June 23 – State wildlife officials have now killed a total of 180 brown bears on caribou in southwestern Alaska in just over a year, as part of a controversial strategy to restore the famed Mulchatna herd.
Alaska Department of Fish and Game officials shot from a helicopter between May 10 and June 5, killing 81 brown bears and 15 wolves they spotted across 530 square kilometers of tundra, officials said this month.
In 2023, the first year of the program, government workers killed 94 brown bears, including several cubs, five black bears and five wolves.
State wildlife officials say killing bears that feed on newborn calves is a last-ditch effort to prop up a herd that has dwindled from a peak of 200,000 animals in 1997 to just over 13,000 today. The state halted all hunting of Mulchatna caribou in 2021 with a goal of reaching a herd size of 30,000 to 80,000 animals.
Wildlife officials now say the strategy is working: The ratio of calves to cows used to measure summer calf survival nearly doubled last fall compared to a 10-year average, according to a Department of Fish and Game advisory from 14th of June.
“Based on last fall, I expect we’ll see another pretty strong showing of calves fairly soon,” said Ryan Scott, the state’s top wildlife official.
But the new data comes amid ongoing questions in the scientific community about the role predators play when it comes to caribou survival, compared to other factors such as disease and access to the low-growing lichens the animals eat.
When the Alaska Board of Game first approved killing bears in 2022 as an expansion of an existing wolf control program that wasn’t working, Fish and Game biologists studying the Mulchatna herd cited malnutrition and infection as bigger factors in caribou declines than in predators.
Even now, two years into the project, the state still does not appear to have data showing that killing bears will definitively increase caribou numbers, according to several retired biologists interviewed for this story.
The improved calf-to-cow ratio announced this month could reflect a population recovering from brucellosis, a disease that can reduce calf survival, rather than the effect of fewer boars, says Ken Whitten, a former Fish and Game wildlife biologist living in Fairbanks.
Whitten said the state’s own data indicated that bear predation was not a serious problem for newborn caribou, “particularly for the western portion of the herd, where the monitoring occurred.”
The state’s bear numbers this month also come amid growing questions about the role climate change could play in the collapse of caribou populations in North America, including Alaska’s western Arctic and other herds including the Mulchatna.
Jim Dau, a Kotzebue caribou biologist who retired from the Department of Fish and Game in 2016, said the concern among his colleagues is that a “really aggressive” predator removal program was implemented without knowing how many bears were moving through the area or simply what drives the herd is decreasing.
“The biggest concern for me is how climate change is affecting caribou worldwide,” Dau said. “If we just keep pouring our time and resources into carving bears and wolves, we could miss out on a lot of other things.”
Dau said he has seen winter rains freeze snow into a crust that prevents animals from penetrating underlying vegetation, and brushy shrubs replace the low-growing lichen on which caribou depend.
Scott, director of the state Department of Conservation, said he agrees that climate change is likely affecting many Alaska caribou herds, including the Mulchatna population, in this way.
There is “very little we can do to impact that in a positive way,” he said. “But we know that bears and wolves eat the calves and that is the only lever we can use to make a positive impact.”
Fish and Game failed last year to radio-collar newborn calves to closely track and study them — a point of contention among critics of predator control — but have collared 42 calves this year, Scott said. The agency is also trying to learn more about what led to the deaths of calves that did not survive, he said.
According to this month’s advisory, wildlife officials are also conducting nutritional research and monitoring diseases “to determine whether further reductions in bear and wolf populations during spring calving are warranted to further improve calf survival and herd growth.”
The predator control program is approved through 2028. The state plans to run it for at least another year, Scott said.
The Mulchatna program cost nearly $309,200 last year, officials say. An estimate for this year’s program was not available this week.
Conservationists say they are operating under a mandate under state law for “intensive management,” which requires action when caribou numbers fall below a certain level.
The Mulchatna Mountains include the Togiak National Wildlife Refuge and villages in the Bristol Bay area. State officials say residents of 48 communities depend on the herd for food.
[Previously: Lawsuits target Alaska predator control program that killed 99 bears in effort to boost caribou]
Resolutions at last year’s Alaska Federation of Natives conference included support for Mulchatna predator control. The Association of Village Council Presidents, which represents 56 federally recognized tribes, sent the Board of Game a letter last fall supporting “all possible measures to protect the herd,” including controlling predators and limiting hunting to only the livelihood.
This month, state wildlife officials said bear and wolf populations are “healthy” in Western Alaska and previous research shows “a full recovery to pretreatment levels” within a few years.
Whitten, the retired biologist, called that claim “pretty much speculation,” because bears don’t reproduce fast enough for a population to recover that quickly, although new bears may move into the area.
“What the long-term effects are and how quickly bears will recover in this area, those are things we don’t know,” he said.
