An aggressive grizzly bear that stalked and trapped a high-profile mountaineer and his client up a tree for more than three hours has been destroyed.
The Sept. 26 incident in which the six-year-old male grizzly stalked Barry Blanchard and his client near Saddleback Pass, and followed them up a tree, was the final nail in the coffin for this bear.
Parks Canada wildlife managers destroyed the grizzly bear in Lake Louise on Sept. 28, saying they had no choice because the animal was too much of a threat to human safety.
Officials say this bruins’s behaviour became increasingly aggressive over the summer, noting he held a grain train hostage, chased cyclists and charged at a wildlife officer armed with a shotgun.
“It was a very, very difficult decision and a sad thing to do,” said Hal Morrison, a veteran human-wildlife conflict specialist in Lake Louise, Yoho and Kootenay.
“We worked hard at trying to keep him on the landscape, but we have to make the tough calls when we have to. I feel he was going to be a real visitor safety risk for someone.”
Wildlife specialists put an extraordinary amount of effort, involving hundreds of hours, into this grizzly bear, known as bear No. 8, to give it the best possible chance of survival.
They used aversive conditioning to try to keep him out of trouble and, with the help of a radio collar, were able to track his whereabouts constantly.
“He truly believed he was the big bear and he could do anything he wanted to,” said Morrison.
“Grain, and other factors, played a part in the overall habituation and level of aggression of this bear. Part of it is also his personality and he was a six-year-old male trying to test everything.”
Conservationists say the death of this habituated bear speaks to a bigger issue – Parks Canada’s refusal to deal with human limits and its onward march to increase visitation by two per cent a year.
An estimated 3.1 million people visited Banff National Park in the past 12 months, and it’s assumed many stopped in Lake Louise. A 2003 visitor-use study showed 1.35 million people visited the greater Lake Louise area that year.
Jeff Gailus, conservationist and author of The Grizzly Manifesto – a book exploring the unique biological and political circumstances that make it difficult for grizzly bears and people to share the same landscapes – suggests increasing human activity is a big part of the problem.
“The bottom line from decades of research is that as you increase human activity, from hiking to industrial development, you negatively impact grizzly bears,” he said.
“That’s not to say we can’t enjoy our national parks. There are ways to balance enjoyment and protection, and Yellowstone National Park has set the standard.”
Gailus says managers in that U.S. national park close off a significant portion of the park to people to keep grizzly bears safe and alive – and they still draw millions of visitors every year.
“While Banff’s bureaucrats have made many positive changes over the years, there’s still much work to be done. Like Frankenstein, bear No. 8 was something we created,” said Gailus.
“He became habituated because he had to live among so many people, and he became food-conditioned because of sloppy campers and residents and grain on the railway tracks,” he added.
“If we’re going to allow a major transportation corridor to bisect the park and kill bears, we need to compensate in other ways – and that means limiting other forms of human activity in the best grizzly bear habitat. Seasonal closures, especially in the Lake Louise area, should be mandatory to keep both bears and people safe.”
This was the first grizzly bear destroyed in Banff, Yoho or Kootenay national parks since 1995. At that time, a female grizzly, along with her cub, was killed following attacks on campers in Lake Louise.
However, bear No. 16 was removed from the ecosystem and sent to the Calgary Zoo in 1996, and is therefore considered dead to a wild population of bears. Several black bears have also been destroyed.
This most recent aggressive encounter with bear No. 8 happened Sept. 26 as Blanchard, an international mountain guide, was taking a client from Japan to climb the north glacier of Mount Aberdeen.
The grizzly followed them for about 300 metres, but when it became apparent the bear was stalking them, they climbed to the top of a tree to escape. They did not have bear spray.
The grizzly bear climbed the tree after them, coming within mere metres. After the three-hour ordeal, the bear eventually took off into the forest.
Blanchard is devastated the grizzly was killed.
“It’s tragic and heartbreaking,” said Blanchard, an alpinist noted for pushing the standards of highly technical, high-risk alpine climbing in the Canadian Rockies and the Himalayas.
“I understand why, but I also know that he was just being a bear. I’m sad.”
The grizzly bear had dropped 20 pounds over the past two months, going from 338 pounds when he was re-collared earlier this summer to 318 pounds when destroyed.
And while they don’t know the exact reason behind the weight loss, Parks Canada noted it has been a tough berry season in that area, which may in part explain the bear’s weight loss.
Brianna Burley, resource conservation specialist, said any association between the bear’s weight loss and his behaviour is “inconclusive”.
She said the bear was very healthy looking in appearance and well within what Parks Canada considers to be a healthy bear.
“Despite his weight loss, he was still in the upper threshold of what we would consider to be a physically healthy male grizzly bear,” said Burley. “A necropsy has been done. The initial assessment suggests that he was in good health.”
