OPINION: Killing 99 bears risks credibility of Alaska’s wildlife management

Last spring, agents of the Alaska Department of Fish and Game, or ADF&G, shot 95 brown bears and four black bears on the western calving grounds of the Mulchatna caribou herd in Bristol Bay. This was an ill-conceived effort to reverse the herd’s population decline and meet historically unrealistic population and harvest goals. ADF&G biologists did not recommend adding bears to the existing wolf control program. When the proposal to kill bears came up during the 2022 Board of Game meeting, biologists admitted they didn’t have good data on brown bear populations in the area. They speculated that bears were likely to repopulate the control area within three to five years from surrounding federal conservation units — Lake Clark and Katmai National Parks, Yukon Delta and Togiak National Wildlife Refuges.

The Board of Game not only ignored ADF&G staff biologists’ concerns about the lack of data on bears, it gave the public no chance to weigh in on the decision to include bears in the predator control program. Department leadership supported the board’s inclusion of bears. Not allowing the ADF&G biologists to do adequate research on bears before making a decision and poor public participation are a recipe for bad management decisions.

The department risks its professional credibility by killing bears when, by its own admission in its Intensive Management Operational Plan, it had inadequate data on bear population numbers and no ability to even estimate the magnitude of the effect of killing bears on caribou herd size. The Board of Game risks its credibility by not giving the public, many of whom highly value bears, a chance to comment on this unprecedented proposal to kill bears.

The ADF&G staff reports and Intensive Management Operational Plan are good science. Department biologists made it clear that the Mulchatna herd, like all caribou herds, is subject to periodic increases and declines. Department biologists laid out the factors that are the primary drivers of the current decline: nutritional problems related to the quality and quantity of the herd’s range; disease, primarily brucellosis; and, human-caused death, primarily out-of-season harvest of female caribou. Biologists noted that predators are a factor limiting recovery, but they are not a major cause of the decline, nor are they likely the solution to reversing the decline. Biologists also pointed out that 11 years of both land-and-shoot and aerial-gunning wolf control had failed to reverse the downward population trend of the Mulchatna caribou herd.

The department acknowledged it can do little about disease or caribou range conditions. Larger forces, including climate change, are forcing habitat changes to the range especially along the river corridors, where changes from tundra to willow shrubs have hurt caribou and favored moose. Fortunately, more moose are a good thing and local people in the Mulchatna area are adapting to this change and replacing some of their caribou harvest with moose.

Trying to make the long-term caribou population objectives and human harvest goals replicate a 20-year, once-a-century population spike, and not recognizing the changes in habitat and range conditions is unrealistic. But that’s where Alaska’s intensive management law pushes the Board of Game and the department.

Without a change in the law, a more balanced representation of Alaskans on the Board of Game, robust public involvement, and the Board of Game and the department leadership setting science-based, biologically achievable and sustainable population and harvest objectives, we will see more of the same — bears and wolves treated as vermin to maintain unsustainable game populations and unrealistic human harvest objectives. The Board of Game and ADF&G leadership can do better. The public and Alaska’s wildlife resources deserve better.

Frank Rue served as commissioner of the Alaska Department of Fish and Game from 1994-2002. He lives in Juneau.

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