Wildlife

Juneau’s resident black bears break into trash cans every year. In most cases, it just creates a mess, but sometimes those bears end up dead.

So far this year, the Alaska Department of Fish and Game has euthanized five black bears downtown, including two at once back in July.

Regional Management Coordinator Roy Churchwell said this year was not an especially active year for trash bears across the whole of Juneau, because there was plenty of natural food available. 

“I don’t actually think it is a bad year, I think some years have been much worse,” Churchwell said. “There were decent berries out and there were fish available for bears.”

That’s compared to years like 2018, 2019 and 2020, when a lack of natural foods and a bear baby boom drove up bear activity. 

But Churchwell said this year, there was a concentration of problem bears downtown, and commander Jeremy Weske with the Juneau Police Department said they received more than 160 bear-related calls this year. 

Trash management in Juneau is governed under a city ordinance, which the police enforce. It lays out rules about when garbage can be put out on the curb and what kinds of cans it can be stored in. 

It also doles out fines when trash attracts bears. Even so, the local trash rules are frequently violated, and Weske said there are repeat offenders who earn several fines in a single year.

“I think in general, people respond well to education and maybe a ticket or two if it gets that far,” Weske said. “But there will be people who don’t respond well to that and we have to have a different strategy for that.”

The ordinance calls for a $50 fine for the first trash violation, $100 for the second and $300 for a third within the span of two years. 

The ordinance dates back to 2004. In the year before it went into effect, 23 bears were killed.  So Churchwell said it’s helped, but there’s room for improvement. 

“When the original ordinance went into effect, there was a decline in human-bear conflicts and bears getting into trash. And so that’s a good thing,” Churchwell said. “We just want to build on that and create a situation where there’s even less human bear conflict, if possible.”

Earlier this year, the Department of Fish and Game commissioned a pair of wildlife researchers from the University of Fairbanks to study Juneau’s human-bear interactions, with the hope of saving more bear lives on the future.

But in the short-term, trash management is going to be especially important over the next month. Right now, bears are going through a phase called hyperphagia as they get ready for hibernation. 

“It’s a time when they’re just really trying to put on weight before they go into the den,” Churchwell said. “So they’re really looking for food at this time.”

Those hungry bears will be eyeing trash. Juneau residents should only store trash in a bear-proof can, and trash should be stored inside — or in a garage or shed — until  trash pick-up day.

The Alaska Zoo in Anchorage has a new addition: an endangered Amur tiger named Natasha.

Dozens of volunteers and staff members greeted Natasha at the zoo Wednesday, eagerly watching her as she strolled her new space.

“We’re really excited,” Sam Lavin, curator for the zoo, said. “It did us all some good to see tigers back in the exhibit. We’re just so, so happy.”

Natasha is 11 years old, about 300 pounds and was born at the Sedgwick County Zoo in Kansas.

She arrived in Anchorage on a FedEx flight, and is the only tiger at the zoo after Kunali died in March of complications from old age. His brother, Korol, died in 2023. Both tigers lived to age 19.

Amur tigers are the largest cat species in the world. And in the wild, they’re only found in Russia and China, so they’re adapted to cold temperatures and harsh climate conditions. Lavin said she expects Natasha to thrive in Alaska.

“We couldn’t have another kind of tiger and have them be comfortable here,” she said.

It takes a lot of planning to get an endangered animal to the Alaska Zoo.

Natasha is part of an endangered species breeding program within zoos, known as a species survival plan, which aims to support wild tiger conservation efforts and raise awareness about the species.

She was moved because she can’t contribute to the Kansas zoo’s breeding efforts. In 2019, Natasha was spayed while undergoing a surgery to remove a mass. The Alaska Zoo isn’t a breeding facility.

Four other species are in survival programs at the Alaska Zoo: polar bears, lynx, snow leopards and wolverines.

Lavin said, so far, Natasha is curious about her new home.

“She’s moving slow and obviously checking everything out, but she’s interested,” Lavin said. “We’ve been told she’s quite athletic.”

It’s estimated that between 350 and 450 Amur tigers remain in the wild.

The winner of this year’s Fat Bear Week is a mama bear whose cub was killed by her opponent — a bear she faced off against in last year’s voting.

Out of more than a million votes, 128 Grazer won over 32 Chunk, a male bear weighing more than 1,200 pounds. Grazer received more than 70,000 votes, compared to Chunk’s approximately 30,000.

Grazer also won the contest last year, defeating Chunk in 2023.

In July, two of Grazer’s cubs fell over a waterfall in Alaska’s Katmai National Park. They were carried downstream near Chunk, “the most dominant bear on the river,” according to explore.org, the organization that documents the bears using live cameras.

Chunk attacked the cubs and one died from its injuries. The surviving cub was a contestant for the 2024 Fat Bear Junior.

The annual Fat Bear Week honors bears that have sufficiently bulked up in the months before entering hibernation. This year’s voting was delayed a week after one of the contestant animals was fatally mauled by a rival bear.

Grazer was brought to Brooks River in Katmai as a cub in 2005.

Two Juneau residents hunting on Admiralty Island at the end of September ended up face-to-face with a brown bear. Luckily, everyone walked away from the encounter – but not without some battle scars.

Amanda Compton and her friend Nicholas Orr have been hunting together for years. Last weekend, they took Compton’s boat to Glass Peninsula on Admiralty Island, across from Port Snettisham.

A few miles into their deer hunt, they were walking single file through open muskeg with Compton in the front. As they stopped by a grove of trees, a brown bear rushed them without warning.

“I would say it was two seconds of seeing the bear, seeing and registering that it was charging full force for me, and also determining that I had no time to pull a shot off,” Compton said.

The bear was on Compton immediately. It grabbed her head in its jaws and shook her for several seconds – it’s hard to know exactly how long it lasted.

“I was lucid through the whole thing,” she said. “There just wasn’t enough time to be terrorized.”

Then, just as quickly, the bear released her and moved away. But it didn’t leave. It watched from several yards away. Orr had fallen to the ground when the bear charged, but managed to get back to his feet.

“By the time I got one loaded, the bear turned around and I shot and then it ran off,” Orr said.

He’s not sure if he hit the bear, but he’s convinced he was the original target when it started charging. Compton was closer.

When the bear ran back into the trees, they noticed a cub for the first time.

Meanwhile, Compton’s head was bleeding – a lot. Her hand was also injured. But she could walk and her mind felt pretty clear. She just couldn’t believe she was alive.

“I just didn’t anticipate that having a large brown bear on me would do anything but the most extensive damage,” she said.

Though they had a radio, Compton and Orr decided to hike back out to the boat instead of call for help. In retrospect, she admits that may not have been the best call.

“I didn’t know the extent of her injuries at the time,” Orr said. “I just saw the superficial one up front, and I was like, ‘Well, maybe you got lucky on this one, and it just got your hand.’ But no, it got her more than that.”

After more than an hour, they made it back to her boat. On their way back to town, the Coast Guard showed up for an unannounced vessel inspection. They radioed their situation and the Coast Guard vessel ended up accompanying them to Douglas Boat Harbor, where a friend met them to take Compton to the hospital.

At Bartlett Regional Hospital, doctors cleaned and stapled gashes in Compton’s scalp. She also received a few stitches, an x-ray and a CT scan. Her hand is in a brace, and she doesn’t have full use of it yet.

“I’ve got my Halloween costume put together early,” Compton said. “I look like a hybrid between Chucky and Frankenstein right now.”

The sow also left something behind – a shard of tooth was embedded in Compton’s scalp.

Even with her injuries, she knows she’s lucky.

“It is more amazing to me that it literally gnawed on my head and used its paws and teeth to the point where it got a piece of tooth stuck in my head. And I, with the exception of a few staples, don’t have much to show for it,” she said.

This wasn’t Compton and Orr’s first close encounter with a bear on Admiralty. A few years ago, they were deer hunting in early November. Usually by that time of year, most of the bears are settling down for winter. But Compton says it had been a bad salmon and berry year.

But on that day, a predatory bear approached them, coming within 10 feet before Compton fired a warning shot to scare it off. 

Even as an active outdoorsman, she can’t believe she’s had two extremely close calls with brown bears in the span of a few years.

“There are people that hunt way harder than I do that have been in Juneau for eight times as long as I have, and have never had something remotely close to this happen,” she said.

Still, both Compton and Orr feel like there’s nothing they could have done to avoid the situation. Alaska Department of Fish and Game Wildlife Biologist Carl Koch agrees.

“They’re doing what hunters do, and they surprised a bear,” he said. “It sounded like [it was] very close by, too close to to use a deterrent. So, yeah, I’m not judging anything that they did.”

Koch said Admiralty is home to some of the highest concentrations of brown bears in the world. And this time of year is when they’re especially active as they prepare for hibernation.

“If you think about all the hunters that are out on the landscape and how uncommon something like this is, it’s reassuring,” Koch said.

In this case, the bear was able to walk away from the encounter. But Koch said when a bear is killed, Alaska Wildlife Troopers will investigate to make sure the death was legal. The people involved are required to skin the animal and provide the hide and skull to Fish and Game for inspection.

Orr said their encounter comes down to bad luck. He’s been to that area and many others on Admiralty countless times without issue.

“If we had gone to the lower part of the muskeg instead of the middle, we would have walked right by it,” he said.

Orr said he’ll be back out hunting later this fall. For now, Compton isn’t in any rush to head back into brown bear territory.

“I feel like I’ve had my fair share of brown bear encounters, and I really — I don’t need anymore,” she said. “Am I going to take up knitting and like, I don’t know, painting rocks? Probably not.”

It’s going to take some time for her to heal and to process what happened. She still has the tiny shard of tooth. Maybe, she says, she’ll put it in a locket.

This story has been updated.

Over the last several months, brown bears have been putting on pounds at Katmai National Park and Preserve. The culmination of their efforts is celebrated during Fat Bear Week, where 12 bears are pitted against each other in a bracket-style competition for the adoration of online voters.

The annual observance of Katmai’s bears has exploded in popularity since it started almost a decade ago. Last year, Fat Bear Week saw its highest voter turnout to date, with over 1.3 million participants from over 100 countries.

“It’s an opportunity to share their stories with people around the world, and also to celebrate Katmai’s robust ecosystem,” said Mike Fitz, resident naturalist with Explore.org, a website that livestreams the bears at Katmai’s Brooks River Falls.

Contenders for this year’s Fat Bear Week were announced Tuesday after an incident earlier this week where a large bear killed a rival bear near Brooks River Falls.

In the running are several fan favorites. One of them is Grazer, last year’s Fat Bear Week winner. She grew in popularity because of her dominant nature and hefty stature, often displacing male bears in the park.

This year, though, Fitz says Grazer’s focused more of her energy on raising a new litter of cubs.

“She’s probably not as fat this year, but there’s a lot of stories associated with her that we can admire,” Fitz said. “Her fearlessness, her dedication to her cubs, her work ethic. Bears are single moms, they don’t get any help from the male bears in raising cubs.”

There’s also Chunk, the most dominant bear on the river this year. He packs a punch at about 1,200 pounds. Yet, he’s never won Fat Bear Week.

A number of newcomers are also on this year’s docket. Bucky isn’t the oldest bear, but he’s certainly one of the smartest. He’s discovered a fishing spot all his own – under the cascade of Brooks River Falls. No bear has consistently fished there before.

And Fitz says Bear number 519, a teenager who just split from her mother, is also competing.

“It’s one of those young bears that’s on its own and trying to figure out the world for the first time, and that could be a real challenge for some of these younger bears,” he said.

For the first time, longtime favorite and four-time Fat Bear Week champion, Otis, is not in the running. He’s one of the oldest bears in the park, but has not returned to Brooks River Falls this summer. Fitz suspects he may have passed away.

Although the annual celebration is dubbed Fat Bear Week, the fat bears shouldn’t get all the credit. Fitz says Katmai’s sockeye salmon runs are the healthiest and largest in the world. Without them, there’d be no Fat Bear Week.

“Brooks River is part of the Bristol Bay salmon run, which is one of the last, probably the last great salmon run left on earth,” Fitz said. “To be able to share that story of the sustainable fishery, of Bristol Bay, and what salmon can bring to ecosystems, whatever they happen to be, is a powerful message to bring to the world.”

Fitz says the much-anticipated event isn’t all about who wins, but rather, showcasing the diverse stories of the bears in the running. He says organizers are always looking for new and unique brown bear stories to tell that will resonate with online fans.

“This is an event, an election where all of the bears are worthy of the vote,” Fitz said, “Despite what you see in local and national politics, and you may be apathetic or maybe not like the candidates at your disposal, I think every Fat Bear Week bear is certainly worthy of the vote.”

Online voting for Fat Bear Week opened Wednesday and runs through Tuesday. You can vote for your favorite fat bear and follow bracket results at Explore.org.

In a shocking live broadcast, one of Katmai National Park’s celebrity bears killed another — just before the start of Fat Bear Week. Viewers from all over the world watched via the live nature cam network explore.org.

The attack took place at the mouth of the Brooks River at roughly 9:30 a.m. Monday. Video footage shows bear number 469 attacking bear number 402 and apparently drowning her after a struggle. He then dragged her body to shore, presumably to eat.

Mike Fitz, a naturalist with explore.org, moderated a livestreamed discussion after the attack.

“402 was a beloved bear by each and every one of us,” he said during the discussion. “Honestly, I think we are all at a little bit of a loss of words.”

Fitz doesn’t know why bear 469 attacked, expending valuable energy. But he said it appeared to be a predatory act.

“I don’t think his behavior is abnormal. It’s well within the spectrum of what we can expect bears to do to one another,” Fitz said. “But how common is this sort of thing? It’s not something that we expect to see.”

The discussion attracted nearly 26,000 viewers. They flooded the comments section with messages like “hugs to all with broken hearts” and “so grateful for the time 402 spent with us.”

Bear 402 was the mother of eight litters and a favorite of bear cam fans going into Fat Bear Week. The annual competition celebrates the bears’ success in fattening up for hibernation. Fans vote for the bear that’s put on the most weight over the summer.

402’s death delayed the release of the Fat Bear Week bracket, which would have come out Monday. The release was rescheduled for 11 p.m. Tuesday.