Two wild animals caused mayhem in two different buildings in Petersburg last month — both, within 24 hours of each other. First, a grouse trespassed in Petersburg’s airport. Then a black bear cub broke into a grocery store downtown — and though neither people nor products were hurt in the chaos, things ended poorly for the young bear.
KFSK’s Shelby Herbert has the story on why wildlife officials decided to euthanize the cub — and how the wayward bird fared much better.
A baby black bear, just about the size of a small dog, darted past slabs of frozen meat in Petersburg’s downtown grocery store on October 17th.
Rudy Rosas was at the IGA to shop for some snacks. And then mayhem ensued. He took shelter outside the store behind a huge pile of pumpkins and took a video with his smartphone — that’s what you’re hearing now.
Petersburg police and Alaska Wildlife Troopers responded within minutes — lassoing the cub with a catchpole and escorting it out of the store.
Pam Stewart is an employee at IGA. She saw it all go down.
“I was just over in our cooler aisle and all of a sudden I saw a little black bear come running through — just a little baby. It scared the heck out of me,” said Stewart. “So, then we’re trying to catch him in our meat department, trying to get [him] out of the store, but we couldn’t.”
But, Stewart says, the cub didn’t actually manage to get into any food.
“He was just running around terrified,” said Stewart. “Poor little guy.”
Before police and Wildlife Troopers arrived, she and her coworkers were worried that the cub’s mother was just around the corner. But mom never came. And that’s part of the reason why Troopers made the difficult decision to euthanize the young bear.
Austin McDaniel is a spokesperson for the Alaska Wildlife Troopers. He says the responding officers doubted the young bear’s ability to survive in the wild. And that’s because they found the cub in poor condition — it was emaciated.
“It did not have any kind of measure of fat that would be able to sustain it through the winter,” said McDaniel. “It had been abandoned for unknown reasons, and did not really have any ways to significantly acquire resources to recover from its condition.”
When word got out that the cub was euthanized, some Petersburg residents questioned why officials didn’t send it to a facility that would care for it. McDaniel says they considered that as an option. But the cub wasn’t healthy enough to handle the stress of the trip.
“Even if [the bear] could, as we were trying to locate a facility somewhere to transport that bear,” said McDaniel, “there were none available in the region, or anywhere in the state that were willing to take the bear.”
Over at Petersburg’s James A. Johnson Airport, another errant critter had better luck.
Just a day before the bear incident, an unruly, feathered passenger tried to get through airport security with no ticket, no identification, and no Precheck. When confronted by airport security, it defecated on a newspaper stand.
Mali Christensen is a station agent. She says, in what she believes to be a first for Petersburg’s small airport, a grouse broke into the terminal.
“We came off of Flight 64, and the terminal was empty, except for one lonely grouse sitting out here by the newspaper machine,” said Christensen. “Anyway, He did leave us a little treat before he did the mad dash out the front door on our windowsill. But, yeah — that was a big, interesting part of the day.”
Two TSA agents were tasked with flushing him out. Having missed the southbound jet, the bird had to come up with a new flight plan.
“He flew out the door, right back out into the muskeg,” said Christensen. “It was a beautiful moment. [He] soared!”
As it turns out, there are no shortcuts for winter migration — at least, not under the watchful eye of the Transportation Security Administration.
