Found this on Youtube today, wanted to share it here since I know we have members who live in Alaska and can confirm rather this is a large bear or just average! I really enjoy these types of videos, since where I live we also have bears but they are a much smaller species (American Black Bear) than what you guys in Alaska have! Enjoy!

looks like a grizzly, what do you think Rich

Yeah that Brownie is pretty big alright, and well fed from eating salmon by the looks of it, Brownies are coastal and can get bigger than the inland Grizzlies because of gorging themselves on Salmon ,although they both can get pretty huge, there have been some taken that were close to 12 ft from nose to tail and can have a skull over 30 inches wide.
Here is a link to the Katmai National Park website.

http://www.katmailand.com/bear-viewing/about-bears.html

I have never seen one as big as a 10 or 12 foot monster but I was visited by a pretty good sized brownie at another cabin I used to live at here on Big Lake, I dont know how tall he was or how much he weighed but I can tell you when he looked at me through a four foot window his head took up more than half of the width of the pane. After I thought he had left , I went outside to go to our outhouse and he came from behind our cabin and was actually between me and the cabin , fortunately he ran up the hill and thats when he climbed into my pickup truck bed and started kind of bouncing by rearing up and then coming down hard and pushing with his front paws. I scared him off with a few bottle rockets and made a trip to the dump to get rid of some garbage we had in a bin outside in hopes that he wouldnt come back. He visited us one more time durring the night and there were some pretty huge muddy paw prints on my deck the next morning and after that we didn't see him again. Although we did hear from some other people living on the lake of some other close encounters. In the end he must have just moved on , I never heard of anyone shooting him or anyone that was attacked although he did give some people a good scare.

This post has been edited by AK Rich: Mar 3 2013, 09:56 AM

dude, that is mad! Ive always wanted to visit Alaska, it looks awesome. I dunno if I could handle the close calls with the bears though. I have some family in Canada and I heard recently that they had a bear come into their house one night!

Broke into the house, yikes! That reminds me , there is a lodge at Hatcher pass close to here, and a couple years back a bear broke into the bar and was drinking all the beer, sadly that one had to be put down.

Yeah that kind of stuff happens here with black bears.

This video was shot in Massachusetts, but we have the same kind of bear where I live. The larger one would be considered slightly above average size and this is when they are usually seen, namely raiding peoples birdfeeders!

Honey Pot Road! Sounds like a bears paradise! Man thats a pretty good sized black bear, they love bird feeders for sure,especially right after they wake up in the spring. People who live in the Municipality of Anchorage are required to take down their bird feeders in the spring or risk being ticketed, there are also folks making pretty good money manufacturing and selling so called bear proof garbage cans. And the folks at Fish and Game keep pretty busy relocating bears that have become a little too bold and unafraid of people in the city, once they figure out the city is an easy place to get a meal they start becoming a nuisance, not to mention dangerous.

One thing about people and bears that always makes me shake my head is that people come up here from the lower 48 states and think that they can live with wild bears in order to study them and actually try to become one of the bears in their mind, or they think the bears somehow know that these people, (or weaker bears as I see them) are there to somehow help them. And then people wonder why they end up getting killed and/or eaten which is usually what happens to the weakest bears, its the law of the jungle right? Survival of the fittest and competing for territory? So then what happens is that Fish and Game has to go out and track down these bears which are now deemed man eaters and destroy them for no other reason than they are just doing what comes naturally.
The bears are not your friend, they are not cute and cuddly and they certainly don't think you are there to help them.

Why do they put them out? Can't they just be tranquilized and taken back into the wild?

In Romania, there was a huge scandal a few weeks ago about bears attacking some people - but of course, other people drove them out of their habitat and thus they were searching for food in other spots. Animals are never guilty, only humans are the ones to blame each time. If animals could speak... my God what they'd have to say..

They look so cuddly!

not to get on your bad side almighty riffmeister, but all humans are living because of this( we have pushed nature out)but I am confused on what mankind should do. To not advance would be to limit human procreating or if humans advance we will interfere with nature, of course survival of the fittest would decree that humans advance, just a thought

I am not sure I understand your question Cosmin, If you are refering to the bears that enter the city and become unafraid of people and are raiding garbage and the like , what you have described is exactly what happens , the animals are tranquilized and relocated.

Yeah this is what they do here as well, relocation.

On a lighter note, this one of my favorite commercials......




And I also like this one.......

Lmao! I have never seen those commercials before , thanks strat!

Found this video taken at the world famous Russian River just upstream from the Kenai/Russian river confluence, It's only a few hours drive from here and I have fished there many times. It is very common to see bears here especially at the time this was taken durring a run of Sockeye, or Red Salmon. This guy is just a juvenille but still very dangerous and unpredictable and he gives the fisherman a bit of a scare.

Yeah, that's what I was thinking of - thing is, in here, they killed them and I was afraid they did that there as well

Well, I can't deny that some bears are killed because of situations like you have described where they are attacking people, not always mind you but sometimes it is deemed neccesary, especially if they have become extremely dangerous for whatever reasons, sometimes they become crazed from infection , injuries or rabies, or they are preying on people or pets, which is actually not very common.
After all, people should not have to live in fear of being attacked by wild animals in metropolitan areas should they? For example, what if someones kids were taken and killed or eaten by bear or wolves? People are territorial and protective of their young just the same as many animals are,especially when dealing with predators. The differance being people are far more tolerant when animals encroach than the other way around, at least they are here.
I think we co-exist with wildlife very well here but sometimes steps have to be taken to ensure the safety of the public.

This post has been edited by AK Rich: Mar 7 2013, 08:53 AM

Iin here, de-foresting and all sorts of stupid actions taken by greedy people have driven them out of their habitat and they end up searching for food around towns. Indeed an animal that has rabies is very very dangerous, but as you said, it's a rare case.

This post has been edited by Cosmin Lupu: Mar 7 2013, 09:16 AM