Alaska’s People Just Another Species on the Wilderness Ark

Set gray wolves loose in Idaho and you hear the ranchers’ howls. Allow wild turkeys to hob-gobble about Connecticut and you get letters to the editor. Release a prairie dog in Colorado and you have the locals up in arms. Literally.

But up here in the Great Land, talk of troublesome turkeys and pesky prairie dogs is met with a great big yawn.

Why? Read the license plates, fella. This is the Last Frontier. The corner of America where large critters outnumber people 5 to 1. The land humans and hairy ones share and share alike.

As a moose controller on the Talkeetna rail gang, Sunday Bumanglag’s job is to make sure moose don’t become moose meat when the Seward-to-Fairbanks train passes through. Mind you, moose control can be tricky. Especially if a 7-foot, 1,600-pound bull has taken a liking to a particular section of track.

Bumanglag normally tries the whistle first.

No response? He blink-blinks the headlights.

Moose didn’t blink? The foreman CA-RONG!s a warning shot with a hunting rifle.

If Bullwinkle still doesn’t get the picture, Bumanglag goes to Plan D.

He waits.

Sometimes for half an hour. If passengers start to grumble, Bumanglag makes an announcement: “We have a stubborn moose, ladies and gentlemen.” That’s usually enough to turn scowls to smiles.

“I mean, this is moose country,” Bumanglag says. “We’re just guests in the moose’s living room.”

Peaceful Coexistence

In Alaska, critters are everywhere and humans do a pretty good job of living alongside them. Non-Alaskans might say that’s because farming never took root here and because the state’s so big that humans and animals don’t trip over each other.

But folks here note that while the Paul Bunyans of the Lower 48 were scalping forests and pushing many animals toward oblivion, Alaskans came to appreciate their critters.

“The bush makes you a different person,” says Steve Mahay, an outdoorsman in Talkeetna, an assemblage of log cabins and house trailers in Susitna Valley. He earns a living by taking visitors on trails and on his riverboat to gawk at things nonhuman in the bush.

In Saratoga, N.Y., where he grew up on a farm in the ‘60s, Mahay loved catching muskrats in steel traps. When suburbia came creeping, he gathered his guns and his wife and rode the Alaska Highway west in 1972.

Mahay built a trapper’s cabin and lived off game meat. With a .44 magnum and a .22 rifle he killed 11 bears during his first few years in the bush.

He doesn’t do it anymore, though. “I don’t get any pleasure shooting them,” Mahay says. “Funny how that changed.” Now he counts how many bears he spots from his riverboat. His single-day record: 16.

Carole Lloyd, director of the Nature Center at Chugach State Park, doesn’t know Steve Mahay but insists she can explain his change of heart. “When you live in the wild,” she says, “you learn tolerance for all living things.”

This is a land where bald eagles lunch on poodles and dachshunds; where flocks of Canada geese keep jetliners in holding patterns; where an intruder in your home is likely to slobber and leave a pile on the rug.

In Juneau, the state capital, black bears poke through trash bins, raid bird feeders, even duck into supermarkets. Eight years ago, a cub entered the Barlett Regional Hospital emergency ward.

Nobody called 911.

Laura Stats, a nurse, found the bear sitting on a bed. She fed it some milk and apples, sedated it, called the Fish and Game Department and returned to her rounds.

In Anchorage, where half of human Alaska resides, nobody is surprised to drive home from work and find a moose on the roof. “Happens all the time,” says Rick Sinnott, a wildlife biologist. At his desk at the Fish and Game Department, the phone rings nonstop, people calling to report critter capers:

* A porcupine falling out of a tree into some woman’s new hairdo.

* A squadron of ravens chewing up the windshield wipers on cars parked at a mall.

* A moose dragging away a kid’s swing set.

* A bear mauling a bear-shaped archery target.

“We still aren’t sure if the bear was playing or trying to mate with it,” Sinnott says.

If there is one misconception humans have about critter country, it is that pets will feel at home here.

A couple on vacation from Georgia learned otherwise a few years ago after stopping at a Valdez gas station. When the woman let her Chihuahua out to relieve itself, a bald eagle swooped down, snatched it by the scruff and circled up and off.

“The dog gave one yelp,” says Dennis Fleming, the station attendant, “and that was it.”

Forget Disney Cartoons

Alaskans know wild animals are not Disney characters. Moose cause more than 100 traffic accidents a year in Anchorage. They destroy fences, eat shrubbery and “we tend to have a stomping every couple of years,” says Bruce Bartley, a spokesman at Fish and Game.

The last death by moose stomping in Anchorage was in January 1995. Myong Chin Ra, 71, was walking on the University of Alaska campus when a cow moose charged. He died hours later of multiple head fractures and internal injuries.

In Hoonah, a village in southeastern Alaska, a grizzly attacked 14-year-old Cody Mills as he walked a trail in June. The boy was in surgery for three hours.

“This ain’t the zoo,” says Sgt. Darlene Turner, chief of state troopers in Kodiak. “You should appreciate animals, respect them. But you can’t romanticize them.”

Particularly not at a crime scene.

Investigators were taking photographs at a murder scene when a moose appeared--head down, ears back, hackles up. Then it charged.

“We were diving over balconies, running back and forth, around parked cars, trying the get away from that thing,” Turner remembers. The smile on her face fades. “It sounds funny now, but when a moose’s on your tail, it’s not that comical.”

After three times around the lot, an idea struck: the siren. “Once he heard it,” she says, “Mr. Moose was off like a shot.”