Grizzly bears never cease to amaze us.
Data downloaded from a GPS collar fitted on a young male grizzly bear shows he surprisingly, and somewhat regularly, travelled across glaciated terrain in search of good habitat last year.
The young bear, known as number 125, travelled over the top of the Wapta Icefield, eventually apearing at the north end of the Blaeberry Valley in B.C. where he spent the entire breeding season.
“It was during the hunting season and I was surprised we didn’t lose him,” said Steve Michel, a Parks Canada wildlife expert during a Feb. 25 presentation hosted by the Bow Valley Naturalists.
“We couldn’t believe he zipped right over the top of the Wapta Icefield. When I’m skiing up there in terrain like that, I’d never think of seeing a grizzly bear way up there.”
Bear 125 eventually made his way back to Banff National Park, again crossing the Wapta Icefield. He’s travelled through glaciated terrain in Yoho Valley.
Michel said high mountain travel does not pose any kind of constraint to this bear.
“He’ll go over high mountain passes and cross glaciated terrain – going from point A to point B – to get to good bear habitat,” he said. “He does high elevation travel much more so than any other bear we’ve ever seen.”
Bear 125 is one of 11 grizzly bears captured last spring and fitted with high tech GPS collars as part of a project to stop so many bears dying on the train tracks in Banff and Yoho national parks.
Of 11 grizzlies fitted with radio collars, six are females with offspring, including bear 64, the matriarch of the Bow Valley. The other five are males, including bear 122, a 317-kg bruin packing a big attitude.
The collaring project is one of many studies underway as part of a joint $1 million Parks Canada/Canadian Pacific Railway action plan to curtail grizzly bear mortality. Bears are often attracted to the tracks by spilled grain.
The train tracks are the single biggest killer of grizzly bears in the parks over the past decade. Since 2000, trains have killed 13 grizzly bears in Banff and Yoho.
Tracking data from last summer shows grizzly bears crossed the railway tracks 553 times and there were 354 total locations of grizzly bears actually on the train tracks for 2012.
In all, 19,173 radio telemetry locations were recorded in just six months last year, compared to 15,000 locations for an entire decade through VHF technology used by the 1994-2001 Eastern Slopes Grizzly Bear Project.
The data is showing that the mean size of a home range for males in the study is 1,674 square kilometres, while the mean size of home range for females is 464 sq. km.
It also revealed that six of 11 collared grizzlies were in the Flints Park area of the Cascade Valley last August, while three females, all with offspring in tow, used the Fairholme Benchlands between Banff and Canmore.
Four of 11 spent time in the northern end of Kootenay National Park near Marble Canyon, in the area of the 2003 forest fires, during the buffalo berry season.
Michel said the kind of detailed information the GPS collars provide speaks to the necessary evil of capturing, drugging and collaring grizzly bears, which he acknowledges can be stressful on the animals.
He said there have been significant advances in drugs used on bears, and he and his crew worked closely with an in-house veterinarian. Culvert traps and ground-based darting was used to capture the bears instead of leg snares.
“I don’t like doing this kind of work. I’d prefer if we didn’t have to handle the bears, but the reality is there’s no way to get on a collar without an immobilization procedure,” said Michel.
“DNA work with rub trees and remote cameras are fantastic tools for bear research, but they are used for very different reasons and they don’t give us the fine-scale data we need that collars do.”
Grizzly bears are considered a threatened species in Alberta because of their low reproductive rates, low population sizes, long intervals between breeding and high rates of mortality near human development.
There are less than 700 bears on provincial lands, but despite living on federally protected lands, the estimated 60 bears in Banff National Park still face intense pressure.
There’s a mandate to increase visitation by two per cent a year, development pressures, new commercial special events and ski area long-range development planning, including proposed summer use at Mount Norquay.
On top of that, the growing city of Calgary is just 130 km away, bringing regional population pressures, and the traffic volumes on the Trans-Canada Highway and Canadian Pacific Railway are increasing over time.
While the railway is the single biggest source of mortality for bears, the highway is not far behind, with bears finding ways around the wildlife exclusion fence.
“And then the big question, of course, is climate change and evolving ecosystem conditions,” said Michel.
Michel said grizzly bears evoke emotional and mystical feelings within the hearts and souls of people, and perhaps part of that is because of a fear of these iconic animals.
“I’m not sure that fear is the right word, but it’s really empowering when you bump into a grizzly bear on the landscape. Your knees may have been knocking, but I think you’re much richer because of it,” he said.
“These kinds of experiences can still happen here, right outside our back doors. You can hike in California or Colorado where bears no longer are, and yes they are beautiful landscapes, but it can be quite a hollow experience without grizzly bears there.”
