2020 was a difficult year for bears in the Upper Lynn Canal. Small fish runs and a stunted berry crop combined to create a lean year for the species. Fish and Game Wildlife Research Biologist Anthony Crupi said although he didn’t observe any starving bears, they did not put on much fat until very late in the season, well after they should have built up some reserves. He also noted that some bears resorted to cannibalism, which isn’t common among bears.

The lack of food pushed many bears to search in or near human habitations, breaking into cars, homes and garbage sheds. The humans in turn resorted to shooting the bears in high numbers. Fish and Game  Wildlife Management Biologist Carl Koch says he counted 49 bears killed by humans in 2020, only 19 of which were hunted. Two were hit by cars, and the remainder were shot in defense of property, or illegally. Many of these were females of breeding age. This had serious implications for the sustainability of the population.

Here is Koch:

“Brown bears have a slow reproduction, they don’t give birth until they are age five, and cubs stay with them for three, sometimes four summers before they are loose, so when you have a loss in the population or a decline like that, which we think, I believe we estimated at 16 to 20 percent of the total population, it takes some time to recover.”

The effects of so many kills on the remaining population are manyfold. On the one hand it may relieve stress as less bears are competing for food, on the other, especially if some of the dominant bears were removed, the bears have to redefine their pecking order. And some black bears may move into areas that were previously monopolized by the more dominant brown bears.

To allow the population to rebound, in early 2021 the Department of Fish and Game has put in place a recovery plan. Koch explains :

“For approximately five years, limiting  the harvest to five bears in a calendar year, and  no more than two total females being killed by any cause, and no more than seven brown bears total by any cause.”

This means that if two females got killed, the bear hunting season would shut down immediately.

The plan has been successfully implemented.

“So we are at eight this year, which means we exceeded our target of seven, luckily only one of them is a female”

Hunters are always encouraged to avoid shooting females. As part of issuing a permit,  Fish and Game requires hunters to watch a video that teaches how to differentiate the sexes.

“Usually, brown bear hunters are looking for a trophy, males that will have a big blocky head, their ears will look almost too small, they are very small tight against the read, wide space between the ears, and the muzzle looks  kind of short, and then the legs can be very thick, even the lower legs, especially when they put some weight on, but even beforehand those adult males are just clearly larger than the females.”

To further address the issue, a bear task force was formed in Haines, and many of its recommendations were implemented:

“The landfill has taken great strides, they have put an electric fence around the whole perimeter, they have upgraded the dumpsters to be far more bear resistant, the borough assembly changed the ordinance to be the most conscientious ordinance possibly in the whole state for reducing access to unsecured human attractant, they started asking folks to secure chicken coops, and do a good job with their garbage, and the police force has done some education and enforcement. Fish and Game did some education and helped with a lot of advice, we lent out electric fences. The Takshanuk watershed council has a fruit tree program where they will volunteer and pick people’s fruits for them, the museum did a grant for electric fences, so, I really want to thank the community.”

These efforts are paying off. Here Anthony Crupi is summarizing trends in the bear population he has identified:

“This summer we were able to monitor sixteen cubs from twenty different adult females Essentially the things that we are looking at when we chrome to model the population is the number of cubs per adult female, and the percentage of females that actually have cubs. And those numbers have slowly started to regain over the last two years. So in 2020 and 2021, the number of cubs per female was only about one and a half. Now we are back up to an average of about two cubs per adult females, over the last four years of the study, we were able to find out that about 56 percent of adult females don’t have cubs in a given year, about ten percent would have one cub, about twenty percent would have two cubs, and another eight percent or so have three cubs. When we look at this long term data set where we tracked over one hundred female adult bears over the last four years, we’ve really been able to see some positive gains. So slowly over time this population will be able to rebuild to be a sustainable population that can support all of the interests that people have both culturally and economically and socially when it comes to people’s interactions with brown bears.”