Lots of good posts above, especially MD's. I've had a permanent home outside Soldotna, on a wooded hilltop just a quarter mile from the Kenai River. The hilltop is a preferred daytime bedding area for fishing brown bears in-season. They are through or by my yard on an almost daily basis. I found one bedded under the bow of the boat, 30 yards outside the bedroom window one evening (it was raining hard). The morning after I poured my sidewalk, there were 10 inch muddy tracks down the length of it. It apparently preferred that to walking thru the muddy garden...
I've had 'em on my deck (clean your grill after use!), in the back of the pickup (don't leave garbage in it overnight!), and a sow with 2 year old triplets ripped the end off the dog kennel (I didn't get to cleaning up that moose head in time). Problems of my own making.
I've had year old cubs try to approach my furiously barking Lab who kept backing away. I was 30 feet behind the dog, backing away, the cubs were 15 feet from the dog, with mom 30 feet behind the cubs, all the time both of us telling the cubs to get the hell back in the woods where they belonged. Mom very carefully did not make eye contact with me the whole time. We both knew if she did she would have to do something about it, and I'd have to beat her to death with my garden trowel.
After the first couple years, and several bear encounters there, I quit worrying about my kids. The bears, on the other hand, were on their own...
Sam is coming from the perspective of a stockman, so that is legit opinion. I don't have to worry about that.
Bears are eating machines, and will go where the food is - apparently there is still enough food out on the plains (excluding stock), that the bears are filling in their former habitat.
The hair/barbed wire/DNA technique is likely the best way to determine bear populations. After years of claiming there were only 300-400 brown bears on the Kenai Peninsula (using a Montana model in different habitat, and arial snow tracking in the early winter
), when everyone - including the biologists- knew better, funding was obtained for the hair study. Sure enough, they came up with double that number, which I suspect is still a bit conservative.
I've not tried it personally, but if time and circumstances (and nerves) allow, I suspect #6 12 Ga. pheasant loads at 10 feet and closing would be an effective bear deterrent.
Besides, we have way more people than bears... (I couldn't resist..
)
Tho I've had several encounters of the turd knd over the last 40 plus years in Alaska, the only bear I've "had" to shoot was a 200 pound black that came in on our moose meat. That was probably because I killed a bull 100 yards or so from where someone had killed one the previous weekend... Just more meat in the meat-pile to make up for the few bites and ripped game bags. Besides, he wasn't going away, so....
