| The door bell rang and our neighbor stuck her head in to say, "Jerry, keep the kids inside, there's a bear in your yard". |
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 This little fellow was snooping around our next door neighbor's garbage cans they had left out on a long 4th of July weekend. He is standing about 20 feet from our front door. The tree on the left of the picture is in the center of our front yard. This picture was taken by the neighbor that lives on the other side of us. She stepped out on the sidewalk to snap the picture, then yelled and waved a broom to shoo the bear off. |
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| An Alaska Fish and Wildlife ranger came by and told us this guy looked like a yearling. She was hoping to catch it, but it managed to get through a small hole in the fence in our backyard. She then told us, about an hour before we had our little visitor, they had to shoot a large boar (male) black bear just 4 blocks away; it wouldn't leave the neighborhood and go back into the woods when they tried to scare it. It kept charging at people. They were very upset about it, but the bears were being drawn into the hillside neighborhoods because of "easy pickings" from garbage cans. Because so many bear encounters occurred during the summer of 2005, the city of Anchorage went back to enforcing a law already on the books, allowing them to fine anyone who leaves their garbage cans out more than twelve hours prior to pickup. Garbage cans have to be kept inside your house, shed, or in an approved bear-proof box. In addition, the refuse collection companies were forced to a Monday through Friday schedule with the first collection not starting before 7am. |
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| This personal account was written by Jerry A. Floyd and he can be contacted at www.ShopALASKAfromHome.com or Jerry (dot) Floyd (at) gci (dot) net
For more Living In Alaska real life stories, Click here
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