The railway line through Banff National Park is the number one cause of death for grizzly bears in the area.
The problem is significant enough that CP Rail and Parks Canada partnered for a five-year, $1 million research project to determine how bears use the landscape in the Bow Valley.
Three years in, the research is showing promising results, which officials shared with the public this week.
“We feel the progress is really good,” said CP chief environmental engineer Chris Bunce on Wednesday (Oct. 30). “We are really pleased with how the work has come together and are encouraged by the results.
“There is a lot of really strong fundamental science going on in terms of the vegetation assessment and bear habitat assessment.”
In order for that assessment to occur, Parks Canada put GPS collars on grizzly bears in Banff to see where they travel in relation to the railway line. When bear activity is clustered near the railway, researchers from the University of Alberta access the area and assess.
Colleen Cassady St. Clair, lead researcher with the university, said the information gathered has been able to show what, other than grain spilled on the tracks, may attract bears to the railway line.
“The nature of the food attractants is so much more complicated than we realized and the food is just one dimension, we also know bears use the rail as a travel corridor because it is easier to travel there than in adjacent areas,” she said, adding GPS data provides subtle details to inform possible mitigations. “We are able to compare clusters of activity from collars with historic places where bears have been struck and we are tying to build a comprehensive view of how these places differ.
“If we can figure out more about what distinguishes these situations, it is likely possible to improve the mitigation.”
Other food attractants that bears access in the railway corridor includes dandelions, horsetails and buffalo berries. St. Clair said the berry bushes have a complex relationship of their own with the rail – the berries mature faster – likely because they gets more light in those spaces.
The same is true for dandelions, which is a plant that is entirely edible, while horsetails are generally associated with wetter locations. St. Clair said horsetails might be benefiting from snow shoveled off the rail line, “so they are really abundant there and that is a favourite bear food.
“Combine all that with fire suppression this park has had for 100 years and you ask where are these plants in a natural setting? Mostly they aren’t because most of the park would be covered in forest.”
She said it is clear the area around the railway line is important bear habitat and the balance is to find a way to let bears share space with train infrastructure and increase the segregation between bears and trains in time.
“What we don’t want is for bears to be hit by trains and by extension we don’t want bears to be casual around trains,” she said. “We are confident bears don’t actually like the experience of having a train rumble past a few metres away from them just as we don’t, that is an all body experience.”
Parks Canada resource conservation officer Rick Kubian said the data will help inform how mitigations are designed.
“We are learning a lot about how grizzly bears use this landscape and understanding better how grizzly bears use the landscape immediately adjacent to the rail line and we are hoping that helps us to zone in on what the problem is and ultimately will lead us down the path of hoping we can design mitigations to reduce the risk to grizzly bears on this landscape,” Kubian said.
Kubian said one of the strengths of the project has been the partnership formed between Parks and CP to work together over the five-year period.
“When you have a project like this that goes on for a few years, you really evolve those relationships and we are really now focused together on coming up with those mitigations – not just in our individual camps and looking at it from our own organizations’ perspective. We have really come together to try and evolve those solutions,” he said.
To tackle the issue, he added, took stepping back and putting energy and efforts into research first.
“We will take our time to try and come up with the right solutions and make sure we are doing effective and efficient mitigations when we get to that stage,” Kubian said. “There is no silver bullet in this, otherwise we would have found it years ago. This is a complex problem, complex topography, lots of infrastructure and we are dealing with a wildlife species that changes over time, changes its patterns over time and changes the way it uses the landscape over time.”
At the same time as research is going on using GPS collars, Parks wildlife biologist David Gummer has been studying electro-mats as a possible mitigation.
Two trial sites were built last December and tested over the past year. They were comprised of a simulated railway entering into an enclosure so biologists could bait it and test whether the electrified mats fully prevent access for bears and other species.
“We felt it was important to test the technology and those scenarios away from the rail and in a safe and controlled environment, just so that if bears breached the mat and successfully crossed into the enclosure they wouldn’t be stuck on the railway in a very high risk situation,” Gummer said, adding initially the mats were not turned on. “By the time the hibernation period was over, we were able to draw in two bears to the site and establish they were willing to cross the mat to access bait when it was off as a baseline condition.”
In June, the project moved to the next phase, with electricity turned on and a series of automated cameras in place to capture animal behaviour. Gummer said at this early stage, the mats have successfully deterred every animal that stepped on it including four grizzly bears, 11 black bears and five wolves.
“It is still really an early stage in the project because we want to do additional tests as well as more individual animals to experience the mat and test the mat for us, but these are certainly promising results at this early stage,” he said.
