This kind of remarkable stuff happens all the time in Alaska. It's what made it such a fun place to be a reporter. Rarely a day went by without some sort of "holy shit" story to tell in the paper.
Today's comes from The Anchorage Daily News. They have a story about a bear that was captured in 2001 and repeatedly released further and further into the wilderness, in hopes that he'd just stay there and keep away from humans. He was seen so often, folks nicknamed him "Old Yeller" because of the yellow I.D. tag that had been placed in his ear by Alaska game officials.
Apparently the black bear had a jones for bird seed. After emerging from its den last spring, it started raiding neighborhoods again. State biologists received 37 reports about the bear in just three weeks. On April 26, the 260-pound bear was tranquilized near an elementary school and equipped it with the tracking collar. The bear was in prime shape, weighing about 260 pounds, with glossy black fur.
The collar, originally designed for tracking wolves, was programed to record its location every half-hour through June 30 using global positioning satellites. It also broadcast a VHF radio signal so that biologists could find it. Biologists expected to see the bear pretty often, so the plan was to eventually take the collar off and put it on a wolf sometime in the future.
What happened next amazed even the most experienced experts.
For the next several months, Old Yeller wandered about 200 miles south of Anchorage, even crossing a pretty broad body of water at one point. No one can remember ever hearing of a black bear attempting such a thing in that area before.
The collar was eventually recovered - someone had cut it from the bear's neck. That means the bear was probably dead at the time.
Here's my favorite passage:
Why would a bear leave the great bait bucket that we call Anchorage and go down to the Kenai?" Sinnott said. "Who knows what he was thinking. ... It was the breeding period. Maybe there weren't enough hot females in the city."