DENALI: Proposal bans taking sows, cubs from den in preserve.

Unhappy that the state Board of Game has allowed black bear cubs or sows with cubs to be killed in their dens, the National Park Service is conducting hearings this week on a proposal to ban the practice in the 1.3-million-acre preserve portion of Denali National Park and Preserve.

The proposal would also ban the use of artificial light to aid in taking black bears in dens.

In November 2008, the board unanimously voted to authorize residents to use artificial light to take black bears at den sites and to take black bear cubs and sows with cubs between Oct. 15 and April 30 in state game management Unit 19A, portions of Unit 19D and in Units 21B, 21C, 21D, 24, and 25D. The regulation went into effect last July.

"The state's got predator control going there because of moose degradation by black bears," said Cliff Judkins of the Board of Game. "We had a report by the biologists out there a few years ago, and the only way to reduce it was to reduce the black bears. The park service has a goal of maintaining biodiversity where they don't allow any manipulation of one species for the benefit of another.

"The way state land is run, of course, is to ... manage predators to ensure an abundance of ungulates. They do their job and we do our job and it seems to work fine together."

Kristy Tibbles, executive director of the Game Board, said the proposal reflected "a traditional practice for taking bear in those areas. For safety purposes, they requested use of light be legalized."

Tibbles quoted a supporting comment submitted by the Middle Yukon Fish and Game Advisory Committee when the proposal was under consideration: "Taking bears from dens is a traditional method of our people to harvest black bears for our needs. As a safety issue, it is important that we can use flashlights to look into the den to see what the bear is doing. Whether it is sleeping, whether it is dead or wounded after being shot, or whether it is attacking."

The park service aims to ban those practices at Denali, in the northwest and southwest corners that are part of the preserve where sport hunting is permitted, as well as Gates of the Arctic preserve. Hunting is outlawed on national park lands.

"We're required to manage for healthy populations, and if there's an issue that we feel is not going to let us do that, we have to take action," said Kris Fister, a spokeswoman for Denali National Park and Preserve.

"It's really targeting (cubs and sows) at a time when they have no defense," Fister said. "It's part of the state's intensive management to diminish predator populations."

However, because the preserve areas are remote and difficult to access, park service biologists consider it "likely that the number taken is very low," Fister said.

When the Board of Game approved the practice, "we didn't immediately recognize there were slices of the preserves in Denali and Gates of Arctic included," said John Quinley, assistant regional director of the National Park Service.

"We felt that those provisions ... were unacceptable impacts to the national preserves' values," he said.

The park service wrote proposals exempting the Denali and Gates of the Arctic preserves, but they were rejected by the Board of Game, which suggested the park service write its own rules on the preserve.

Read more here:

Park Service would ban hunting bear cubs in dens in Alaska preserves, Fairbanks Daily News - Miner, March 26th 2010

Park Service hopes to protect denning black bears, KTUU.com March 27th, 2010