Jeff Gailus: Role Reversal in Grizzly Population Management

Role reversal

As grizzly bears become increasingly threatened north of the 49th parallel, Canadians look to the U.S. for solutions

By Jeff Gailus
http://www.headwatersnews.org/

There was a time not so very long ago when American conservationists and biologists looked north across the 49th parallel with hope. They saw a vast wilderness full of grizzly bears they thought would always be able to augment flagging populations of Ursus arctos in the lower 48 states.

Those days are long gone. Now, as Americans contemplate the delisting of the Yellowstone grizzly, many Canadian conservationists and biologists are looking south to figure out how to reverse the continuing decline of grizzly bears and the habitat they depend on in the Canadian West.

Nowhere is this truer than Alberta, where the political and legislative climate is so hostile, and grizzly bear habitat so degraded, that the future of the grizzly is as uncertain as it is anywhere on the continent.

From the perspective of the grizzly bear, the history of the Canadian West is similar to that of its southern neighbor. Grizzly bears once roamed as far east as the Manitoba-Ontario border, but as trappers and fur traders moved west in search of beaver, grizzly bears, buffalo and most other mammals became increasingly scarce.

By the time settlers started flooding the prairies in the late 19th century, grizzlies were all but gone from the Great Plains, relegated instead to the boreal forests and tundra of the North and to the foothills and mountains of southern Canada.

Today, most grizzly bear "populations" on the Canadian side of the border are considered threatened or nearly so. Only two, British Columbia’s Flathead and South Purcell grizzly bear "population units" contain "viable" populations, and only the Flathead provides the potential for meaningful connectivity with a recovering, though not recovered, population in the U.S.'s Northern Continental Divide Ecosystem.

In Alberta, the provincial government's own Endangered Species Conservation Committee recommended that the Alberta grizzly be listed as a threatened species, but the government has refused to adopt the recommendation and has done little to reverse the trends threatening grizzly bears everywhere they still exist.

It may come as a surprise that Alberta harbors arguably the most threatened population of grizzly bears in Canada, if not North America. This situation has less to do with ecology or biology and everything to do with politics.

South of the border, grizzly bears are protected by relatively strong legislation (the Endangered Species Act) and a science-based and well-funded recovery plan. While not perfect, these measures, kept on track by a reasonably robust environmental movement, seem able to ensure grizzly bears, perhaps even the small, isolated populations that hang on in places like the Selkirk, Cabinet-Yaak and Cascade mountains, will receive the attention, and habitat, they require to recover.

The success of the recovering Yellowstone population, which has doubled over the last 30 years, is a good example of what is required to recover declining grizzly bear populations.

Biologists have long recognized that access management is the key. Keeping road densities low and ensuring enough secure core habitat exists across the recovery zone are key components of recovering grizzly bears, and have worked well in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem.
"The Yellowstone recovery plan is still the high bar," said grizzly bear biologist and Banff National Park warden Mike Gibeau. "And we’re nowhere near that in Alberta."

There are no reliable estimates for the Alberta population. The process used by the government to estimate population size and set hunting quotas between 1988 and 2002, one that suggested the population had grown by almost 50 per cent over the last 15 years, was determined by a government analysis to have used "questionable practices" that "are not scientifically defensible," leading to predictions that are "not biologically possible."

Expert opinion suggests there are between 500 and 700 of some of the slowest-reproducing grizzly bears found anywhere in North America. They survive in approximately 260,000 kilometers of western Alberta, though the amount of habitat "occupied" by females with cubs is likely much smaller than that.

This so-called recovery zone is so riddled with roads and cutblocks it is unlikely that any significant patch of grizzly bear range (outside of the national parks) would meet even the weakest standards used in the United States for road density and core secure area.

The deplorable state of grizzly bear habitat in Alberta wouldn't be so alarming if the government was committed to do what is needed to recover grizzly bears in the province. But it is not.

After 15 years, virtually none of Alberta's 1990 Grizzly Bear Management Plan has been implemented. When the Alberta Endangered Species Conservation Committee recommended that the grizzly bear be listed as a threatened species in 2002, the Alberta government decided, for the first time ever, to ignore the recommendation, choosing instead to continue the hunt north of Calgary, although it did decrease the number of tags available.

In an absurd twist reminiscent of a Franz Kafka novel, the government did convene a team in 2003 to develop a recovery plan for a species that is still being hunted for sport. Two years later, the multi-stakeholder recovery team, dominated by industry hacks and pro-industry government bureaucrats, submitted a draft plan to the Alberta government.

Although the plan contains some important ideas and strategies, it is extremely weak, based not on science but on the political manipulation of science. (There is not enough room here to include a detailed critique of the recovery plan. For more information, see http://www.headwatersnews.org/www.grizzlybearalliance.org.)

Even if the draft recovery plan is implemented as rigorously as possible, it will do little to slow the continued decline of grizzly bears in Alberta.If Alberta is to begin the long, slow road to recovering its grizzly bear population, it will need to develop, fund and implement a recovery plan that is similar in scope and detail to the Yellowstone recovery plan that has proven so successful to date.

Inevitably, this will require Albertans to restrain their activities in grizzly bear habitat and to repair decades of damage that has been ignored for too long.But in the long term, the investment will have been worth it, for as Andy Russell wrote more than 40 years ago, grizzly bears can teach us something of what it means to live with nature, which is something we will be forced to learn, whether we like it or not.

Jeff Gailus is a writer and conservationist living in Calgary, Alberta. He is currently working on a book about the history and future of Canada’s Great Plains grizzly bear.


Readers respond:

Conservation efforts must address how changes affect humans, too

Let me get this straight.

Jeff Gailus wants Alberta to follow the U.S. conservation model, and for Albertans to, um, "inevitably," um, "restrain their activities" just like has happened south of the border?

On whose authority?

And I can't help but notice the "Kafkaesque" aspect to part of what Ms. Nelson wrote in her sidebar: "Conservationists say the purpose of the Crown of the Continent is not to create new wilderness or public parks, but instead to provide bears and other animals a way to migrate north with as few conflicts with humans as possible." Well, that's what conservationists SAY.
What do they DO?

I would appreciate it if someone at Headwaters or elsewhere could explain to me Montana Wilderness Association's (a Y2Y member group) proposal for the Winton Wedemeyer wilderness proposal in the Flathead North Fork, which of course appears "moderate" compared to the "Flathead National Park and Preserve" thing pushed by Alliance for the Wild Rockies...also a Y2Y member/affiliate -- these are not attempts to create wilderness and/or parks?

Look, folks. People know what is going on. Y2Y is social engineering on a massive scale in support of a value system that isn't exactly mainstream either in its origins or in its implementation.

Unless Y2Y advocates truly consider the consequences for human ecology, and integrate concern for those consequences into both rhetoric (Jeff certainly does not) and policy, they will fail.

Dave Skinner
Whitefish, Montana

Analysis: Grizzly bear's status depends on location

By Shellie Nelson, assistant editor
Headwaters News
April 13, 2005

A lot in life is determined by where you're born, the state of the country in which you live, the attitude of government toward the political heft of your champions and how easy it is to make a sustainable life.

So, too, is the evolving status of the grizzly bear.

Columnist Jeff Gailus writes that the grizzly bear population in Alberta is probably the most threatened in the Northern Hemisphere and attributes the bear's dire straits to the political environment of that province.

A bear living in the the remote wilderness of the Northwestern portion of the United States enjoys federal protection as a threatened species under the Endangered Species Act of 1973.
In 1975, when the grizzly bear was first listed as threatened there were fewer than 1,000 bears in the West, with 200 to 300 in Yellowstone National Park.

Bear populations in and around Yellowstone National Park have rebounded to an estimated 700, most of them in Wyoming.

Wyoming, Montana and Idaho have revamped their management plans to handle the expanded populations.

Wyoming's draft management plan released this month creates two recovery zones: The bear enjoys primary protection on park lands and adjoining national and state forest lands, and authorities are given wide latitude in areas outside the primary protection zone to handle bear-human conflicts.

Critics of Wyoming's management plan and of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service's plan to remove the grizzly bear from the threatened list say state and federal officials have not considered what 2004's record mortality rate has done to the genetic diversity of the bear populations.

In 2004, 50 grizzly bears were killed or died in the lower 48 states, and 19 of the bears lost were in Yellowstone, more than 2 1/2 times higher than the 15-year average.

Sixty percent of the dead bears were female. Some say the high mortality rate was due to years-long drought that dried up food sources and forced bears to travel longer distances for food.
Bear experts say at least 500 bears are needed to maintain genetic diversity and when they factor in losses of 2 percent to 5 percent of the population, they conclude the Fish and Wildlife Service is acting too hastily.

Plans to introduce grizzly bears into the Bitterroot-Selway Wilderness along the Montana-Idaho border and to funnel populations into Idaho's Frank Church River of No Return Wilderness were shelved by the Bush administration in 2001, despite a strong belief the move would have provided a long-term solution for the species' survival.

A few hundred miles northeast of the proposed reintroduction area, conservationists are working with ranchers to create a wildlife corridor that runs from Ovando, Mont., north 150 miles to the Canadian border.

The habitat bridge, dubbed the "Crown of the Continent" corridor, gives grizzly bears, elk, wolves and other animals a sheltered land for migration.

The trail ends in 98,000 acres of land in British Columbia secured for wildlife habitat through a landmark agreement in December 2004, between the Nature Conservancy of Canada and Tembec, a Canadian forestry company.

Conservationists say the purpose of the Crown of the Continent is not to create new wilderness or public parks, but instead to provide bears and other animals a way to migrate north with as few conflicts with humans as possible.

British Columbia officials estimate there are 14,000 grizzlies across the province. The provincial government takes a somewhat modified approach to sustaining bear populations, with bears being protected in national and provincial parks.

Hunting of grizzlies is allowed in British Columbia with permits, with number of permits set as a percentage of total bear populations. The percentages are reviewed every three years and adjusted as needed.

The grizzly bear faces a lot of challenges: human encroachment on its habitat, environmental changes caused by higher temperatures and drier conditions, and barriers to migration such as roads and oil and gas exploration.

But the most significant of all challenges may be the political ebb and flow of support for the species, both north and south of the Canadian border.