A brown bear that intruded into the kitchen of a Southeast Alaska fishing lodge on Saturday was shot dead later that same evening.
Steve Daniels, owner of the Highliner Lodge in the small Chichagof Island community of Pelican, didn’t believe it at first when a chef came running out of the kitchen during dinner service and told him there was a bear inside. Daniels headed into the kitchen and sure enough, there it was.
“First thing when I saw it was a bear, I said, ‘Someone grab a camera!’” Daniels said in an interview Wednesday.
Photos posted on the lodge’s Facebook page show the hulking female bear standing in the kitchen near the doorway, alongside shelves of food. Guests were eating dinner in the next room.
The incident was chaotic, Daniels said. When he got into the kitchen, he looked around for something to throw at the animal. There was some salami nearby, but he decided against throwing meat at a bear. Then he started chucking plates at it, but he missed each time, he said.
This story has been updated: Our kitchen staff and guests had a pretty good scare last night during dinner service when...
Posted by Highliner Lodge & Fishing Charters on Sunday, June 30, 2019
Eventually the bear started to go back out the door, Daniels said, and he chased behind to slam the door shut.
“I wouldn’t recommend chasing bears,” he said, adding that it was “weird” for him to reflexively throw things and chase the bear out. It was the only close encounter with a bear he’s ever had, he said.
But the bear leaving the kitchen wasn’t the last he would see of it that night.
Bob Adams, a Village Public Safety Officer in Pelican, responded to the lodge after he got a call about the incident. At that point, he didn’t see the bear in the area, and then he went around town letting people know what had happened.
Adams then went back to the lodge, where one of the employees told him the bear was still nearby and that it had tried to get inside “three additional times,” he said. The bear hung out in thick brush behind the lodge and “continued to move through (the) brush towards the armed village public safety officer, Steve, Highliner staff and several guests,” according to a post on the lodge’s Facebook page.
Adams and Daniels "both decided that now was the time it needed to be dealt with,” Adams said. He shot the bear once in the heart, with a 12-gauge shotgun, he said, and it died immediately. That was just before 10 p.m.
Adams recognized the bear from an incident earlier in the week when it had been preventing someone from dropping trash at the dump, he said. It was clearly unafraid of humans, he said.
Alaska Wildlife Troopers responded to Pelican on Sunday to load the carcass onto a boat to dispose of it, Adams said. That’s when he saw that the bear had been in poor health, he said.
“We started looking it over and noticed a lot of really bad puncture wounds, and festering wounds,” he said.
It’s sad that the evening ended with the bear being killed, Daniels said, adding that it was “a beautiful animal.”
Run-ins like the one on Saturday are “very rare” in Pelican, the post on the lodge Facebook page said.
“While we would much prefer that this story could have ended with the comical intrusion of a bear on our dinner service, scaring it back into the hills forever by use of dinner plates and salami,” the post said, “we are relieved that everyone is safe and understand that the decision was unavoidable.”