NATIONAL PARK SERVICE Demography of Grizzly Bears in Relation to Hunting and Mining Development in Northwestern Alaska

1. Maintain radio collars on 30 to 50 adult female grizzly bears for the next 5 to 10 years. Because the bear population within a 13,000-km² area is being harvested at or above sustained-yield levels and the effects of the Red Dog Mine have not yet been fully determined, maintaining a pool of radio-collared females will allow managers to continue to assess the effects of harvest and gross effects of the mine on the bear population. Continued monitoring will allow managers to gather long-term productivity and mortality data necessary to determine sustainable harvest limits. Without maintaining a radio-collared sample of bears, biologists will be unable to distinguish between harvest- and mine-related effects.

2. Radio-collared females should be monitored more frequently during March through April to gather more accurate data on productivity and survival of COY and yearlings.

3. If research on grizzly bears continues, efforts should be made to obtain accurate estimates of survival rates of subadult bears, particularly 2- through 4-year-old age classes. Modeling exercises suggest these parameters are important for estimating sustainable harvest. These data are difficult to collect because of the expense involved with temporary collars or frequent changes of collars to accommodate growth.

4. A mark—resight census should be repeated within the Red Dog Mine census area within the next 5-10 years. Full-scale ore production did not begin until 1990, so by 1995 many of the effects from the mine on the bear population should be evident.

5. We recommend marking all bears encountered during capture operations. This includes COY, yearlings, subadults, and unmarked males. Saturation-tagging permits managers to effectively track marked bears through the harvest. The latter may be particularly important if changes are to be made in bear hunting regulations.

6. Satellite telemetry should be used on selected bears to document potential interactions between bears and the operating mine.

7. Changes in current bear hunting regulations are desired by subsistence users; however, if changes are made, a strong enforcement effort will be necessary to ensure biological integrity of the data, compliance with regulations, and adequate protection of the resource.

8. Management biologists need to closely monitor the status of grizzly bears in northwestern Alaska. The popular belief is that bears are numerous and populations need to be reduced. Nearly half of the bear harvest in northwestern Alaska comes from the area where we studied bears. Some local residents believe that bear densities are at an all-time high in area 23. Informal conversations with guides—and results of our own observations from hundreds of hours of flying in the Kobuk, Selawik, and Purcell mountain areas—suggested that grizzly bears are much less numerous in those areas than in the NRSA. Results of a meeting with professional hunting guides in 1988 also suggested that grizzly bear densities in other areas of northwestern Alaska are much lower than those reported for the Red Dog Mine census area (Alaska Department of Fish and Game files). If sustainable harvests within the area are indeed larger than we have reported, additional objective data concerning distribution and abundance of bears is needed above and beyond public comments received so far. Perhaps additional censuses are required to confirm whether bear densities are at historic high levels.

9. An informational and educational program geared towards local residents is necessary to ensure adequate conservation of grizzly bears in northwestern Alaska. Loon and Georgette (1989) reported that many local residents believe grizzly bear populations to be high. Local residents apparently have expressed concerns about "the growing number of bears in the region and the hazard they pose to children, cabins, camps, and food caches." Unfortunately, the location of several villages, such as Noatak and Kivilina, are adjacent to fish concentration areas where bears feed. At times, local residents can come into contact with a relatively large proportion of the bear population that may be temporally concentrated at these sites. Local residents need additional information about the methods available for avoiding confrontations with bears.

10. The Division of Wildlife Conservation should establish a bear management plan that sets population objectives, levels of harvest by various user groups, methods of implementation, and timetables for implementation. The division should determine which of the current bear hunting regulations are appropriate for northwestern Alaska, draft new regulations if necessary, determine the timing and degree of enforcement required, and make appropriate recommendations to the Alaska Board of Game.