Cathy Ellis BANFF
A wide-ranging male grizzly bear that spent much of its time on national park lands and was part of a Parks Canada research project was shot dead in British Columbia during the province’s controversial spring grizzly bear hunt.
The bear, known as 125, surprisingly, and somewhat regularly, travelled across glaciated terrain in search of good habitat, moving from Banff and Yoho national parks to provincial lands in B.C. where he spent time during the breeding season on lands open to hunting.
Officials say this bear – which was fitted with a GPS collar in 2012 as part of the Parks Canada-Canadian Pacific Railway joint action plan to stop bears dying on the train tracks in Banff and Yoho – was legally hunted on June 12 in the Blaeberry drainage.
“Many bears are trans-boundary and so it’s not completely unexpected,” said Alan Dibb, a Parks Canada wildlife biologist for Lake Louise, Yoho and Kootenay.
The grizzly bear hunt in B.C. is now closed, but a fall hunt begins Oct. 1 and continues until mid-November. About 1,800 tags for bear kills are being issued this year, up from about 1,700 last year.
On average, about 300 grizzlies are killed annually during the hunt in B.C. From 2004 to 2009, resident hunters shot an average of 191 grizzly bears per year, while non-residents hunted an average of 106 bears per year.
There is much disagreement about the management of grizzly bears in B.C., and debate on their numbers, with provincial biologists estimating there are up to 15,000 grizzly bears and other biologists stating it could be as few as 6,000.
Approximately 65 per cent of the province is currently open to grizzly bear hunting.
Bear 125, thought to be about seven years old, was the second bear captured as part of the GPS collaring project. He was collared on May 23, 2012, not far from the train tracks in Yoho National Park near the Alberta-B.C. border.
He wore the collar until early November 2012, and provided detailed data to Parks Canada on his movements from May through November that year. He did have an ear transmitter and they were able to get limited data after that.
The GPS information revealed some interesting travel habits of this bear, particularly his high elevation travels across glaciated terrain.
Dibb said he made three different one-way trips across the Wapta Icefield, travelling somewhere in the vicinity of Peyto Lake and Bow Lake, and crossing rugged terrain at the Continental Divide.
“We don’t know the exact point he crossed and he most likely had to travel on the glacier,” he said. “That was his connection from the Upper Bow Valley to the Upper Blaeberry.”
On three different occasions, GPS data showed him travelling rugged terrain between Little Yoho Valley and Emerald Lake in the vicinity of the mountains known as President and Vice President.
The wide-ranging bruin travelled, at least twice, right through Kicking Horse Pass and spent a chunk of time in Banff National Park where he did a circumnavigation of Drummond Glacier.
“All the telemetry points are quite high elevation and above tree line, and it looks for all the world like he was navigating around the edge of the icefield,” said Dibb.
A few years ago, a different grizzly bear went from Lake Louise to Lake O’Hara via Abbot Pass.
Dibb said bear 125, however, regularly travelled high elevation routes.
“It was definitely a little bit unusual that he was doing this regularly. There was a lot of regular movement involving high elevation routes,” he said.
In Alberta, the provincial government suspended a grizzly hunt in 2006 and declared the bears a threatened species in 2010.
