Grizzlies were listed as a Species of Special Concern by the Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife in Canada in 2012.Michael Proctor/Supplied
There’s been a Captain Hook swashbuckling his way through the Purcell and Selkirk mountain ranges, in a win for grizzly bears and wildlife corridors.
Captain Hook – named for a pirate because of his peg-leg gait, the result of a bullet to the back leg – is a grizzly bear that travelled from his home turf in the Purcell Mountains to the neighbouring Selkirks, which are about seven kilometres away, separated by the fertile Creston Valley. While there, he mated with eight female grizzlies from the threatened South Selkirk population, siring 13 offspring.
Captain Hook and his travels are documented in a report by B.C. grizzly bear researcher Michael Proctor and three co-authors that details a 15-year conservation program designed to encourage bears from other populations – immigrants, if you will – to mingle and breed with the isolated South Selkirk population unit.
For Dr. Proctor, the travels of Captain Hook have helped validate Kootenay Connect, a project that aims to establish a network of wildlife corridors in the region in the hopes of conserving more at-risk species. With both Canada and B.C. having promised to protect 30 per cent of land and water by 2030, Dr. Proctor sees such corridors as a potential step toward those goals, with his latest grizzly-bear study as proof of concept.
His grizzly conservation program, which began in 2005, sought to minimize the opportunity for conflict that can arise when bears cross paths with humans. Measures included putting up electric fences to protect crops and livestock, and trapping and relocating bears, sometimes with the sting of a rubber bullet in their rumps to discourage them from coming back.
“We had next to zero immigrants and zero gene flow into that population for many decades – at least 60 years,” Dr. Proctor said.
“And then in a period of 15 years – we’ve measured it – we picked up nine migrants into the population that have bred 27 offspring in that new population. So not only do we have evidence of animals moving in, but they had sex with the locals and had a bunch of kids and it worked like a charm.”
Dr. Proctor hopes the South Selkirk grizzly success story will shape future policies. The paper, which Dr. Proctor is in the process of submitting to a peer-reviewed journal, is part of the Trans-Border Grizzly Bear Project, a grizzly conservation program run by scientists in Canada and the U.S.
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Grizzlies were listed as a Species of Special Concern by the Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife in Canada in 2012 and subsequently listed as Special Concern on Schedule 1 of Canada’s Species at Risk Act (SARA) in 2018.
While grizzly populations in parts of B.C. were stable or growing over the past two decades, the South Selkirk unit had dwindled to fewer than 100 bears and become cut off from its neighbours as human settlement increased. Research shows that small, isolated populations are at greater risk of extinction than larger groups.
Based on metrics such as huckleberry patches (a favourite food source) and the number of roads (a danger zone for bears) in a given area, Dr. Proctor and his colleagues zeroed in on potential corridors, securing 331 hectares within the Creston Valley area through purchase or conservation easements. Those areas became the routes that Captain Hook and other bears used to navigate between mountain ranges.
Researchers collected thousands of bear-hair samples for DNA analysis. They shot bears with tranquillizer darts so they could be fitted with radio collars to track how they were travelling through the 12,000 square kilometre study area. They worked with landowners to install electric fences or bear-proof garbage cans.
Ken Shukin manages Shukin Orchards Ltd., a family-owned cherry orchard near Wynndel, north of Creston. He put a nearly three-metre game fence around his orchard, but grizzlies dug under it. He piled boulders around the fence base to deter the bears from digging; the bears tossed them aside “like pillows.” During harvest, workers patrolled the fenced perimeter in a pick-up truck, shooting bear bangers (a noisy no-contact deterrent) if they spotted a grizzly. Finally, this past summer, Mr. Shukin and five helpers spent two weeks stringing electric fencing around a 180-acre orchard, at a cost of about $22,000.
Two days after they finished the job, a neighbour called, saying he had grizzlies in his apple orchard.
“He said, ‘Did you finish your fence? Because they all showed up here, at my place,’” Mr. Shukin said.
“And I said sorry. But it reinforced that what we did, and the money we spent, worked,” he added.
There are tensions over grizzlies in the Creston Valley and elsewhere in B.C. Some groups support a regulated hunt while others call for increased habitat protection.
Dale McNamar, who raises cows and sheep at Goat River Farms Ltd. near Creston, said he and others are seeing increased numbers of grizzlies in the area and are worried about potential damage to crops and livestock, as well as threats to humans.
The province of B.C. is currently working on a new Grizzly Bear Stewardship Framework. It follows a 2017 report by former provincial auditor-general Carol Bellringer that found the province had failed to follow through on many of its commitments to manage the species. Despite public controversy over grizzly-bear hunting, Ms. Bellringer found the biggest threat to the species was not hunting, but human activities that degrade grizzly habitat. (B.C. banned grizzly-bear hunting in 2017.)
Captain Hook, who was radio collared in 2013, is presumed dead (he was about 20 years old when collared, at the upper age range for grizzlies), but his offspring are still alive, including one that has been fitted with a radio collar for the next generation of surveys.
“It’s so rare that we actually turn a bad conservation issue all the way around,” Dr. Proctor said.
“That was the unexpectedness of it – oh wow, you mean it actually worked? It was a pleasant surprise.”
Wendy Stueck