How have deer and goat hunters and bear viewers impacted Kodiak bears? This is my third and final post about the complex relationship between humans and bears on Kodiak Island.
Deer Hunters
In the early 1980s, the Sitka black-tailed deer population exploded throughout the Kodiak Archipelago. As a result, the length of the deer-hunting season as well as the bag limit for deer increased. For several years, each hunter was allowed to shoot seven deer. Bears quickly adapted to this new, easy source of food, and conflicts between bears and deer hunters increased in frequency. A questionnaire filled out by hunters indicated 21% of all deer hunters had threatening encounters with bears, and as many as 26% lost deer meat to bears. A heightened emphasis on hunter education and ways to avoid bear encounters has helped solve this problem. Today, the bag limit is three deer per hunter, but bear/deer-hunter encounters still occur.
Goat Hunters
The mountain goat population on Kodiak has also rapidly increased within the last 
decade, and in many areas, permits for hunting mountain goats have gone from a restricted drawing to an open registration. Several goat-hunter/bear conflicts have occurred in the last few years, but goat habitat is difficult to reach, so there are fewer goat hunters than deer hunters and therefore fewer goat-hunter/bear conflicts than deer-hunter/bear conflicts.
Bear Viewers and Photographers
The interest in bear viewing and photography has steadily increased on Kodiak since the 1980’s. The Refuge classifies bear viewing as “non-consumptive” use as opposed to “consumptive” use by bear hunters, but “non-consumptive” is a misleading term. Bear viewers can be very disruptive to bears and the habitat, and their impact or potential impact is not easy to measure or predict. The challenge the Refuge has faced in recent years is to learn how to limit the impact of non-consumptive users on bears while allowing as many people as possible the thrill of watching a Kodiak bear in its natural habitat.
Bear viewing on Kodiak occurs almost exclusively in the summer months when bears are concentrated on streams or in shallow, saltwater areas at the heads of bays, feeding on salmon. Bears must consume large amounts of protein and fat in the summer to sustain them through the following winter’s hibernation. It is especially critical for sows with cubs and pregnant sows to receive adequate nutrition.
Bear viewers can force bears away from prime feeding areas. This impact is difficult to measure, and it is likely bear viewers or photographers will not even realize they are impacting the bears, because some bears are more tolerant of humans and will stay and feed in their presence, while other bears will leave the area as soon as they detect humans nearby. These less-tolerant bears may then be forced to fish in less-productive areas or at different times of the day when tides and light conditions are not as good.
Management Decisions
Biologists are now studying and trying to understand the impacts bear viewers, sport fishermen, rafters, and hikers have on Kodiak bears, and they hope to use what they learn to develop regulations to manage these impacts on Kodiak bears and their habitat.
Over the next few weeks, I plan to cover past and present scientific research on bears, including one recent controversial study.
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Robin Barefield is the author of three Alaska wilderness mystery novels. To download a free copy of one of her novels, watch her webinar about how she became an author and why she writes Alaska wilderness mysteries. Also, sign up below to subscribe to her free, monthly newsletter on true murder and mystery in Alaska.
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