Alaska brown bear Credit: FWS/Donna Dewhurst
Brown bears have been snarfing down moose calves in South Anchorage. Moose cows have been dropping twins all over town — we just spied two spindly legged babies chasing after mom in the municipal park a few hundred yards from our back gate.
“You’ve got the bears in town chasing moose calves,” state biologist Rick Sinnott told the Anchorage Daily News in a story posted this week. “You’ve got the moose cows trying to protect their calves. … It’s almost the perfect storm.”
It’s also regular life for Anchorage in June, when bears roam and moose get snarky about their space.
One evening a few years ago, just about this exact date, the late TV news reported that bear tracks had been sighted in a city park on Anchorage’s urban east side. State biologists were skeptical but matter-of-fact.
It could be a young male bear out wandering during its first year away from Mom, they said. A teenage bear, perhaps, seeking its place in the world.
I was curious.
Even though it was late, it was that time of year when light never quits Anchorage, allowing midnight bike rides in an endless cool dusk. I rolled my bike out the back yard gate, pedaled for about 15 minutes along a meandering asphalt trail, and halted at a bridge over a spring-fed creek.
This was no wilderness setting. The park contained a six-hole golf course, and through the birch trees I could hear two golfers talking at the first green. A few hundred yards away was a housing complex, and beyond that, a five-lane boulevard with whooshing traffic. If there had been no trees blocking the view, I could have seen traffic lights, a gas station, and a video rental store in the distance.
Plenty to eat for bears in the city Credit: Doug O’Harra
I thought about all this as I balanced on my bike, shoe resting on the rail. A bear? Here? In the city? Seemed unlikely.
Then I looked down.
Beneath my tires on the wooden deck, I noticed a succession of tracks leading from the creek at one end and disappearing off the bridge in the direction I had just come. Claw marks dotted the surface ahead of the toes, and the paws had stamped the wood with wet, dark prints. The water hadn’t had time yet to evaporate, or even soak in much.
The message was startling: An Alaskan brown bear had crossed this bridge only moments before. Perhaps the 500-pound omnivore had watched me bike up. In the rush of adrenaline that followed, I forgot I was in the middle of an urban area with a quarter million people, just a few miles from at least 5,000 homes, four shopping centers, a couple of warehouse superstores, three hospitals, a college campus and an airport.
I rode home fast.
Even though I was shaken, I knew what I had experienced was not that rare.
Humans here live much as they do anywhere else in the United States, caught up in the hustle from suburbia to office to school and back. Yet this daily grind overlaps with a remarkable menagerie: 52 mammals, 230 birds and one amphibian, the wood frog.
All five species of Pacific salmon struggle through culverts on their journey to spawn. Offshore swim ghostly white beluga whales, animals sometimes hunted by Native Alaskans who live in town, or by roving killer whales from the Gulf of Alaska.
This city of 260,000 is the only urban center on earth where you might meet a brown bear on a summer bike ride or an afternoon run. It’s also the only city of its size where a black bear might raid your backyard deck in the morning, a 1,200-pound moose munch your garden peas at noon, and a beaver flood your favorite trail that night.