In Stuckagain Heights, an East Anchorage neighborhood well accustomed to the presence of bears, homeowners heard what sounded like a bear killing a moose calf early Friday morning.
A few hours later, one homeowner went outside to get his newspaper. He took a gun with him. He had barely reached his driveway when, as he told state biologists later, the brown bear charged him.
Prior to the confrontation, a flurry of posts reporting sightings of the bear appeared on the Stuckagain Heights Nextdoor site -- a signal of the increasingly prominent role that social networking sites, particularly Nextdoor.com, are playing in human-wildlife encounters in Anchorage.
"It went real quick," Donald Crafts, president of the Basher Community Council, said of the spread of news about the brown bear, the first he'd heard about in the area this spring.
"Really, up until now, there hasn't been that much of a spread of information that quickly," said Crafts, who has lived in the neighborhood about nine years.
When the bear charged, the homeowner shot at it, said Dave Battle, Anchorage area biologist with the Alaska Department of Fish and Game. The bear then ran off to the north, into a thickly wooded area. It wasn't clear whether the homeowner struck the bear, and when police and biologists searched later, they couldn't find a blood trail. Biologists did find the spot where the bear sat to eat the moose calf, Battle said. It appeared that the bear had "polished off the moose calf in one sitting."
When the bear wasn't found, Battle sent an email to Crafts.
"The bear could have been missed, injured, or may be dead in the woods somewhere," Battle wrote. "Would you mind getting the word out however you can? Facebook, Next Door, talking to neighbors, whatever…?"
When it comes to bears in Anchorage, Nextdoor, a free website and smartphone application designed for neighborhood interactions, has "come into play tremendously," Battle said.
"We started to see it last year. We're really seeing it this year," Battle said.
And, he said, that can be both a good thing and a bad thing.
On the positive side, neighbors can alert each other more easily than ever before about bears or other wildlife, Battle said.
But this year in particular, Battle said, residents are reporting wildlife incidents on Nextdoor instead of calling biologists with Fish and Game. He noted that it's not possible for the biologists to view community-specific Nextdoor pages, which require users to create a profile and login.
He said the other problem comes when people post the specific location or address where they saw wildlife, as was recently the case in the Government Hill neighborhood.
In April, a family of five black bears roaming the neighborhood exploded on Nextdoor, with dozens of messages tracking the bears' whereabouts being exchanged daily between neighbors. Some of the bear sharing also made it on to non-neighborhood specific sites like Facebook.
That prompted others to show up and take pictures, even causing traffic jams, Battle said.
He said a social media posting about wildlife in one neighborhood prompted a big enough crowd that a school bus couldn't get through, and a biologist almost didn't, either.
That problem didn't arise in Stuckagain, where houses are separated by large lots. But Battle said social media factored smoothly into the equation in that particular sighting.
"This was an instance, I think, of using it for good," Battle said.
As of Sunday evening, the bear had not been found.
Michelle Theriault Boots contributed to this story.