,” an area overgrown with new hemlock about 20 feet tall but just two inches to four inches in diameter and few branches as the trees compete for sunlight.

“It’s like walking through a forest of toothpicks,” Mooney said.

Visibility is only about 30 to 35 feet even when the sun is out.

“It’s a good place for bears to sit,” Mooney said. They can lie uphill without disclosing their location and listen and look for anything coming at them. They’re not hiding from humans, Mooney said, but from other bears.

Mooney found no evidence that the attacking bear was defending a food cache. He found few tracks and nothing to indicate the presence of a cub.

What he did find was a rock shelf above Wolfe’s path. A mix of fallen trees and root wads had created a canopy and a dry spot about the size of a dining room table. A bear had dug a bed in the needles before Wolfe arrived.

“I’m just guessing, but the bear could have been asleep and didn’t hear him until he was very close,” Mooney said.

Wolfe told the Daily Sitka Sentinel he was “side-hilling” — zigzagging up the mountain because it was so steep. He followed a rough trail wide enough for one person that had been cut in by the Sitka Mountain Rescue team.

The bear needed only about three steps to cover the 20 feet to Wolfe. His backpack’s strap may have deflected the bear’s jaw. The momentum knocked Wolfe to the ground between two trees.

Wolfe swung his rifle around and hit the bear with the butt end. The animal turned away for a moment but still had its ears back, Wolfe said.

“It didn’t go away, it was regrouping,” he told the Sentinel. “It swung around and was coming at me aggressively.”

Wolfe chambered a round into his rifle and fired from hip at close range. He said he didn’t know if he hit the bear, but he didn’t wait to find out.

“I knew I was bleeding a little, and I knew I needed to get out of the woods,” Wolfe said.

He said he reached his truck and drove to the Sitka hospital.

His heavy clothes and the pack may have prevented a more serious injury.

“The bear didn’t hook him in the back in the shoulder blades or the ribs,” Mooney told the AP. “It’s just one of those things. Sometimes you just can’t beat luck.”

Mooney found no blood to indicate the bear had been wounded.

Wolfe didn’t immediately return phone calls Tuesday from The Associated Press.

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2 injured by lightning strike

 

Associated Press – May 27, 2009 11:24 AM ET

ANCHORAGE, Alaska (AP) – Anchorage Fire Department officials say two people were struck by lightning in Arctic Valley between Anchorage and Eagle River.

A man and woman were watching thunderstorms roll in at about 6:30 p.m. Tuesday when they were struck.

The 25-year-old man was knocked unconscious.

When he came to, he saw his 23-year-old companion about 15 feet away, seriously injured.

The man was able to walk out but the woman suffered a back injury and cuts to her legs and had to be carried down. Emergency officials brought in all-terrain vehicles to aid in the rescue.

The man’s shoes were blown open and melted. He suffered cuts to head and hands.