Keith
Member
Poor Timmy Treadwell (the animal rights activist who recently got ate by one of his friends) is becoming a joke around Alaska, while being enshrined as a hero in California... Go figure!
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Don't feed the bears with trash
MIKE DOOGAN
COMMENT
(Published: October 28, 2003)
When I was growing up in Fairbanks, bears didn't wander into town much. Moose either. It's as if they knew that Fairbanksans had a word for moose and bears that showed up in town.
The word for moose was "dinner."
The word for bears was "rug."
Oh, you could eat bear if you wanted, but it is usually tasted strong and ate tough. For most people bear meat was a last resort food, along with rhubarb and freezer-burned fish.
Animals did show up once in a while, it's true. A moose chased my little brother down our street one day and straight up a big birch tree. While the moose stalked around beneath the tree, my brother proclaimed at the top of his lungs that he'd done nothing to provoke the moose, most certainly not throwing rocks at it. Uh-uh. Nope. No way. Not a single rock. Never.
The moose finally lost interest and walked off down the street where, a couple of blocks along, it collapsed and died from a .30-caliber heart attack.
Maybe the heart-attack-inducer needed the meat. Or maybe he just wanted to keep the moose out of his garden. Moose were notorious raiders, and vegetable gardeners tried all sorts of moose repellent: soap, daffodils, chicken-wire fences. One old-timer even claimed to use wolf urine, although he was never very clear about how he acquired the substance.
Of course, nothing was quite as effective as bullets. The game wardens of the time tended to look the other way when these violations of hunting season occurred, under the theory that any moose that walked into a town was trying to commit suicide, anyway.
Bears were even rarer in town than moose. Most of them didn't get any farther than the city dump. Part of the time I lived in Fairbanks, there was nothing to tempt them away, since Fairbanksans didn't put their garbage at the curb. For one thing, there were no curbs. For another, there was no garbage collection. Even after there was, I guess the smell of the dump was just too appealing.
The occasional bear that did make it into town, usually a young black bear, would cause a ruckus. There'd be radio reports and police cars coming and going until, finally, some old-timer caught the bruin trying to break into his cache and filled it full of lead.
Both the law and society are different now. We let the moose wander around our streets like they are sacred beasts. And you can actually get into legal trouble for shooting a bear in a neighborhood. Changing attitudes toward wildlife also mean there's no bear hunting in the park behind town, and in the warfare that is part of a bear's daily life, the losers frequently get pushed down into the city.
So you'd think the residents of the Eagle Crossing subdivision would be more careful about leaving their garbage out to attract bears. But, apparently, they aren't.
Eagle Crossing is a new subdivision near the banks of Eagle River. According to Fish and Game biologist Rick Sinnott, a brown bear is using it as a smorgasbord because residents are putting their garbage out days before it is to be collected.
You don't have to be a bear expert to know that, particularly in built-up areas, bears use river and creek banks as ways to get around. Or to know that bears like garbage, particularly before the fish and berries arrive in spring and after they play out in fall. People who leave their garbage out are just baiting bears.
Why do they do it? Most likely they've got what I've come to think of as Timothy Treadwell disease: They just don't respect bears. Respect in this case is recognizing that bears are smart wild animals who always have the potential to be dangerous. You don't try to make pets of them, and you don't act like you're living in Malibu when you're living in bear country.
The rules aren't complicated or hard to follow. Don't leave food around, even if you call it garbage. If you see a bear, steer clear. If it hangs around anyway, call Fish and Game.
If everybody's lucky, this episode will end with the bear taking off to hibernate. If they aren't lucky, far and away the most likely result is a dead bear. State statistics are sketchy, but they indicate that man-bear encounters have resulted in thousands and thousands of dead bears for every dead human.
And if everybody is really, really unlucky, some kid on his way to school is going to run into the bear with grisly results. Nobody wants that. So pay attention, folks. There are bears in the neighborhood.
www.adn.com
Don't feed the bears with trash
MIKE DOOGAN
COMMENT
(Published: October 28, 2003)
When I was growing up in Fairbanks, bears didn't wander into town much. Moose either. It's as if they knew that Fairbanksans had a word for moose and bears that showed up in town.
The word for moose was "dinner."
The word for bears was "rug."
Oh, you could eat bear if you wanted, but it is usually tasted strong and ate tough. For most people bear meat was a last resort food, along with rhubarb and freezer-burned fish.
Animals did show up once in a while, it's true. A moose chased my little brother down our street one day and straight up a big birch tree. While the moose stalked around beneath the tree, my brother proclaimed at the top of his lungs that he'd done nothing to provoke the moose, most certainly not throwing rocks at it. Uh-uh. Nope. No way. Not a single rock. Never.
The moose finally lost interest and walked off down the street where, a couple of blocks along, it collapsed and died from a .30-caliber heart attack.
Maybe the heart-attack-inducer needed the meat. Or maybe he just wanted to keep the moose out of his garden. Moose were notorious raiders, and vegetable gardeners tried all sorts of moose repellent: soap, daffodils, chicken-wire fences. One old-timer even claimed to use wolf urine, although he was never very clear about how he acquired the substance.
Of course, nothing was quite as effective as bullets. The game wardens of the time tended to look the other way when these violations of hunting season occurred, under the theory that any moose that walked into a town was trying to commit suicide, anyway.
Bears were even rarer in town than moose. Most of them didn't get any farther than the city dump. Part of the time I lived in Fairbanks, there was nothing to tempt them away, since Fairbanksans didn't put their garbage at the curb. For one thing, there were no curbs. For another, there was no garbage collection. Even after there was, I guess the smell of the dump was just too appealing.
The occasional bear that did make it into town, usually a young black bear, would cause a ruckus. There'd be radio reports and police cars coming and going until, finally, some old-timer caught the bruin trying to break into his cache and filled it full of lead.
Both the law and society are different now. We let the moose wander around our streets like they are sacred beasts. And you can actually get into legal trouble for shooting a bear in a neighborhood. Changing attitudes toward wildlife also mean there's no bear hunting in the park behind town, and in the warfare that is part of a bear's daily life, the losers frequently get pushed down into the city.
So you'd think the residents of the Eagle Crossing subdivision would be more careful about leaving their garbage out to attract bears. But, apparently, they aren't.
Eagle Crossing is a new subdivision near the banks of Eagle River. According to Fish and Game biologist Rick Sinnott, a brown bear is using it as a smorgasbord because residents are putting their garbage out days before it is to be collected.
You don't have to be a bear expert to know that, particularly in built-up areas, bears use river and creek banks as ways to get around. Or to know that bears like garbage, particularly before the fish and berries arrive in spring and after they play out in fall. People who leave their garbage out are just baiting bears.
Why do they do it? Most likely they've got what I've come to think of as Timothy Treadwell disease: They just don't respect bears. Respect in this case is recognizing that bears are smart wild animals who always have the potential to be dangerous. You don't try to make pets of them, and you don't act like you're living in Malibu when you're living in bear country.
The rules aren't complicated or hard to follow. Don't leave food around, even if you call it garbage. If you see a bear, steer clear. If it hangs around anyway, call Fish and Game.
If everybody's lucky, this episode will end with the bear taking off to hibernate. If they aren't lucky, far and away the most likely result is a dead bear. State statistics are sketchy, but they indicate that man-bear encounters have resulted in thousands and thousands of dead bears for every dead human.
And if everybody is really, really unlucky, some kid on his way to school is going to run into the bear with grisly results. Nobody wants that. So pay attention, folks. There are bears in the neighborhood.
