Two of the three chicken coop raiders roaming the Anchorage Hillside/Facebook
The problem with tasty chickens
With a chicken-fancying grizzly bear sow and her cubs still roaming upscale Hillside neighborhoods above Alaska’s largest city, there is an increasing social-media call for the Alaska Department of Fish and Game to “do something.”
This “do something,” in the minds of the best intentioned, is to capture the bears and peacefully move them to a happy place somewhere else, although the state’s experience with that approach has not gone well.
In 2015, then-Alaska Gov. Bill Walker tried to play the hero in this regard and directed state wildlife biologists to capture a family of five, troublesome black bears in the Government Hill neighborhood. The bears were darted and whisked across Turnagain Arm, a body of water with violent tides, to the Kenai Peninsula.
The biologists were right.
The bears soon followed their noses upwind to the tiny town of Hope, Alaska, where The Turnagain Times reported they shredded a tent in the Porcupine Campground, tore open campers’ coolers and damaged a vehicle in a search for human food they had found easy to obtain in Anchorage.
“Previously, the bears had been credited with feasting on local chickens and acting aggressively toward a Boy Scout troop hiking near the campground,” The Times added.
“This isn’t the first time a tagged, problem bear came to Hope,”Fayrene Sherrit, the owner of Hope’s fine art gallery also told The publication. “The last time I can remember was several years ago when a large brown bear found its way to Hope. It caused all sorts of problems. And one day, it started coming into someone’s home, and they had to kill it.”
The same fate awaited four of the five Government Hill bears. What happened to the fifth is unknown.
After most of the famliy was killed, it could have decided to retreat to the wilderness because humans are dangerous. It is, however, just as likely it was killed by another bear or bears before or after because the Kenai has a large and healthy population of bears, and they’re not all friendly.
This is why the state largely avoids transplanting bears. And zoos seldom want them because bears are easier and just as readily obtained from the Lower 48 or Canada.
Do something with a gun
This leaves only one other “do-something” option, the that most of those demanding that something be done prefer not to say: “Kill the bears.”
Were state wildlife biologists given their choice of do-somethings, they would likely choose to ban backyard chickens or require that people who want such pets put them in coops surrounded by a suitable electric fences, such fences having been shown to keep bears at bay.
But the biologists lack the authority to do either of these things. So, according to area wildlife supervisor Cynthia Wardlow, they are monitoring the situation and encouraging people to voluntarily fence their birds.
Theoretically, this will discourage the bears from continuing their coop raids, and with luck, they might stop cruising for coops.
Realistically, this is sure to save some chicken lovers’ grief.
As one chicken fancier posted on Facebook after a visit from the bear, “they got my (hen)house and five of my six chickens a week ago. I was so heartbroken for my girls.”
The bears also smashed a fence around the woman’s yard, and destroyed her chicken coop in order to get at the chickens inside. This is what bears do.
“I have one surviving chicken that I keep in the garage for now. Outside when I am out with her,” the woman posted. “She is traumatised and alone. Poor baby. The good thing is that it appears the bears are still afraid of humans, but sooner or later…. I felt very guilty for not being a deterrent with an e fence and instead, reinforcing her behaviour, which is going to get her and her cubs killed.”
That end is highly probable, but Wardlow is holding out hope the bears might return to the wilderness that surrounds Alaska’s largest city.
Southcentral Alaska grizzly bears have home ranges that cover tens to hundreds of square miles, and it is not impossible these bears could wander into a back corner of their range in the Chugach Mountains behind Anchorage, find a berry patch overland with berries, and decide this beats hunting chickens.
And, so far, the coop bears don’t appear anymore dangerous than the few to a dozen or more beras already roaming Anchorage on any given day.
“While reports indicate that these bears are attracted to poultry enclosures, they also report that these bears have run away if they have encountered people and most reports are during overnight hours when people are usually inside,” she said. “Most of the videos and sightings have been from home security cameras, not from people seeing them firsthand.”
Home security cameras and social media have in the 21st century combined to make it much more obvious to Anchorage residents that the bears that have been roaming the city for a decade or two are roaming the city.
Plus there appear to be more bears in the city now than 50 years ago, when the general, Chugach-wide bear population was subject to heavy hunting and most bears that got close to people on the fringes of the city were killed in “defense of life and property,” an action allowed under state law.
Luckily for these bears, the Anchorage residents of 2025 aren’t as trigger-happy as those of 1975.
The trackers
Modern, more-civilized Anchorage residents are also more likely to expect government to do for them what Alaskans once did for themselves, and thus Fish and Game is on the case.
With this family group of grizzlies, Wardlow said, “there is not an identifiable pattern in timing or location…, like we have sometimes seen with bears that get habituated to trash and seem to target garbage pickup day. Also, no reports of them trying to access any structure other than poultry coops.
“Electric fences have been successful tools in deterring these bears in some of the reports we’ve received….Whether it’s this specific bear group or any other bear, any unsecured attractant that is bringing bears into close proximity to people can create a dangerous situation. Human safety around wildlife is a priority for ADF&G; however, it’s also dependent on people being proactive in taking the necessary steps to prevent wildlife from being drawn into neighborhoods in the first place.”
This could be read to say that if you are chicken lover, beware.
As for your neighbors, if you are a chicken lover and they don’t already know it, it would be only neighborly to warn them. Bears wandering through Anchorage neighborhoods is one thing.
Bears hanging out in a neighborhood because they’re hunting chickens is another, and though these particular bears have shown no sign of losing their fear of humans, it’s never a good idea to get between a bear and what it views as dinner.
Or to get between a sow grizzly and her young. There is a risk there of triggering a defensive attack form even the best-behaved bear. Grizzly sows are of the best-defense-is-a-good-offense school of thought, unlike black bears.
Black bear sows will send their cubs up a tree and then put on a show but almost never attack.
Even in the latter case, however, attacks by blackie sows are rare. The black bear that is dangerous is the one that sidles up to you like it wants to be your friend. Such a bear is sizing you up as food, concluded the Canadians who studied 63 fatal black bear attacks in Canada and the U.S. between 1900 and 2009.
Know your bears
Those 63 deaths, which equates to a fatal black bear attack about once every two years in all of North America, says how rare deadly black bear attacks. Grizzlies (or brown/grizzlies as Fish and Game prefer to kill them) are much deadlier.
On average, they now kill slighlty more than on person per year in Alaska alone. They killed one man in the stae last year, a deer hunter near Sitka in Southeast Alaska. The year before, no one died. But in 2022, a soldier on Joint Base Elmendorf Richardson adjacent to Anchorage was killed, and in 2020, two were killed, one of them a man near Hope.
If you live in Anchorage, it’s probably a good idea to learn how to tell black bears and grizzly/brown bears apart, and how to deal with them. Fish and Game provides plenty of educational reading material.
Those rare, but dangerous black bears are a case in point because, according to reesarchers, they “appear to be strongly motivated, as if a switch had been thrown,” and the only lifesaving defense against them is to fight back.
“We know of incidents where a black bear behaved as if it were considering or carrying out a predatory attack and was deterred by people’s aggressive actions such as shouting, or hitting with rocks, fists, or sticks,” the researchers said. “(But) once predatory behavior is initiated, it may persist for hours unless it is deterred.”
Predatory attacks by Alaska grizzly/brown bears are thought to be less common, but there has been at least one predatory grizzly bear attack in Anchorage in recent years. There has also been one deadly attack by a predatory black bear.
As yet, there is not known to have been a deadly attack by a bear habituated to essentially being fed chickens, garbage or other food stuffs by humans either intentionally, accidentally or ignorantly as has happened elsewhere. But it seems only a matter of time in a city that becomes more urban-minded and less-rural schooled every year.
You might want to think about these things before you decide to put bear attractions – chicken coops, bird feeders or piles of dog food – in your yard. Bears have very good noses and can smell food from a long way off.
As for these bears, no one knows how their story is going to end, but the odds are not good for it ending well with the sow now limping around with an injured foot or leg. That can only encourage her to look for easy-to-obtain food, and cooped chickens are a lot easier to catch than grouse or ptarmigan.
And then there is garbage, which is in human eyes waste but to bears food. Whether this bear will next be tempted to turn to smashing open garbage cans to find easy food, no one knows. Just as no one knows how she came to be injured.
There are a lot of possibilities there. She could have been kicked by a cow moose while trying to kill its calf. Moose are very good with their front feet. She could have been hit by a motor vehicle. She could have stepped on the “bear boards,” boards filled with nails that some people believe can be used keep bears out of their coops. She could have taken a fall as humans sometimes do.
The injury will surely heal. Bears are very durable animals. But how it will influence the behavior of a bear trying to feed not only herself but helping to feed two cubs is an unknown in a world where bears need to accumulate all the calories they can during the short Alaska summer to enable them to survive in a den through the long Alaska winter.
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Well said as always Craig. One of my nitpicks is the claim often made that “we are living in the bear’s territory.” Modern humans and modern bears got here more or less simultaneously once the ice receded. We have been interacting with them ever since, often with conflicts occurring. The Rousseauian “peaceable kingdom” nonsense sticks in my craw.
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