Bad news for bears: for thirty years the wild Alaskan bears that visit McNeil sanctuary have learned to trust the people who watch them. But this fall, despite a public outcry, those bears may be hunted

Natural History, March, 2007 by Bill Sherwonit

On a bright August morning, with gulls screeching and bald eagles picking at spawned--out salmon, I'm standing with ten other people in the shadows of an alder-topped bluff. Our backs are pressed tightly against a dank rock wall. Everyone's attention is drawn to the left, where the bluff ends abruptly in a blind corner.

Douglas D. Hill, who's guiding our group, had peeked around that corner only moments earlier, then ordered the rest of us to stand quietly against the wall and remain absolutely still. Several more moments pass. Now, hardly daring to breathe, we watch as an adult brown bear rounds the corner, as if in slow motion, and angles our way. Passing within less than twenty feet of our party, the 600-pound animal scarcely acknowledges our presence as she squishes through mud and wades into the stream that flows before us.

That in itself is enough to send adrenal glands into overdrive. Imagine the tension, then, when two small cubs step gingerly into view and turn our way. Unlike their mom, the cubs eye us intently and pick up their pace, clearly anxious. But not so anxious that they run or cry or give us a wide berth. Barely larger than the teddy bears awarded as carnival prizes, the dark-chocolate spring cubs scoot past our wall-pinned bodies, no more than ten feet away. Several yards beyond us the cubs wrestle with each other, perhaps a release of tension. Then they lope toward their mother, intently hunting salmon in the swirling, muddied water.

Anyone passionate about brown bears will instantly guess where our encounter took place. It can only be McNeil River State Game Sanctuary, a 200-square-mile parcel of coastland situated on the upper Alaska Peninsula, some 250 miles southwest of Anchorage. McNeil is the standard against which all other bear-viewing sites are measured. Established in 1967 and managed by the Alaska Department of Fish and Game, the sanctuary protects the world's largest gathering of brown bears--the coastal cousins of the grizzlies. As many as a hundred bears come to McNeil River Falls every summer to feed on chum salmon. It's not uncommon for visitors to see dozens of brown bears at a time congregating by the fails.

The McNeil bears are now threatened. The Alaska Board of Game, which has jurisdiction over McNeil and several surrounding areas, has voted to allow hunting in the Kamishak Special Use Area, adjacent to McNeil to the east and south [see map above]. Both before and after the salmon return to McNeil River, the bears fan out throughout the region, often far beyond the McNeil sanctuary. Tagging and radio-collar studies in this area have shown that some bears travel hundreds of miles in a year and that many McNeil bears venture into the Kamishak Special Use Area. So if open hunting there remains legal, it is only a matter of time before trophy seekers kill some of McNeil's most tolerant and approachable bears.

Protecting the McNeil bears is the stated mission of the Alaska Department offish and Game, which is why it established a permit system to keep human visitors at the site to a minimum. A state-run lottery attracts as many as 1,400 applicants, but permits are granted to just ten people at a time for consecutive four-day periods from early June through late August. Visitors take their seats on folding chairs placed side by side on two gravel pads within a hundred feet of the falls. The bears eat, nap, nurse, or even mate not far from the pads where the viewers sit transfixed by the action for as long as eight hours a day.

Many people are surprised by the bears' neutral attitude toward their fans. "Think about it," says Larry Aumiller, McNeil's former manager. "You've got this group of people standing in the middle of dozens of bears. You're very close to where they want to be. And they tolerate you."

Before the McNeil "experiment," many bear experts thought that habituated bears, particularly browns and grizzlies, were extremely dangerous because they had lost their natural shyness of humans. But Aumiller showed that habituated bears that have not learned to associate humans with food treat people as "neutral objects, maybe as innocuous as rocks or trees." Still, habituated bears remain wild; they should not be confused with tamed animals. As Werner Herzog's widely released documentary film about Timothy Treadwell, Grizzly, Man, made clear to a worldwide audience, carelessly approaching any bear in the wild can have fatal consequences.

Because of the precautions that Aumiller and his staff have taken, no McNeil bears have attacked or injured anyone in more than three decades of close association with people. And no bears have had to be killed because they presented a danger. Those facts demonstrate that these bears are safe to be around if people are willing to adjust their behavior. "What goes on here is still news to a lot of people," Aumiller says. "They don't think it can happen. But it does. McNeil shows that if you learn about something that's different from you, and begin to appreciate it, then you'll figure out a way to keep it in your life. You'll learn to peacefully coexist."