A state predator control program has culled more than 250 bears in Southwest Alaska over the past four springs in an attempt to boost the Mulchatna caribou herd and help caribou hunters in the region.
The Alaska Department of Fish and Game says the bear culling is working, by decreasing the predation of caribou calves. The idea is to get caribou numbers up so the department can reopen hunting, which was shut down amid a population crash.
But critics say there's no proof that the program is effective and that there are other factors affecting the herd's population.
Anchorage Daily News reporter Zachariah Hughes, with help from the Pulitzer Center, has been covering the predator control program and described how it works.
This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Zachariah Hughes: The basics are that for about a month each May, two spotter planes will head out — one year (from) Dillingham, the other year it's been Bethel — and the spotter planes will kind of fly over the area around where the caribou are calving, and they will call in a helicopter, very small helicopter, and they use a shotgun. They get pretty close to the bears, I've heard anywhere from 10, 20, 30 feet above them, and dispatch them, shoot them, with a shotgun slug.
And after that, the helicopter lands, under the protocols that have been relayed to the Board (of Game), the bears are skinned out, their hides are retained. From there, they're tanned by taxidermists along the road system, and eventually the hides are sold at the Horn and Hide Auction the following March. And a little bit of the proceeds generated from that are put back into the department's operating budget.
Casey Grove: There is a lot of criticism about it, but why does the state say that it needs to be doing this?
ZH: (Alaska Department of Fish and Game) Commissioner Doug Vincent Lang says that he is under statutory requirements, as his department interprets the Alaska Constitution, to manage wildlife resources for the maximum benefit of Alaskans. And so to do that, if that's what we're obliged to do, then we need to pursue policies that can boost caribou and moose numbers. And in this particular region, where the Mulchatna herd is — and you can think of the Mulchatna herd's range as kind of the in-between zone from Bethel to the north to Dillingham in the south, and inland towards upper Kuskokwim communities like McGrath.
That herd has fluctuated a lot over the years. I mean, I found reports and evidence and survey data that put the herd at only like 1,000 or 6,000 animals decades ago. It increased, it decreased, it increased really dramatically in the late '90s. It was at about 200,000 animals in 1997. That's kind of the high water mark, and so a lot of people's baseline goes back to this abnormally high number.
Fast forward, the herd has crashed. There's a bunch of reasons for that, but in the last couple of years, hunting has been completely closed for it. The state is facing pressure from all different sides, from sport users, from guides, from subsistence users, for, "How do we get Mulchatna caribou back to the level where we can harvest them?" And the state's rationale for this whole program is, "We need to protect the calves," and that really is why they've argued for continuity in this program, is to grow a generation of caribou that can start to reproduce and build the number back up.
CG: Zach, here's the big question: Is it working, right? I mean, it seems like there may be a lot of factors playing into the decline of the Mulchatna caribou herd, and this is a lever that the state can pull to try to help, like you said, those calves. Has it been going on long enough that they even know that it's working? Do they say it's working? What do they say about that?
ZH: Gosh, yeah, I would say that's the million-dollar question. But this program has cost close to 3 million at this point, so maybe that's the $3 million question. It depends who you ask. A lot of the people that I was interested in speaking with for this story, who know this issue backwards and forwards, many of them say, "We are not against predator control. We just want an intelligent use of it. That predator control, that's a hammer, and the state, in the last few years and under this commissioner and under this governor, has treated everything like a nail that it wants to hit with this predator control hammer." And they would say this is a flawed program, it's not inherently bad, but the data and the scientific evaluation of it was inadequately done. So that's what you've seen lawsuits about, was that we don't have bear population surveys, this was rushed through the Board of Game with inadequate notice. These are almost like procedural or technical issues without getting at the fundamental question of does predator control work.
And the short answer that I was able to come up with was probably not. That most of the science or most of the wildlife biology that's looked at this long term says there might be short-term increases. That pretty drastic interventions, if sustained, can affect levels, but once the intervention goes away, once the predator control program stops, things kind of revert, and the increases really aren't that dramatic, especially relative to cost, and especially relative to other interventions like environmental management and dealing with disease and stuff like that.
But the state will say that, in the short term, from what they've gathered from their surveys, the herd is growing. It's pretty modest growth. It's along some key metrics. That's both the overall size of the herd and then how many young caribou are reaching it to maturity, and based on their aerial survey methods and some of the other data that they've collected, it does look like the herd has grown a little bit in recent years.
I think the bigger question that needs to be asked is, are those modest growth increases, do they justify the degree, how radical a degree, of intervention the state has exercised?
CG: We're just talking about this one particular region, but are folks talking about the possibility that this program could be applied in other parts of the state?
ZH: Yeah, people are definitely talking about it and talking about it in different ways. I have not seen any specific policy that says, "We want to do this, X, Y and Z elsewhere." But a lot of the people that are most vocally opposed to this program worry that the Mulchatna program is going to be used as a template to go and do this bear control, this intensive aerial gunning on bears, in other places.
And part of the reason they think that is because Doug Vincent Lang has kind of said it. You know, caribou stocks are not really doing great anywhere in Alaska right now, and there's some places that people rely on them more than in the southwest region, and particularly in the northwest Arctic. That's a much bigger caribou place than Southwest Alaska. But one of the issues is that's a lot more federal than state land, so right now the state cannot do this kind of intensive aerial gunning on federal lands.
And so what Doug Vincent Lang said to me in our interview was, you know, there are conversations that are happening, there's increasing interest about — especially given that we have a very sympathetic administration in the White House and in the federal government — about allowing these kind of state tactics to be used on federal lands.
So I think that topic is live. I think it's being explored. A lot of it will depend on who the next governor is. Doug Vincent Lang has been at the head of ADF&G since 2018 when Gov. Mike Dunleavy was first elected. And the next governor will appoint the next Fish and Game Commissioner, who will be the one who's in charge of the department and all the staff members and be liaising with the Board of Game, which sets policy on a lot of these programs.
