November 6, 1999 Anchorage Daily News article by : Bear aggression puzzles experts EVAN R. STEINHAUSER [and]  Stephen Herrero is a respected expert on bear behavior. BEARS: Biologist say reason for rash of recent attacks aren't clear.

Just days after separate Kodiak Island brown bear attacks left one man dead and another seriously injured, renowned bear biologist Stephen Herrero was in Anchorage to give Alaska ecologists bad news from Western Canada:

Maulings and deaths are on the upswing, and no one knows why, said the author of "Bear Attacks: Their Causes and Avoidance."

A University of Calgary believes the reason behind the upswing may be as simple as more humans invading bear country. But he hasn't ruled out the possibility that some bears may be getting more aggressive, too.

Persecuted across North America for centuries and driven to extinction in much of the Lower 48, the remnant brown bear populations of Canada and Alaska are now treated with greater tolerance, he said.

Whether that changes how bears view people is hard to say, said Herrero, who confessed it's a stretch for any-one to discern the psychology of bears.

However, what's documented in British Columbia is disconcerting. The number of bear inflicted injuries "increases by decade," Herrero said. "What does that mean?"  he added. "That's the real question."

Alaska biologists think the same thing is happening here, but the data is scant. No state or federal agency investigates or tracks Alaska bear attacks. Tom Smith, an ecologist at the Alaska Biological Science Center, has been trying to compile a history, but funding has been hard to find.

There have, however, been a rash of notable attacks in Alaska the past 18 months.

A brown bear woken from its den by a seismic crew on the Kenai Peninsula attacked and killed a worker there last winter.

Another brown bear killed a hiker near Sterling early this summer.

Then came the recent attacks in the Kodiak Archipelago. Sixty-eight-year-old Gene Moe of Anchorage was attacked on Raspberry Is-land, about 35 miles northwest of Kodiak, while he was cleaning a Sitka blacktail deer. He survived only because he was able to fight the bear off with a hunting knife, recover his rifle and kill the animal.

A couple of days later, 53-year-old Anchorage hunter Ned Rasmusson was attacked and killed on Uganik Island, about 50 miles northwest of the city of Kodiak.

Alaska Department of Fish and Game biologists have said they think Kodiak bears may be more aggressive than normal this year because of a poor berry crop, weak salmon runs in some areas and a 30 percent or greater drop in the Sitka Blacktail deer population due to a rough winter last year.

Simply put, they speculate the bears could be confronting deer hunters in an effort to get food.

Herrero, one of North America's foremost experts on brown and black bear behavior, said that is unlikely, but not impossible. Bears, he said, usually survive periods of food shortage without conflicts with humans, but he noted that problems with black bears occurred in the American Southwest after several years of drought.

CAG Comment

USFWS might do well to contact some bear behaviorists before they exploit grizzly bears by reintroducting them into the Selway Bitterroot Wilderness.

There is significant evidence that an adequate habitat for grizzly bears does not exist in the wilderness and these animals, like those in Alaska on short rations, will come out into populated areas looking for food producting bear/human conflicts which in turn causes human/ENDANGERED SPECIES ACT conflicts, the worse kind of slavery.

End CAG Comment

Studies done at McNeil River in Alaska have indicated that in years of weak salmon runs, male bears become less tolerant of competition for fish and essentially take over the prime fishing areas. That means sows with cubs are under increased stress to find something to eat.

Both Kodiak maulings appear to involve sows with cubs. The bear that attacked Moe, in particular, seems to have been after the deer he had killed. Still, Herrero said, it's tough to speculate on any attack because of the wide range in behavior and personality among individual bears.

On a larger scale, he added, humans remain more of a threat to bears than bears are to humans. Humans have driven bears to extinction on much of their historic range and threaten them elsewhere.

Herrero, in fact, is in Anchorage to consult on the problems now facing the Kenai Peninsula's small and isolated brown bear population. He is the keynote speaker for the Alaska Bear Festival which starts at 10 a.m. today at the Loussac Library. His 2 p.m. speech is titled "Bears and People: The Art and Science of Coexistence."

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