For the past couple years, the Alaska Department of Fish and Game has been receiving reports of a big black bear rummaging through garbage in the downtown area. For just as long, he’s been evading capture.
“He’s kind of like a ninja,” Stephanie Sell, a biologist with the department, told the Empire Thursday afternoon.
During the time that she’s been pursuing the roughly 300-pound bear — that’s more than 60 pounds above the average weight of adult black bears — Sell has watched his stomping grounds change.
For a time, he hung out near the Bergmann Hotel. Next, it was the area around the building that used to house Tracy’s Crab Shack on South Franklin Street. Now, it seems he’s hanging out at the Bergmann again, likely attracted by a large (and constantly growing) pile of trash in the hotel’s parking lot.
Several pieces of furniture, a couple TVs, three refrigerators and several other household garbage items have been heaped into a mound at the corner of Fourth and Harris streets, near the base of a staircase that runs up to the Starr Hill neighborhood.
For about the past month or so, that staircase has also served as an access road into downtown for the big black bear whose first, and sometimes only stop in town, is the Bergmann trash pile.
“We’ve had a lot of problems in that area,” Sell said.
It’s pretty typical for bears to frequent this portion of downtown, according to Sell. And the Bergmann’s trash isn’t entirely to blame. Bears live in the woods just behind Starr Hill — nestled up against Mount Roberts — so they don’t have to travel far out of their comfort zone to find garbage here.
The problem, she said, is that so long as they continue to find tasty trash, they aren’t going to stop coming into town, even if that means forgoing hibernation.
“If they continue to get rewards here, then they have no reason to go den,” Sell said, explaining that the Bergmann’s trash mountain is likely habituating this behavior. “I certainly am a little concerned about the freezers and refrigerators out there because I know they probably did have food in them and that attracts bears.”
It certainly has. The other night, while walking in the area, I watched a black bear — possibly Sell’s ninja bear — standing on its hind legs searching through the freezer of one of the refrigerators. It was as if he had a hankering for ice cream.
Unfortunately for the bear, the freezer was empty. After a few minutes, he sauntered up the stairs back to Starr Hill, huffing as he walked.
Limited by the law
Curbing the bear’s trash addiction won’t be easy, according to several city officials. Sizable though it seems, the Bergmann’s trash pile is smaller than it has been in the past, said Rob Steedle, the director of the city’s Community Development Department.
Steedle and Charlie Ford, the city’s building official, have both been keeping an eye on the garbage pile, but there’s not much they can do to get rid of it. Municipal code only allows the city to get involved if a person or business maintains a “bear attraction nuisance.”
Code defines such a nuisance as more than one-half gallon of any putrescible material, any organic material that has previously attracted a bear, soiled diapers, etc. Essentially, if you’ve left food out or trash containing food out, you’ve likely created a bear attraction nuisance.
The Bergmann trash pile doesn’t contain food or other organic matter, though. And because it doesn’t (yet) spill into the public right of way, the city can’t clean it up or issue a citation to the hotel’s owners. They’re protected by another portion of city code.
“By code, you’re entitled to have up to 200 square-feet of junk on private property, and it looks to me like that’s significantly less, so we can’t cite them for that,” Steedle said.
Bob Dilley supervises all of the Juneau Police Department’s community service officers. Dilley and his team of CSO’s are typically the ones who are tasked with handling bear reports.
“We take the brunt of the calls about bears,” he said.
Dilley said the owners of the Bergmann are planning to clean the trash toward the end of next week. After checking out the garbage pile Wednesday, one CSO noted that there was nothing there that warranted a citation.
But there’s a difference between something that will attract a bear and something that violates city code for doing so. The freezer, for instance, definitely attracted a bear, but it didn’t have any food in it, so it’s not technically at odds with city code.
A bear-y bad idea
The Bergmann bear isn’t alone.
Sell said that the Department of Fish and Game has been receiving more bear reports all over Juneau. This is fairly normal; it’s just that time of year. Berries and other natural food sources have started to dwindle, and bears are in their final push to gain weight before winter.
What is atypical is how some people have behaved around bears that have wandered into town this fall. Several people recently walked up to a black bear eating garbage, so they could take pictures of themselves with it. They were within 10 feet of the bear, according to Sell, who saw some of the selfies after somebody sent them to Fish and Game out of concern.
“That’s a problem for me, and that’s certainly a problem for the people near the bear,” she said. “That’s really dumb. I don’t know what else to say about it.”
Rather than using their phones to take pictures of themselves — risking life and limb to do so — they should’ve called the Department of Fish and Game to report the bear, Sell said.
“We can’t do anything about bears if we don’t know about them.”
To report a bear sighting to the department, call 465-4265.
• Contact reporter Sam DeGrave at 523-2279 or sam.degrave@juneauempire.com.
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