Bear break-ins continue in Haines

Bears continue to break into homes and buildings in Haines. That’s despite law enforcement and private citizens shooting seventeen of them this season.

Employees at both hardware stores in Haines say they get calls about electric fencing every day—it’s a popular bear deterrent.

Tom Andreissen works at one of them, and he says he’s sold a lot of them this year.

“Our supply warehouse in Washington state did not have enough to satisfy our demand. And so I went directly to the… manufacturer of  this stuff and just ordered cases of everything and got well stocked up,” he said.

The run on electric fencing isn’t the only demand this season’s uptick in bear activity has elicited.

“The last couple of weeks especially we’ve seen people coming in to repair storage shed doors that have been pushed in, greenhouses that have been demolished,” said Andreissen.

Owner Chip Lende says the local hardware store should just be part of a solution.

“Once once there’s been damage at a at a site—at a house at a business— you know, significant damage—maybe there should be someone in the borough government, or Fish and Game for that matter, that could come to a site and prescribe some sort of mitigation, bear fence or this or that,” he said.

“Not just looking for an attractant, but how do we deal with it?”

That’s proven a difficult question to answer. The police have cited households with bear attractants. The dump has secured its premises. Law enforcement and private citizens have shot seventeen bears this season, according to State Wildlife Troopers. And even after four bears were dispatched just last week, more keep coming.

“Almost every night we get like one or two bears that push in a garage door or  something like that,” said Haines’ State Wildlife Trooper Colin Nemec. He has been  at his post since March—and he’s the only trooper from Skagway to Juneau. He said this level of activity is unprecedented. He started keeping a tally of the bear incidents on a whiteboard in his office.

“Bears entering property, property damage, and then charging incidents. We’ve had like three calls of people being charged or brushed by a bear. Some of them have been out the road, like 26 mile, but there was one in down Mud Bay,” he said.

While we spoke, a citizen who shot a bear in defense of their property called for advice. For the curious: ADF&G only wants the head. Pelts aren’t valuable until they get thick in the fall. And the department doesn’t consider brown bear meat fit for human consumption.

Nemec has had to dispatch more bears in the last few months than his predecessor Trooper Trent Chwialkowski did in years at the same post.

There’s twenty tally marks on Nemec’s white board. That 20 calls for property damage, house entry, and bear charges… in a week.

“This has kind of been unprecedented throughout Alaska this year. The bears have been just kind of abnormally active in towns,” Nemec said.

He said he doesn’t expect this kind of behavior until the fall, when berries and salmon dwindle.

“That’s usually when the bear starts to get kind of hangry.  I guess that’s the best way I can explain right there: the Bears are hangry.”

Local Fish and Game biologists are out collaring bears and examining scat near Glacier Point. They’re halfway through a six year bear research project. They say the bears they see are eating berries and salmon, but the tally on Nemec’s whiteboard keeps going up.

 

This post has been updated. State Trooper Colin Nemec says the number of bears shot in the Haines area is now seventeen.