By GARLAND KENNEDY
Sentinel Staff Writer
Police shot and killed a large brown bear that had been roaming in a central Sitka neighborhood Monday afternoon. The bear had what appeared to be a collar around its neck, which turned out to be a tight loop of rope that had cut through fur and skin, causing a significant wound.
Department of Fish and Game wildlife biologist Steve Bethune said he’d known about the bear for some time before it was shot on New Archangel Street.
“I’m aware of this bear because we’ve been getting numerous reports of a collared bear in town,” Bethune told the Sentinel. “It wasn’t collared – it had a piece of 550 cord wrapped around its neck, so it had quite a bit of hair loss, which people thought was a collar, pretty severe infection. It completely severed the skin all the way around that neck. My gut is that it was just a piece of garbage in people’s trash and the bear unfortunately managed to get its head through the loop.”
As neighborhood residents look on, Sitka Police Sergeant Gary Cranford examines a cord wrapped around the neck of a bear that was shot Monday on New Archangel Street. (Sentinel Photo by James Poulson)
The rope was snug around the animal’s neck and in places had sliced into layers of fat and muscle.
Paracord 550 is a thin woven nylon cord commonly used in a wide variety of outdoors activities.
Laurent Deviche and Jessica Twydell watched the bear’s final moments. The two live nearby and had seen the bear early Monday morning.
“It hit the garbage cans in this neighborhood a while back... This morning is the first time we had eyes on it, but we heard that there was one living in the cemetery that had been circulating through here and stuff, so everybody has been watching their garbage and all that,” Deviche told the Sentinel.
Twydell said they saw the bear as they let their dog out.
“(Monday) morning we let our dog out to go to the bathroom,” she said. “He’s got a tie-up lead just to go over to the side yard. So Laurent let him out and he just started going crazy barking at the fence. And Laurent saw some movement in the bushes and thought there were some kids playing in the lawn, peeked his head over and saw the bear.”
They immediately called the police.
“We let the cops know and they showed up an hour ago (around noon), then we were like, ‘Where’s the bear at?’ As we looked over, everybody looked over the fence again and it was right behind that red shed that’s on the side of the yard there and it was just laying down right there, and it just huffed at us and everybody was like, ‘Holy crap.’ It kind of stood up... and eventually it ran through the yard and broke through the fence and the guy (police officer Richard Meunier) shot him,” Deviche remembered.
Twydell noted that after years of living in the area, their bear problems began only recently.
“We’ve lived here about four years, and the first time we’ve had bear issues was about a month or six weeks ago when a bear came and got into the garbage cans, and that was the first. And since then there have been reports of bears on various streets in this neighborhood,” Twydell said.
Bethune was away and out of cell phone range when the bear was killed, but Sitka police Sgt. Gary Cranford was present in the aftermath.
“We’ve gotten a couple different reports over the last week or so about trash cans being tipped over, so we knew that there was a bear potentially coming in and out of the area,” Cranford said. “But today we received a report that there was a bear in the area and subsequently located here at the back of this house on the corner, so we were trying to work with the biologist and wildlife troopers to get them up here to develop a game plan, to hopefully not have to euthanize the bear.
“But during that process, we had an officer standing here at that intersection, of New Archangel and (DeArmond Street) as you can see, and unfortunately the bear decided to come out and as it charged through the fence it actually charged one of our officers, requiring him to take lethal action.”
A number of shots from a 12 gauge shotgun, a .375 caliber rifle and handgun felled the animal, Cranford recalled.
The sizable neck wound also stood out to the officer.
“The neck area, you’re looking at an area probably somewhere around four to five inches from head to body that all the fur is gone down to fat, there’s even a little bit of actual meat, if you will, or muscle showing,” he said.
Despite the severity of the open wound caused by rope around its neck, Bethune said that the bear could possibly have survived if the cordage was removed, but the animal had already proven itself problematic around garbage.
“Surprisingly bears can recover from those kinds of injuries, if we’d been able to get the 550 cord off of its neck,” Bethune said. “I was debating whether that would be worth trying to do... he was a nuisance garbage bear anyway.”
The animal’s hide was not salvaged.
The biologist said the bear was a large mature male, 15 to 20 years old and weighing around 600 pounds. As he skinned the animal, he noted that it had several inches of fat beneath its hide, indicating generally good health.
Bethune hopes that Sitkans will refrain from putting out their trash early in order to avoid future bear trouble.
“The age-old message of not putting your trash out before the morning of trash pick up – the access to garbage likely led to its demise,” he said.
