Interesting, isn’t it, how certain issues just keep on cropping up.
Take our bears, for instance. For those visiting or who are new to the valley, we’ll point out that around here, we share our outdoor space with wildlife; bears being just one of the critters we co-exist with.
And we’re particular about our bears. Like many visitors from around the world, we find the bears we share the Bow Valley with endlessly fascinating. Bow Valley residents make note of when bears head into their dens prior to winter, make note of when they appear in spring and track their whereabouts through sightings, closures and bear warnings.
We’d also like to point to out that, at this time, bears are everywhere in the valley bottoms. After heavy snows last winter, bears are finding their early season eats at low elevation – in other words, right in among us.
Nobody should be surprised, therefore, if they crop up almost anywhere – front country, backcountry, in town… Bears are unpredictable.
Unfortunately, another way (here in our newsroom, anyway) we track bears is by traffic and rail strikes.
In that respect, 2014 already has a bitter feel to it as our bears, both black and grizzly, are being killed by vehicles and trains alike – reaching back to May when they were first leaving dens (page 18).
Clearly, something needs to be done. Could you imagine national parks being bereft of bears because they were wiped out locally by modes of transportation? How embarrassing would that be?
While we realize there are always calls for drivers to ease up on speed in mountain parks to protect wildlife, in all likelihood, the only answer to reducing roadkills is fencing. Even fences, though, wouldn’t be a certain remedy, as nothing more complex than a tree falling on fencing can create an opening for a bear to get onto a highway.
Perhaps, in trying to attract and host ever more special events in Banff National Park, in particular, a user fee for organizers could be instituted, with a percentage of profits going to the purchase of stretches of wildlife fencing. Event volunteers might be more likely to donate their time if they knew that, in part, their efforts were going toward wildlife protection rather than simply helping organizers make a living.
While it’s all well and good that Parks and CP Rail have embarked on a $1 million study to develop methods of keeping bears off tracks (electro mats, fencing and grain, brush and forage removal), as trains are a major killer of grizzlies, there will be little point in reducing mortality on the tracks if nothing is done to keep bears off the highway.
Whether struck by a train or a minivan or a semi – it doesn’t make any difference to a bear that is being struck.
The fact that several more bears are being collared to study their movements (page 5) is great, but we hope tracking their movements will also reveal areas of particular danger on our roads which can then be addressed.
We’ve said it before – men have been put on the moon, flight was once thought impossible, diseases have been defeated, computers have changed life as we know it – there’s gotta be a way to protect our bears.
