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Experts: Black Bear that Attacked Workers Near Pogo Mine was Behaving Like a Predator

CBC/Google Maps

Experts with the state Department of Fish and Game say the black bear that attackedtwo workers last month near the Pogo Mine was hungry and showing predator-like behavior.

“It was a healthy adult male that hadn’t eaten in some time,” said Doreen Parker McNeill, with the department’s Fairbanks office. “It was not defending a kill. And the nature of the attack appears to have been predatory.”

McNeill, a Fish and Game coordinator, says it’s rare for bears to exhibit that kind of behavior. She says the attack on two Pogo Mine contractors who were conducting field work at a remote site about five miles from the main camp on June 19 is only the fourth such report of such behavior among 208 bear attacks reported between 1980 and 2014.

“It’s not very common for predatory attacks to happen,” she said, “but they do happen.”

One of the workers, 27-year-old Erin Johnson, of Anchorage, died of injuries she sustained in the attack. The other, 39-year-old Ellen Trainor, of Fairbanks, was treated and released from Fairbanks Memorial Hospital on the evening of the 19th. The bear was shot dead by an employee of the mine, located about 38 miles northeast of Delta Junction.

The attack was the second in as many days. On June 18, a 16-year-old competing in a race on an Anchorage-area trail was killed by a black bear as the runner made his way back after the race had ended.

Tim has worked in the news business for over three decades, mainly as a newspaper reporter and editor in southern Arizona. Tim first came to Alaska with his family in 1967, and grew up in Delta Junction before emigrating to the Lower 48 in 1977 to get a college education and see the world.