Bullets Or Binoculars? Sightseers, Shooters Track Alaska Bears

Alaska grizzly bears are wanted, dead and alive. This is creating a problem, wildlife officials say.

The long-established sport of hunting grizzlies - better known as brown bears in Alaska - could bolster the state’s economy by about $20 million a year. But a fledgling bear-viewing industry already exceeds that economic punch, according to a nearly completed study by the Alaska Fish and Game Department.

The study is giving wildlife managers some fat to chew and leaving bear hunters - and possibly even anglers - wondering whether they’ll be spit out of future bear management decisions. Fishing boat captains are printing new brochures to promote bear watching. New lodges are sprouting along salmon streams to house paying guests with a yen for a close encounter with a griz.

Some biologists say throngs of people with cameras could eventually be as lethal to bears as hunters. Others dread the inevitable political confrontations.

“McNeil River State Game Sanctuary on the Alaska Peninsula used to be the target destination for bear viewing in Alaska,” said Sterling Miller, Fish and Game Department bear specialist. “Now bear viewing is becoming such a big attraction to Brooks Camp in Katmai National Park, the Park Service is considering the elimination of sport fishing to prevent conflicts.”

Demand for bear viewing is exceeding the supply of reliable opportunities, Miller said. In recent years, more than 2,000 applicants have paid $20 to apply for fewer than 250 permits to view bears at McNeil River.

Professional and amateur photographers from around the world seek the permits for McNeil, where guided visitors follow a strict regimen that conditions bears to feed on salmon while in close proximity to humans.

Demand for hunting brown bears also is high. Last year, there were five times more applicants than brown bear permits for Kodiak Island.

One of the key differences in this comparison, however, is that nonresidents pay $250 for a McNeil River viewing permit. Non-resident hunters pay $585 for a brown bear license and permit. In addition, outof-state hunters are required to hire a licensed guide at the going rate of $8,000-$12,000.

“Without bringing in crowds of people, bear hunting is worth a million dollars a year to Kodiak Island alone,” said Dick Rohrer, who’s guided bear hunters there for more than 20 years. “You can still go bear viewing during summer. There’s no reason you can’t do both.”

However, neither hunters nor viewers are happy after a two-year experiment with a bear viewing hot spot known as O’Malley Creek in Kodiak National Wildlife Refuge.

“It was a hassle,” said Jay Ballinger, refuge manager. “Once people started coming in to a formal bear-viewing situation, the public pressure to close the surrounding area to hunting was tremendous.”

Petitions have forced the refuge to assess the impacts of bear viewing and bear hunting at O’Malley Creek before they can be reauthorized. But Ballinger said there’s no funding.

“We felt we could offer bear viewing and maintain hunting,” he said. “It all got shut down because of politics, not biology.”

Traditional hunting and access have been put on hold, and the concession that was getting $1,400 a person for a catered bear-viewing vacation has been eliminated.

Bob Stanford, owner of Island Air Service on Kodiak Island, said growing interest in bear viewing is helping his business take off.

“I used to fly for the commercial fishing industry,” he said,”but what pays the bills now is the commercial tourism industry.”

Stanford built a private lodge for bear-watchers in nearby Katmai National Park, where bear hunting is prohibited.

“Now I can take tourists to Katmai and I don’t have to explain why we watch bears part of the year and hunt them later,” he said. Gary Salter of Magnum Charters guide service said bear viewing is a boon to him, too.

“We have the biggest carnivores on the face of the Earth here,” Salter said. “That’s our attraction. Once we get people here, they find out we have good fishing, too.”

Said Rohrer, “We can attract more people to these areas. But as soon as we do, they’ll put more restrictions on guides and public access.”

Seeing the potential for this scenario to repeat, Miller, his wife, SuzAnne Miller, and Daniel McCollum began examining the values of Alaskan bears in 1994.

From the outset, they knew the stakes were high, as they are for any rare commodity.

Habitat destruction and human intolerance have eliminated brown bears from Mexico and wiped them out from 99 percent of their original range in the contiguous 48 states.

Outside Alaska, fewer than 900 brown bears remain in the United States. About 25,000 brown bears roam portions of Canada, but they have been eliminated from 24 percent of their original range and their status is at risk in 63 percent of their current range.

“Alaska has about 31,000 brown bears,” Miller said, noting they are not immune from pressures that have eliminated them elsewhere.

Alaska is the only place in North America with developed and popular viewing opportunities for brown and black bears, he said.

Results of the study peg the value of resident brown bear hunting at $2.5 million. Non-resident brown bear hunting is worth about $17 million. Resident bear viewing is valued at $32 million.

The researchers arrived at the values by asking people what they paid for a hunting or viewing experience and then adding how much additional money they said they were willing to spend for it.

The research on non-residents who do not hunt is not yet complete, but Miller expects the value to be significant. About a million tourists visit Alaska in a year, and many come to view wildlife. Alaska sells about 85,500 resident and 7,000 non-resident hunting licenses a year.

Based on value comparisons, policy-makers could justify allocating more bears to viewing at the cost of bear-hunting opportunities, Miller said.

But he said this policy conclusion is complicated by the high value of moose hunting and the belief of some resident hunters that large numbers of bears are detrimental to moose populations.

The value of moose hunting using the same criteria was pegged at $54 million - more than bear hunting and bear viewing combined.

Rohrer said he enjoys leading bear viewers into the backcountry as he would hunters, using binoculars to watch bears from a distance as they fish and graze.

“We don’t force the bears to acclimate to humans like they do in the controlled areas by plopping a viewing platform next to the prime salmon feeding spot,” he said.

Fish and Game statistics indicate that controlled hunting has had little adverse impact on bear populations.

“I’ve been in Kodiak 26 years and the bear population is higher now than when I came,” Rohrer said. “We’ve had a fairly consistent harvest. The sex ratio is good. We have a better age distribution than we had a few decades ago. In fact, we’ve taken more record-book bears in the last 10 years than we took throughout the 1970s and 1980s.

“Those are facts, not emotion.”

In 1993, the state Board of Game rejected a proposal from viewing enthusiasts to close bear hunting in a large area adjacent to the McNeil River sanctuary.

Although the sanctuary is closed to hunting, two or three bears a year had been taken by hunters in surrounding areas. Years of hunting had not hurt the viewing at the sanctuary, hunters pointed out. But viewing groups said it was inappropriate to hunt bears accustomed to snarfing salmon a few yards from humans.

Miller said the research wasn’t designed to bolster either side of the issue.

The study is a first step in sizing up the role of bear viewing in Alaska, said John Schoen, Fish and Game’s senior conservation officer in Anchorage. “We’ve spent millions to look at the impacts of logging and mining on wildlife, but none on the importance or impacts of wildlife-based tourism.”

Schoen said he hopes hunters and bear watchers can find common ground. “If you don’t have unified support for wildlife, Arco , BP and other industrial interests can walk in and take more habitat,” he said. “That’s the most lethal threat of all.”

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: Color photo