Earlier this summer more than a dozen Kodiak brown bears were causing problems at the Kodiak Island Borough’s landfill. Most of those bears have now been cleared out of the landfill as winter has set in and many are starting to hibernate.
For at least five months, since August, the Alaska State Troopers, Kodiak Island Borough staff and Alaska Department of Fish and Game biologists have been using trial and error to try to keep brown bears out of the landfill.
“That’s also what we’ve been sharing with the landfill folks is this isn’t going to be a one and done thing. It’s going to be an ongoing effort," Nate Svoboda, the area wildlife biologist with ADF&G in Kodiak, said.
He said in August of this year they counted more than a dozen bears going in and out of the landfill at any given time.
Now he says the department has only seen one bear in the landfill, as of earlier this month. That’s in part due to the department’s efforts to deter bears from entering the landfill through non-lethal hazing with rubber bullets, firecracker shells, or by trapping them. In some instances, lethal control is the only way to stop bears from eating trash according to Svoboda. But the Alaska Department of Fish and Game views that as a last resort.
Svoboda said that last month the department captured two subadult bears inside of a mobile culvert trap made out of aluminum that they placed in the landfill.
“It’s probably, I don’t know, maybe 10 to 12 feet in length, probably four or five feet tall in a big barrel, essentially a culvert," Svoboda explained. "And we bait it inside the trap, and the bears go in, grab the bait and the door closes behind them.”
The bears were then transported to the Monashka Bay reservoir area around Nov. 10.
Typically, Fish and Game doesn’t relocate bears because Svoboda said previous efforts to do so around the state have failed. But in this case he said the two relocated bears don’t appear to have returned to the landfill yet.
“If we have bears frequenting a certain location where they shouldn’t be, we’ll go out and set the trap and see if we can’t capture them. It’s not super successful most times," he said, "but we had some luck at the landfill.”
Despite the progress they’ve made, the borough landfill isn’t out of the woods yet. The Alaska Department of Environmental Conservation in September found that the borough was violating state laws by allowing bears to enter the site.
According to the inspection report, the state told the borough that it needs to remove all bears from the landfill and ensure it is bear resistant or face fines. So far, DEC staff told KMXT the department has not imposed any fines against the borough.
Svoboda said he and his staff have been working with the department of environmental conservation.
“That’s one of our Fish and Game goals. But that’s also a directive from DEC that it has to be bear resistant and no bears in the landfill," Svoboda said. "So that’s the ultimate goal.”
He said he’s cautiously optimistic that goal can be accomplished at the Kodiak Island Borough landfill, especially since many bears have begun denning outside of the facility for winter.
But, Svoboda said, come spring that could all change and the team could be dealing with the same bear issues again.
Staff at the borough previously told KMXT that they planned to increase the voltage of the electric fence around the landfill and make structural upgrades in certain areas by last month. Those tasks have not yet been completed as of the airing of this story.
