In this episode, I look at how bears are moving into the valley bottoms to feed on buffaloberries, and it’s time to make room for them as they seek out their most critical summer food. Also in this episode, I also look into a new report that examines Human-Wildlife Coexistence in the Bow Valley
Before I get started, I wanted to thank iTunes listener Mira406 from the U.S. who wrote a kind review. Mira wrote:
“This podcast is a refreshing look at the natural world around us, species, history, culture and is perfect for my listening pleasures Thank You. Lower 48 Tree Hugger”
Thanks so much Mira. I’m happy to share the stories with you.
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The Buffaloberries are back
Well, it’s that time of year again – buffaloberry season. This is the time when black and grizzly bears will be attracted to trails, roadsides, and open areas around townsites in search of this critical food source.
It’s sometimes hard to understand just how important buffaloberries are to bear populations. The central Rockies are one of the most challenging landscapes for bears to survive. On the north coast of British Columbia, which is the land of milk and honey for bears, there are five kinds of Pacific salmon and a dozen kinds of edible berries offering them plentiful food choices year-round.
Here, the bears have very few food options. This limited menu means that by learning the seasonal foods of bears, you can help to stay safe by recognizing foods that might serve as an attractant at different times of the year.
For instance, the first thing some grizzlies do in the spring is stretch, yawn, head to the avalanche slope, go to the frozen food section, and get themselves a TV dinner. Over the course of the winter, the odd bighorn sheep, and the odd mountain goat gets wiped out by avalanches, and these deep snowpacks keep them nice and well preserved, just like a frozen dinner. It’s a nice hit of protein after a long winters sleep.
So if you find yourself on an avalanche slope in June, then that’s a good place to make extra noise to let any bears know you’re in the area. It’s also worth checking out the trees to look for ravens gathering which might indicate a nearby carcass that may have attracted other large scavengers.
I’ve put a link in the show notes to an article I’ve written that gives a detailed look at many of the seasonal foods that black and grizzly bears seek out. You can find it here: http://mountainnature.com/Wildlife/Bears/BearDiet.htm
It’s worth the energy to learn the plants important to bears. It gives you one more tool to stay safe in bear country. If you know what they’re eating, where they’re eating it, and how much of it they’re eating, then just by what’s growing around you, you’ll have a good idea when to be extra vigilant, when to make extra noise. You can even plan your seasonal outings specifically around avoiding those seasonal foods.
If you learn just one plant, make it buffaloberry! This plant is THE plant when it comes to making sure our black and grizzly bears have the calories they need to not only survive but to reproduce.
Bears mate in the spring, giving birth in their winter dens, usually around Christmas. However it only takes a few months to make a bear cub, so the math doesn’t add up. Bears, like all good Canadians, should have summer birthdays…but alas they don’t.
Bears are one of the only animals that can be half-pregnant. In fact, most of our female bears are half-pregnant right now. Bears are unique, along with weasels, in that they experience something known as delayed implantation. This means that when they mate, the fertilized egg develops only briefly, and then it stops.
It’ll then float freely in the uterus for month after month as mom mows down all the calories she can muster. The real smorgasbord has just begun for local bears. She needs a lot of calories if her cubs are going to survive. The milk of black and grizzly bears is incredibly high in fat so she needs huge reserves in order to provide milk for hungry cubs.
Bears have some the fattiest milk of any mammals. When they give birth, their cubs are tiny, blind, and helpless. At birth, these cubs are the smallest of any other mammal when compared to the size they will eventually attain when fully grown. Their only chance of survival is an endless supply of fatty milk that allows them to gain weight at an incredible pace.
Over the course of the summer, mom has to gain some 70 kg (150 lbs.) in order to have those reserves. If she doesn’t, her body just reabsorbs the embryo and the cubs never develop. That gives bears more control over their reproduction than almost any other animal.
If you’re an elk and your pregnant, you’re pregnant; and pregnancy can be fatal. If we accept the fact that an elk heavily laden with a calf will not move as fast as one that isn’t pregnant than it makes sense that carcasses killed by predators in the late winter will show an over-preponderance of pregnant females.
How do female bears gain the weight they need to successfully produce cubs – well in the central Rockies there is only one answer – buffaloberry. These berries are the bear’s one source of high-calorie food helping them put on the fat reserves they need to feed thirsty cubs until they emerge in the spring.
OK, just how many calories does she need to mow down? Well first, let’s look at the caloric value of a single berry. A single raspberry has 1 calorie, a wild blueberry has 0.8 calories. A single buffaloberry has only one-fifth of a calorie.
This begs the question: how can a bear possibly gain 70 kg on a berry with just 1/5 of a calorie. Well, it’s all a numbers game. They need to eat a lot of berries, and I mean a lot! How does 200,000 to 250,000 every single day sound? They will be their sole focus in terms of food for the next 6-8 weeks until the first frost of autumn sees the berries fall off the bush.
That’s the equivalent of you sitting down, every day for the next 6 weeks, and chomping down 75 Big Macs – more than 40,000 calories per day.
At this time the bears enter a state of hyperphagia. Essentially it’s a hormonal imperative to binge. They’ll wake up, set up at a berry bush, mow down the berries, and then simply move onto the next bush, for 18 hours a day.
They lose all sense of time and their surroundings. The berries are their only focus. Nothing can interrupt them, they are zen, yum berries….ah crap, cyclist!
This is the challenge of berry season. The bears are completely zoned out, focusing simply on consuming the maximum amount of calories that the day allows. They are not the vigilant animal that we normally consider them to be.
Unfortunately, because the berries essentially taste terrible, this means most locals and visitors alike can’t identify them. Every day I’m out guiding and I see an endless line of walkers, cyclists, and joggers, most of whom either don’t have bear spray or have it in places that will be totally ineffective should they actually encounter a bear.
If it’s in your pack – you don’t have bear spray. If it’s on your bike – you don’t have bear spray! It has to be on your person. Either on your belt or in your pocket. Think about it. You’re out for a nice walk. You’re looking at the wildflowers and the majestic mountain scenery…and then…oh, crap….bear. Because you’re naturally inattentive, and the bear is focused on feeding, it’s just too easy to have an “oh crap” moment.
It’s not uncommon for cyclists to get ejected from their bikes when they have a sudden encounter with a bear. If you don’t have your bike, and your bear spray is attached to your bike than you simply don’t have bear spray.
Bear encounters happen fast. You need to be able to respond within seconds if you have a close encounter. If your bear spray is in your pack, you simply don’t have the time to be rooting around looking for bear spray. Be safe! Keep it on your person.
Bear 148 taught us a very important lesson. She was hanging in the Peaks of Grassi to Rundle Forebay area. This is the area of highest wildlife-human conflict in the entire townsite area. She did nothing wrong. She was attracted to a high-calorie food source and she settled down to feed.
Unfortunately, and we can’t blame this one on tourists, entitled locals thought the closures didn’t apply to them and they violated the closures. Time and again they entered legally closed areas and each time one of them had an encounter with 148, Alberta Environment and Parks tallied the score.
Nobody from Alberta Environment wanted to translocate 148. They simply had no other choice. Regardless of whose fault it was, the bear always pays. She had one too many interactions, and although there was not a single contact incidence, the simple fact that she displayed territorial behaviour was enough for her to be removed from the landscape.
Just as she had wandered across an invisible barrier when she left the higher level of protection of the national park, she later crossed another similar barrier and crossed from Alberta to British Columbia. There she became the last bear to be legally shot in British Columbia.
She was likely pregnant for the first time as well. In a landscape that has the lowest productivity of any bear population in the world, the loss of a single breeding female is very serious.
This year, we may encounter another breeding female. Will we make the same mistakes? Already, the town of Canmore has a bear warning that essentially encompasses the entire town. Trail after trail will be closed for the next 6-8 weeks as bears move into the area to feed.
Rather than begrudge the bears for limiting your recreation, take this opportunity to go high. Since the bears are attracted into the valleys, this is the best time to do higher ridge walks like the Centennial Ridge Trail, Ha Ling, or the East End of Rundle (if you’re up for a scramble).
Before you know it, the first frost will come, the berries will fall, and the bears will move onto other fall foods. For now, it’s important to make sure your fruit trees are harvested, your yard is free of other attractants like bird feeders, hummingbird feeders, or garbage.
It’s time for all of us to do better. When 148 was killed, we all joined our voices to say never again. Now it’s time to back that up.
If you see people violating closures, be sure to let them know that they are putting themselves and wildlife at risk. Already, the province is hiring three additional staff to help with both education and enforcement of closures in the area around town this summer.
Their focus will be on key areas like wildlife attractants, off-leash dogs, and violation of legally designated closed areas. As we learned last year, Alberta Environment and Parks spent most of their resources sitting on her and trying desperately to keep her on the landscape. We let her, and those conservation officers down by not giving her the room she needed to simply eat.
Next up the Report of the Roundtable on Human-Wildlife Coexistence
Report of the Roundtable on Human-Wildlife Coexistence
The recently published report of the Roundtable on Human-Wildlife Coexistence in the Bow Valley looked at four major objectives:
- “Identify the current state of human-wildlife coexistence within the Bow Valley by summarizing historical data, current trends, and management tools and practices being used throughout the Bow Valley;
- Identify potential research opportunities to fill knowledge gaps pertaining to human-wildlife coexistence;
- Develop proactive measures to reduce the probability of negative human-wildlife interactions in the Bow Valley; and
- Examine how agencies manage specific incidents of human-wildlife occurrences and achieve cooperation; implement coordination to create consistency”
Together, they identified six critical areas where they could improve the ability of people and wildlife to better live together in the Bow Valley:
- Trans-boundary management
- Wildlife in developed areas
- Habitat security
- Food conditioning and habituation
- People compliance, and
- Wildlife management
According to the report:
“Key strategies for improving coexistence were the following: exclude wildlife from developed areas; improve habitat security in wildlife corridors; reduce human-caused mortality; remove natural and unnatural attractants in developed areas; enhance habitat away from developed areas; increase capacity for enforcement; improve interagency collaboration; and improve communications. Implementation of the recommendations will require additional resources and public consultation.”
The reports priorities were the following:
- “Reducing negative interactions between people and wildlife, particularly in developed areas
- Restoring or maintaining habitat effectiveness for wildlife in the Bow Valley
- Supporting safe, responsible recreation, active lifestyles, and enjoyment of the natural environment by residents and visitors in the Bow Valley, and
- Public transparency in decision making and policy approaches. “
What was unique about this process is that it included representatives from all levels of government, federal, provincial, and municipal, along with subject matter experts to make sure they had the right expertise of help inform the process.
It recognized that the Bow River Valley has been suffering a death by a thousand cuts. Without integrated decision making and land management policies, decisions have been made in vacuums and often to the detriment of functional wildlife corridors.
It has long been known that the majority of our animals prefer the low valley bottom habitat referred to as the Montane Ecoregion. These lowlands are critical to many animals not just for mule deer and elk, but also carnivores like black and grizzly bears, wolves, cougars, lynx, and weasels.
Over the years, the best land has been taken over for development and the share of the pie available for wildlife to move through, and to utilize the habitat patches the valley offers, has been gradually eroded.
This has been complicated by blatant violations of legal wildlife closures and government inability to enforce their own rules.
Since 1986, the population of Canmore has more than tripled from 4,186 residents to a staggering 13,992 according to the 2016 census.
Let’s look at each of their 6-key areas, beginning with trans-boundary management. Wildlife move! They don’t read signs. They don’t recognize national or provincial park boundaries, Town borders, or areas they are “designated” to be. They follow the landscape, the availability of food, and other cues that may only be known to them.
One of the management challenges arises in how wildlife may be managed very differently on one side of these imaginary lines as compared to another. This was never more evident than in the story of Bear 148. Had she simply stayed in the national park, she likely would still be occupying her famous mom’s (Bear 66) territory.
Unfortunately, crossing that border into provincial lands meant that she was managed according to a very different set of rules. That being said, Alberta Environment and Parks officers worked very hard to try to keep her on the landscape. In the end, it was our own local residents who continually violated legal closures that led to her having one too many encounters with people.
According to this report, almost 100 bears have been killed or moved out of the Canmore area during the past 20 years as opposed to just six bears killed in Banff National Park. In fact, the national parks do not move bears as a management tool at all any more while the practice is common on provincial lands.
Once bears are translocated, their chance of survival is exceedingly low. They have no idea where their seasonal foods are available, and in some cases, may not even know what foods to eat.
According to an article in the Rocky Mountain Outlook, Bill Hunt, Banff’s Resource Conservation Manager stated:
“We have preferred to proactively manage bears and, more often, manage people prior to getting to that stage. For example, doing things like closures.”
According to the report, there are several differences in management among the jurisdictions. It states:
“In some cases, human-wildlife issues are managed differently due to current policies, available tools (e.g. legislation) or because of limited capacity and resources. Examples of differences include policies and approaches for managing roadside viewing of wildlife, use of wildlife translocations as a management tool, application and enforcement of area closures to provide habitat security for wildlife, and expectations that wildlife will remain wary when their home range is centred on the Bow Valley.”
The agencies have vowed to do more coordinated training and to continue to collaborate on wildlife management issues.
When it comes to wildlife in developed areas, there are many issues that need to be dealt with. Elk coming into townsites to calve also attracts bears and other carnivores looking to feed on those same calves. Grizzly bears normally take about 45% of newborn elk and moose calves.
In Banff, elk are the number one animal involved in negative wildlife incidents. As Banff has worked to try to make its townsite very unfriendly to elk, Canmore has seen its urban elk population grow continually.
Banff’s policy of trying to keep elk from taking up permanent residence within the townsite has seen the number of aggressive incidents/year drop from almost 100 in the late 1990s to less than 30 on average today.
On provincial lands within the Bow Valley, between 1998 and 2016, fully 58% of aggressive bear encounters occurred within residential areas. Only 1% occurred in the backcountry.
Removing attractants like buffaloberry and flowering fruit trees can help in reducing the temptation for bears to wander into urban areas. In addition, the bear-proof garbage bins have had a huge impact in reducing other unnatural attractants around town.
In Canmore, garbage related bear incidences dropped immediately after the bins were installed in 1998. In 1997 there were upwards of 60 incidents, while today it averages between 0-3 or 4 per year.
Habitat security is another important challenge faced by wildlife. Fragmentation of the valley’s landscape has reduced the effectiveness of movement corridors and habitat patches within the valley.
Wildlife doesn’t just pass through the valley, but animals call the valley home as well. As animals run out of space, it’s inevitable that there will be interactions with people. According to the report:
“There is a strong case for preserving these ‘secure’ areas where grizzly bears will be relatively free from encounters with people; that is, where bears can meet their energetic needs while at the same time choosing to avoid people” (Mattson, 1993). “Providing these wildlife corridors and habitat patches will help reduce the incidences of habituated bears, bears killed in self-defence, and bears removed by management agencies because of unacceptable behaviour” (Gibeau, 2001). “It would also foster the wary behaviour in grizzly bears that most managers consider desirable” (Mattson, 1992).
The report continues:
“…corridor effectiveness depends on a number of factors, including the level of human use within the corridor, the habitat quality within and adjacent to the corridor, and the nature of the corridor itself.”
As the struggle to maintain viable wildlife corridors and habitat patches grows with increased development, land managers must also rely on visitors and locals to respect legal closures. At the same time, there needs to be reduced human use of designated corridors if we want wildlife to feel confident using them.
The presence of dogs, and in particular, off-leash dogs in wildlife corridors is another critical problem.
To help provincial conservation officers better manage human use in wildlife corridors, Alberta Environment and Parks have hired two additional seasonal rangers to patrol the valley. They will have a dual focus on education and enforcement. In addition, they’ve hired an additional human-wildlife conflict technician to cover the area between the Bow Valley and the Ghost Reservoir.
Banff National Park has dramatically increased the number of visitor services staff in the park. At many local tourist stops, including Lake Louise, Lake Minnewanka and Johnson Lake, park staff are visible and help to make sure the park’s messaging on wildlife safety, garbage, invasive species, and wildlife ecology is being communicated with hundreds of visitors.
Hopefully, having more visible staff on federal and provincial lands will help to reduce the incidence of conflict as well as the tendency of people to ignore wildlife closures.
Unfortunately, the town has not followed suit with an increase in bylaw officers to be able to back up the conservation officers on town property.
Seasonal closures will also be used in areas that are known to be particularly sensitive to certain animals at certain times, such as elk during the calving season, bears feeding on buffaloberries, or denning wolves along the Bow Valley Parkway.
Other management actions, like prescribed burns, can also serve to enhance wildlife habitat and help to keep animals in areas that provide plenty of food, but perhaps have a lower potential for interacting with people.
Food conditioning and habituation are other areas that the panel looked into. These are two very different things. Human food conditioning refers to animals that have learned to associate people with food rewards. This is always a negative situation in wilderness settings. Last summer Banff Park Wardens were forced to destroy two wolves from the beleaguered Bow Valley wolf pack after the wolves learned that campers could be counted on to leave food or garbage within easy reach.
Habituation is very different. Habituation occurs when animals encounter people, but they don’t suffer any negative results. Subsequent encounters only serve to increase the comfort level the animals may have with being in close proximity to people.
Habituation has both positive and negative aspects. Bear 66, Banff’s most famous female bear (and the mom of Bear 148), was highly habituated. She learned how to live in close proximity to people, but at the same time, she stayed out of trouble and never acted overly aggressive to people.
Habituation allowed her to thrive for 25 years right around the town of Banff. Less habituated bears would be much more wary of being close to a townsite. There is also evidence that habituated grizzlies are less likely to threaten or attack hikers or bear viewers.
On the negative side, bears that are too comfortable around people provides the opportunity for tourists to crowd the animals and to act dangerously around them. The miracle in the mountain west is not that we have very occasional injuries from bears; it’s that we don’t have hundreds of attacks – especially when you see how people act along busy roadsides when they encounter bears. The bears have shown themselves to be very tolerant of poor behaviour. In addition, the more interactions they have with people, one might argue that with each meeting, the long-term odds of a negative encounter may rise.
Finally, habituated bears, like Bear 148, require an investment in management resources to keep them safe. Habituation may also attract them to places like train tracks where there is a much higher risk of them being injured or killed.
In the Bow Valley, most bears will necessarily have a certain level of habituation simply because it is impossible for bears to spend any significant time in the valley without encountering people. In addition, habituated bears tend to react less aggressively during surprise encounters.
Elk can become so habituated that they use townsites as refuges from predators. This was the problem in Banff during the 1990s. Unfortunately, as more elk began to make the town their forever home, the number of human injuries shot up until they were edging towards 100 per year. Ninety-nine of those 100 had cameras around their neck and they refused to buy a postcard.
Now, you can buy a postcard in Banff of Bruce the elk (an old friend back in the 90s that was one of the town’s dominant bulls), with his head down and four photographers trapped behind a tree.
Shortly after that photo was taken, one of the photographers was injured by Bruce as he tried to run. Wardens then darted Bruce and cut his antlers off. He was instantly reduced to a submissive state for that mating season. Lucky for him, elk grow a new set each year and the following autumn he was in fine form again.
Canmore is beginning to see more and more elk following the same strategy. Banff has worked very hard over the past decade to discourage elk from residing in the townsite, but Canmore is now seeing the same influx that Banff once had. I returned from a winter vacation last year only to find that my front yard was full of bedding down areas that the elk had been using while we were away. Who needs an alarm when you have elk yarding up on your front lawn?
One of the other problems of habituation is that the animals may just get used to being hazed away from areas and simply wait a few minutes and return. It’s for this reason that it’s often easier to manage human behaviour in areas where animals like bears are attracted to foods like buffaloberry.
Closing trails where bears are known to be feeding, or where elk are calving, can reduce the chances of aggressive encounters. At the same time, Banff’s Wildlife Guardian program has staff that help to educate people watching wildlife in order to keep both the people and the animals safe.
Failing that, enforcement is the last resort available to park managers. The hope is that if the stories are widely publicized it’ll help to get the message out that feeding or harassing animals is not tolerated.
According to the report:
“One of the top reasons people come to Banff National Park is to view wildlife. It is critical for the various jurisdictions to provide the public with information and an understanding of how to behave responsibly in areas where wildlife are or may be present. Being educated and complying with the rules will contribute towards ensuring visitor safety and towards the long-term survival of wildlife in the Bow Valley.”
I believe as well that we need to make wildlife-related literature available in upwards of a dozen languages. When visitors arrive at park gates, it is important that critical safety messages like safe wildlife viewing be available in a language they will understand.
In case you’re wondering what is the recommended way to behave around wildlife, here are recommendations from the report:
- “Giving wildlife lots of space; in Banff National Park this means 100 m for carnivores and 30 m for ungulates (or hoofed animals)
- Never feeding wildlife and removing/securing attractants (do not litter, do not leave food/scented items unattended, use wildlife-proof garbage bins).
- Recreating and traveling in groups
- Carrying bear spray; ensure it is accessible and know how to use it.
- Ensuring dogs are on-leash and under control at all times, and
- Complying with area closures and travel/trail restrictions.
The report continues:
“an increase in human presence and use on the landscape requires increased levels of enforcement and compliance if human-wildlife coexistence is to be achieved. Currently, compliance with regards to obeying human-wildlife based legislation such as wildlife attractants, dogs’ off-leash and entering officially closed areas (a management action put in place to ensure the safety of humans and wildlife) is challenging. Efforts to enforce non-compliant behaviours and actions are limited due to insufficient resourcing and differences in legislation amongst jurisdictions.”
These differences can be glaringly seen between the varying local jurisdictions. In 2017, for dogs off leash, the Town of Canmore issued 64 warnings and only wrote 19 tickets. Conversely, the Town of Banff wrote tickets in every case with 0 warnings and 9 tickets. On Provincial lands, only 6 warnings were given, 48 tickets, and 1 eviction. Parks Canada issued warnings 7 times and tickets on 8 occasions.
This report was prompted by ongoing concerns regarding people and wildlife in the Bow Valley. The tragic loss of Bear 148 has forced all the agencies to look inward to analyze their management strategies, but also to look outward towards cooperative management with surrounding jurisdictions. Dramatic variations in ways that negative interactions are dealt with have been shown to make the ability to manage wildlife that moves across federal, provincial, and municipal boundaries make it very difficult to coordinate efforts.
It is a comprehensive report that offers strong recommendations for ways the Bow Valley can maintain it wildlife populations while also allowing people to recreate and animals to migrate. You can read the entire report here: https://canmore.ca/residents/stewardship-of-the-environment/managing-human-wildlife-conflict.
Now is the time people. Will we as communities move forward to make sure that the tragic loss of 148 helped us to put in a system to ensure that unnecessary losses like this one never happen again? Or will we continue to make the same mistakes? It’s up to all of us.
And with that, it’s time to wrap this episode up. If you’d like to connect with me personally, you can hit me up on Twitter @wardcameron, or leave a comment on the show notes at www.MountainNaturePodcast.com/ep065. Remember that Ward Cameron Enterprises is your source for step-on, hiking, photography, and nature guides in the Canadian Rockies. Let us make your next mountain experience one you’ll remember fondly for years. And finally, don’t forget to hit that subscribe button so you never miss an episode…and with that said, the sun’s out and it’s time to go hiking. I’ll talk to you next week.