On Kodiak Island, brown bears are super-sized
A local male brown bear, fattened up for hibernation, as he would insist on being this time of year, can weigh 1,500 pounds. When bears here get up on their hind legs, as they often do when fishing for salmon in the Karluk River, they stand more than nine feet tall. They can run as fast as 35 mph.
The average local bear is about twice as big as his much-feared brown bear kin in the Lower 48, popularly called a grizzly.
Also, there is a phenomenal concentration of giant brown bears here on Kodiak Island, which sits out in the Gulf of Alaska. The island has about 2,600 of them — more than twice the total of all grizzlies in the contiguous United States.
Behind all these numbers, there's a good news bear story. Its plot is driven by genetic isolation and ridiculously abundant salmon runs, a terrible oil spill and many decades of enlightened state and federal government actions.
"The biggest bear that ever lived could be alive right now on Kodiak Island because this place is so well-managed," said Tim Richardson, executive director of the Kodiak Brown Bear Trust, a nonprofit group that looks out for the bears.
That is almost certainly no exaggeration, because the three largest brown bears ever killed by hunters were shot here. Also, 33 of the 50 largest bears listed by the Boone & Crockett Club — a nonprofit coalition of conservationists and sportsmen — were from Kodiak Island. In recent years, as more visitors are armed with cameras instead of guns, the bear hunt is down and the bear population is up.
Kodiak bears do not make a habit of attacking, killing or eating people, although they certainly could. They are believed to have killed only two people in the past century. They injure people, usually hunters, about once every two years.
Compared to grizzlies in the Lower 48, kodiak bears tend to be more predictable, partly because they are better fed.
"I never had a problem with a bear where I didn't start the fight," said Roy Randall, 70, a hunting guide who has tracked kodiak bears for 40 years and has taken part in 116 kills. (In the Lower 48, grizzlies are listed as endangered, so hunting them is illegal.) Even when kodiak bears charge at people, it is usually a bluff, Randall said.
"If their ears are erect, then they are going to stop," he said. "If their ears are folded back and you hear their teeth popping as they charge, good gracious, here they come."
The best possible place to begin a bear story here is beside the Karluk River.
Just 21 miles long, this shallow river teems from early spring to late fall with all five species of Pacific salmon, plus steelhead. About 2.3 million wild salmon come home to the Karluk every year, giving it the highest spawning return per linear mile of any river in North America.
Brown bears are believed to have come to Kodiak Island well before the last ice age. No one knows for sure, but a number of experts think the bears made it to the island by riding ice floes.
Once they got here, they lost contact with the rest of the brown-bear world — and thrived in splendidly productive genetic isolation.
"This is really a rich place for a bear to live," said Leslie Kerr, manager of the Kodiak National Wildlife Refuge, which was created in 1941.
Although bears fatten up on salmon, most of what a bear eats is grass, berries and roots. On island beaches, they also consume seaweed, crabs and the washed-up corpses of whales, sea lions and otters.
Another key reason Kodiak Island is so rich in bears is that it is so poor in oil, timber and gold — the stuff that historically drew hordes of people to Alaska. Cattle ranching ended here in the late 1950s, because it was more lucrative for local residents to take rich people bear hunting (at $10,000 to $15,000 per outing) than to punch cows.
Nearly all of the island's 12,000 residents are clustered in the fishing town of Kodiak. Outside the town, however, bears outnumber people by a 3-to-1 ratio.
Ironically, Alaska's worst environmental disaster — the oil spill caused in 1989 when the Exxon Valdez ran aground in Prince William Sound — was good for the bears.
The spill came after the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act had turned over to native groups large tracts of land from the federal wildlife refuge. Desperate for money, native corporations were under intense pressure to sell, subdivide or develop the land. Biologists feared development would harm salmon runs and greatly reduce bear habitat.
The $1 billion settlement Exxon paid to the state and federal governments averted that. The money bought conservation easements, which protected the bears. The crown jewel in the bear-saving effort, the Karluk River, was protected last year by such a purchase.