So cute, and yet so potentially dangerous/Craig Medred photo
The dangerous Big Wild Life
Spring came late to Alaska’s largest city this year on the heels of a brutal winter, and now the wildlife have invaded.
Actually, they were always here, but the bears were dozing through hibernation, and the moose were pursuing what humans now call the “sedentary lifestyle” to preserve energy through the starvation diet of winter while awaiting the first green, energy-filled plants of spring.
Some of them, as is the norm, didn’t make it. Some that did appear to be in a foul mood.
The Alaska Department of Fish and Game was last week warning city residents that it had learned of five people stomped by cranky moose. There were likely more. Some Alaskans end up embarrassed at being attacked by a moose, and unless seriously injured, keep what happened to themselves.
Even some of those seriously injured remain largely invisible. Only years after chasing her loose dog into the woods, only to end up being stomped so badly by a moose that months were spent in rehab, did a Hillside neighbor reveal her nightmare experience with one of the big ungulates.
Some consider the city’s moose more dangerous than its bears – both black and brown. The moose are, and they aren’t.
Moose injure far, far more people than bears in the Anchorage area, but they don’t kill as many. Then again, bears don’t kill that many either compared to other humans.
The Anchorage Police Department reported 23 homicides in the municipality in 2023, the last year for which complete numbers are available. And motor vehicle collisions that same year killed another 16, the lowest number in a decade, according to Anchorage’s Annual Traffic report.
The 10-year average is nearly 22, and thus combined with homicides, leaves the annual average of people-caused deaths of others at near 50. The wildlife can’t come close to that number.
The real killer
What happened to make Anchorage roads safer in 2023, nobody knows. And a year later, drivers killed almost as many pedestrians – 15 – on the way to racking up 29 road deaths to top homicides in the annual tally. What happened in 2024 and again last year was also unusual.
Historically, motor vehicle collisions in Anchorage have killed more motorists and their passengers. Inattentive drivers appear to be trying hard to change that statistic. Still, the latest “five-year moving average” for fatalities stands at 20.6 with an average of 11.60 motorists or passengers, 7.8 pedestrians and 1.2 cyclists dying every year.
This makes it almost funny that a whole bunch of motorists want to blame the high rate of Anchorage road deaths on homeless pedestrians wandering into city streets. But that’s a whole other story.
This one is about the oft-described ‘bountiful’ Alaska wildlife that seemingly appear from out of nowhere to overrun the streets, trails and neighborhoods of the state’s largest city about this time every year.
Social media has, for the past couple of weeks, been full of photos of them:
Sometimes they even seem to have taken over parts of the city.
A temporarily closed to moose Anchorage Animal Control warning people to use extreme caution in approaching the shelter now because of a mama moose nursing a calf nearby/Facebook
These two blocked the Anchorage Coastal Trail for a time on Sunday.
And it’s not just moose and bears.
Someone new to Anchorage might come to believe that the city has been taken over by the Big Wild Life that the Anchorage Economic Development Corporation once promoted as the city’s brand.
Too wild?/YouTube
The Big Wild Life eventually faded away in favor of the “Urban & Wild” branding now being pushed by Visit Anchorage. Could it be that the Big Wild Life wildlife was just a little too scary?
In these times, most people probably don’t want to travel to somewhere, let alone live somewhere, with the danger of walking out the door only to be trampled by a moose or killed by a bear. But hey, this is Alaska!
The reality of Anchorage is that, thankfully, most of this wildlife will, within days now, disappear behind the screen of foliage that hides it from human eyes during the summer. And the reality of Alaska is that it is a sub-Arctic region that will only support limited wildlife populations.
Where the bears are
The 500 bears living in the Lake Tahoe Basin of California significantly outnumber the 300 to 350 bears living in Anchorage, the 85,000 acres of still largely wild Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson on the city’s northern edge, and the half-million-acre Chugach State Park abutting the city to the east.
This is because the warm climate of California supports richer habitats than the cooler climate of Alaska. But there is, of course, one notable, “Big Wild” difference between the bears of Anchorage and those of California. About 60 of the bears that roam into and out of Anchorage are brown bears, or what most of the rest of the world calls grizzlies, according to the Alaska Department of Fish and Game.
California once had a lot of grizzlies, too. But the only one left is the one that adorns the California state flag.
The last live grizzly in California was reportedly killed in 1916, and nobody is clamoring to bring them back even though California still boasts nearly 50 million acres of protected wild land, much of which could support grizzlies.
The problem is public safety. Grizzly bears are simply more dangerous than black bears.
The last bear to kill someone in the Anchorage area was a grizzly that attacked a group of soldiers mapping a training site on JBER in May 2022. Thirty-year-old Staff Sgt. Seth Michael Plant became the fourth person to be killed by a bear in the Anchorage area in the last 10 years.
Three of the four people killed by bears in this area in the past 10 years were killed by grizzlies. The fourth to die, 16-year-old Patrick Cooper, was a smallish teenager who might have survived if he’d been bigger, stronger and schooled in what to do when attacked by the rare, predatory black bear.
Most black bears will run if people make noise and act aggressively toward them. The dangerous one is the one that tries to slink up to you. If that bear should finally attack, the advice is to fight like hell because it has decided you look like food.
Such black bears are dangerous, but they’ve been fought off with rocks, tree limbs wielded as clubs and even with fists. And in the big picture of how you might end up dead in the Anchorage area, bear attacks are the least of your worries.
Compare the four deadly bear attacks over the last 10 to the 92 pedestrians who were killed on Anchorage streets in the same 10-year time span. This earned Alaska’s largest city the distinction of being one of the most dangerous cities in the country for people on foot.
A May report from the Alaska Office of Epidemiology ranked Anchorage more than five times deadlier for pedestrians than the average American city. So while the Big Wild Life the city once bragged about might look a little dicier than it really is this time of year, what you really need to watch out for is the Small Urban Life.
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