Chilkat Valley News - Serving Haines and Klukwan, Alaska since 1966

In last week’s paper, Larry Benda in a paid commentary responded to a letter to the editor written by Tom Faverty. In this and Benda’s recent paid commentary, he said he believes Alaska Department of Fish and Game biologists manipulated brown bear data. Given the serious claim that Fish and Game biologists intentionally lied, and the public interest in this issue, I reached out to Fish and Game biologists to get their response to Benda’s claims.

Benda’s two claims are, generally, that Fish and Game lied about how many collared brown bears were killed by guided hunters and that biologists lied about the allowable harvest limit. You can read his full commentary on page five in the Dec. 16 issue.

Fish and Game regional supervisor Tom Schumacher responded to these claims in the following manner:

“There is no prohibition against taking collared bears. Mr. Benda was referring to a slide in an ADF&G presentation that summarized sources of mortality for bears marked in the Haines area over the last few years. In the public meeting where Anthony (Crupi) gave that presentation, he explained that his use of ‘collared’ was synonymous with ‘marked’ bears. In some cases ‘marked bears’ were bears that had dropped their collars but retained ear tags. The point of the slide was that a high proportion (23%) of the bears marked by ADF&G had been killed by people. For perspective, in GMU 4 ADF&G manages brown bears for a rolling 3-year average mortality rate of 4%.”

To Benda’s point that Fish and Game biologists lied about allowable brown bear harvest, Schumacher responded:

“We presented our management plan at a public meeting in March of 2021. That meeting was preceded by an announcement that ADF&G would close the spring season if five bears were harvested. At that time we assumed there would be several (bear deaths associated with defense of life or property) over the summer and hunting for the calendar year would be closed before the fall season opened. We also publicly announced that for the next few years we would manage hunts and bear mortality by the calendar, rather than regulatory year. Our intention was to limit hunter harvest to 5 bears (not more than two females) in a calendar year. The plan allows for two additional non-hunting kills (DLP etc.) for a calendar year total of 7 bears (not more than two females). The reason for including two additional bears in the annual mortality limit was to allow hunting to remain open even if there were one or two non-hunting kills. I believe that was clear when we presented the information to the public but admit that the written document could have been clearer. ADF&G regrets any confusion and will ensure the 2022 Management Plan is clear.”

-Kyle Clayton