Kodiak bears are beating a path to the junk food in the island dump
KODIAK ISLAND, Alaska -- Kodiak Island, Alaska, draws tourists from around the world hoping to glimpse one of the planet's most impressive apex predators. But lately, the island's namesake brown bears have been gathering at a decidedly less scenic destination: the dump. The bears have repeatedly breached the Kodiak landfill despite increasingly expensive efforts to keep them out, prompting state environmental regulators to threaten hefty fines and state wildlife biologists to warn that ending the influx is going to be expensive and complicated. The omnivores, the biologists say, can't simply be pointed toward the island's healthier offerings -- like salmon, berries or deer -- or killed. The bears? They just want to eat junk food. "Would you rather have a Snickers bar or a piece of broccoli?" asked Larry Van Daele, a retired Alaska state wildlife biologist. "They're not so different than people in that way." Coexistence between animals and humans is a hard-won fact of life on the Kodiak Archipelago, a mountainous, wind-swept chain of islands in the Gulf of Alaska that is home to as many as 3,500 Kodiak brown bears, a cousin to Russian Kamchatkas and North American grizzlies that can weigh up to 1,400 pounds. Bears are considered part of daily life on the island. Residents are encouraged to secure garbage and schoolchildren learn how to avoid confrontations with animals that have adapted well to living alongside them. Perhaps too well. "People who have lived here their entire lives will tell you that they had never seen a bear in town until about 10 or 15 years ago; they didn't need to come eat garbage," said Jared Griffin, the borough's mayor. "But something has changed, and they've become much more of a nuisance." Bears have wandered onto the landfill since it opened in the 1960s. Recently -- perhaps because smaller salmon runs and berry harvests have nudged them toward the enticing smell of human garbage -- they found holes in the 2-mile fence around the dump and essentially became adorable squatters. Whenever borough workers patched the fence, these smarter-than-the-average bears dug under, climbed over or barreled through. Griffin said landfill crews once saw a sow throw a cub into the fence to see if it was electrified. "There is no animal on earth like a Kodiak bear," he said. Several young bears have spent their entire lives at the landfill. It's "all they've ever known," said Nathan Svoboda, a state biologist in Kodiak. Last summer, cruise ships sent passengers hoping to see bears to the dump. "Bear jams" formed on the road by the landfill at dusk, when the animals emerged from hiding to dine on the garbage. "It's embarrassing," said Aimee Williams, the borough manager. On a recent afternoon, she explained that bears sometimes played in a stormwater retention pond as she drove along the landfill's main road. She rounded a corner and, sure enough, two bears were bathing in the shallow brown pool. Williams couldn't help but gush. "They shouldn't be here, but they're also so cute," she said. "Look at their little heads!" Fifty yards away, a landfill employee had also paused to watch. He waited to resume working until the bears shook themselves off and wandered into the foliage. Williams approved. Ex // Top Stories She’s a longtime Democratic officeholder, but she sounds like a Main Street conservative in her campaign for the state’s No. 2 job This week, The City will honor the life and legacy of Michael Tilson Thomas, hold a free Golden Gate Park music festival, and adapt an Alfred Hitchcock film "Never turn your back on a bear," she advised. The spectacle is dangerous, especially for the bears. Svoboda has found solid balls of garbage in bear stomachs during necropsies, the result of a high-calorie, low-nutrition dumpster diet. "They can essentially starve to death," he said. Tranquilizing and moving the bears doesn't work. Two years ago, wildlife biologists flew a mother bear and cubs that had been raiding Kodiak garbage cans 40 air miles from the landfill to another island. Twenty-eight days later, they were back. "Not just back in Kodiak," Svoboda said, "back to the same exact dumpster." Larger and stockier than grizzlies, Kodiak's bears were isolated on the island at the end of the Ice Age. For much of the 20th century, ranchers considered them a danger to livestock, an attitude summed up by a blunt local maxim: "If it's brown, it's down." Attitudes evolved, and federal authorities eventually set aside nearly two-thirds of Kodiak Island as a national wildlife refuge. Today, Kodiak bear tourism draws thousands, particularly in late summer and early fall when salmon crowd creeks and rivers, their fins cutting through the shallow water as they return to spawn and die -- in some cases, by bears fattening themselves up for winter. The borough has erected mesh wind guards around the landfill's open cell to dissuade people from stopping to watch. It plans to hire an overnight guard and has installed motion-sensitive noisemakers to haze the bears with earsplitting sounds. Borough leaders plan to move the electric fence, which dips deep into stands of spruce and alder, closer to the garbage, giving bears fewer places to hide and workers better sightlines. The idea is to make it as hard as possible for the bears to reach the garbage without busting the borough's already-strained budget or driving up already-steep landfill rates. Wildlife biologists say they expect a few bears will refuse to move and need to be killed. That will be poignant in a place where bears have gone from being hunted as pests to symbols of the island itself. "These bears are sacred. If you don't see God in them, you're not looking," said Leya-Anne Johnson, a Kodiak resident. Most evenings, Johnson parks her car on Monashka Bay Road outside the landfill and talks to the magpies and bald eagles chattering overhead. "You know there's a bear coming, don't you?" she asked them one recent night. "You warning your friends?" A moment later, a bear trudged out of the trees and crossed the road, stopping 15 feet or so in front of her car to sniff the ground. He was close enough to smell, like a wet dog rolled in garbage, and not in any hurry. "They've come up to the car before," Johnson said in a whisper. "They don't care we're here as long as we mind our own business." The bear glanced at the car, pawed the ground again, then headed toward the landfill for dinner.