Post by warsaw on Dec 19, 2012 13:15:13 GMT -9
On the trail of an elusive giant: High tech is helping scientists learn more about Alberta’s grizzlies.
ED STRUZIK, JOURNAL STAFF WRITER
Jasper National Park, The Edmonton Journal, September 5, 1999.
For more than a quarter of an hour, pilot John Bell circled his helicopter above the mountainside, searching for the grizzly bear on the move in the trees below.
Alberta government biologist Gord Stenhouse knew the animal was down there because a radio collar around the animal’s neck was sending a signal to a receiver on board the aircraft.
Not being able to find a 275 kg bear didn’t surprise anyone on board. Since a ground breaking grizzly bear research project got under way near Jasper last April, scientists have had an unusually intimate view of this reclusive animal’s world.
They’ve seen a bear running effortlessly down a mountainside with a bighorn sheep in its mouth, another eating an elk while a pack of hungry wolves tried to move in, a bear at 3,000 metres in the depths of snow and ice, and bears on the greens of Hinton’s golf course.
They’ve also witnessed first hand how dangerous bears can be, and how tolerant they often are when humans are in the area.
"Bears never cease to amaze me," says Stenhouse, who previously studied polar bears in the Northwest Territories. "Just when you think you’ve seen it all, they do something that reminds you how little we know about them."
In this case, not seeing the bear didn’t prove to be a problem. All the information the scientists were looking for came from the radio collar, which four times a month sends out a steady stream of data necessary to track the bear’s movements in and out of the national park.
Being close to the bear was important at the time of the transmissions, however, because the signals are relatively weak.
"A few years ago, it would have taken a biologist 15 years to get the kind of data we’re getting from a month of this kind of tracking," says Stenhouse. "We’re getting six readings a day. Over 30 days, that’s 180 locations.
"Over the next nine or 10 months, we should know more about home range patterns, den sites, habitat use and how bears respond to humans in this area than we’d ever have hoped to gather in the past."
The Foothills Model Forest Grizzly Bear project is designed to put industry, government and the public on the same wavelength when it comes to conserving grizzly bear habitat along the increasingly industrialized east boundary of Jasper National Park.
Using satellite technology, American trained drug dogs and the latest in DNA fingerprinting techniques, the $1 million study is trying to determine what effect mines, forestry clear cuts and other human activities are having on the species.
Because the species is considered vulnerable in Canada, the study will also monitor grizzly bear numbers in and around the national park.
"The presence of grizzly bears is considered to be a sign of a healthy ecosystem," says Stenhouse. "The assumption is that grizzly bears require large, undisturbed areas to survive. They take a long time to mature sexually, and they produce relatively few cubs in their lifetime. So they are believed to be vulnerable to stress and presumably to changes in the ecosystem. This study may very well confirm or perhaps disprove some of those assumptions."
The study area includes a 5,352 square km area along Jasper’s east boundary.
It takes in the national park and adjoining provincially protected areas, the Cardinal River coal mine, the proposed Cheviot mine, Weldwood’s forest management zone, a number of oil and gas exploration sites and popular recreation sites.
Twenty grizzlies in the study area have been equipped with collars capable of communicating with satellites six times a day for nine to 10 months a year. Global positioning systems help scientists track the bears.
Stenhouse also brought in scientists Sam Wasser of the Centre for Wildlife Conservation in the United States to conduct DNA studies of the animals.
NOT AN EASY CATCH
Capturing the bears to install the collars was a real challenge.
After a winter of near record snowfalls in the Rockies, spring took its time coming to the Jasper area.
High winds, rain and even snow and freezing rain tended to be the order of most days.
"I thought working on polar bears in the Arctic was tough," says Stenhouse, who once captured the biggest polar bear in Canada – a big brute he later named Stan.
"But you expect snow and cold up there, and the terrain is flat. Here it was cold and wet, and we had to find and capture many of these animals on slippery mountain slopes."
Most of the bears were lured to a specific area where they could be darted with tranquilizer guns from the air or ground.
Once they were fitted with collars, a wake up drug was administered. Most are a little groggy when they first come to their senses and desperate to get away.
But that’s not always the case.
One bear nicknamed Big Boy, for example, woke up and charged the research team, even though he had not regained control of his hind legs.
"I never saw John Bell, the helicopter pilot, run so fast," says Stenhouse. "Before I could respond, he was in the helicopter, flicking on switches, yelling at all of us to get in. Once we were in the air, Marc Cattet, the veterinary biologist who specializes in animal tranquilizers, and a guy who has worked with a lot of polar bears, turned to me in disbelief and said ‘I never saw a bear do that.’"
Even in the short time the program has been running, the information from the computerized collars has wowed the scientists. For two weeks in May, the team was able to follow the movements of Big Boy, a female grizzly and another small male bear near the park border.
BIG BOY ON THE MOVE
In that time, Big Boy moved out of the park towards the female, then spent four days with her before heading off toward the smaller male. Presumably he mated with the female. Whether there was an encounter with the smaller male is unclear, but the tracking map clearly shows the smaller animal making a bee line out of the area once Big Boy arrived.
In the short time he has been collared, Big Boy has already made a reputation for himself. The next time the research team saw the big 300 kg bear, he was 3,000 metres high climbing the side of a snow covered mountain.
"It was weird," says Stenhouse. "We saw these tracks in the snow way up high and decided to see which bear it might have been. It must have taken the helicopter 10 minutes to get up high enough to see it was Big Boy. He could have easily crossed to the other side by going over the pass lower down. But for some reason, he just went up and over the peak."
The scientists also observed things that made them think twice about the relationship between grizzlies and people in the back country.
In one case, biologist Robin Munro and Bell saw hikers walking along a trail. Above them no more than 100 metres away was a grizzly, evidently aware of the people below. "The bear just waited until the hikers passed, then it crossed right behind them," recalls Munro. "The hikers were oblivious to the bear’s presence."
On another occasion, the scientists saw a grizzly running down the side of a mountain with a bighorn sheep in its mouth.
"That sheep weighed maybe 300 pounds," says Stenhouse. "Yet, the bear was moving so fast the legs of the sheep were flapping behind it like a man’s tie blowing in the wind. It turned out to be Big Boy. The power of these animals is just awesome."
Some scientists believe that in order for a species like the grizzly to survive, there must be enough animals present to avoid inbreeding and to be able to recover from food shortages, disease and forest fires.
Grizzly bear populations on provincial lands in Alberta have increased from an estimated 550 in 1987 to more than 800 in 1999, not including the 100 animals thought to reside in Jasper.
But there is considerable debate about the current status of the species and its future given the increasing fragmentation of habitat.
That’s why Strobeck and Wasser were brought in to do DNA profiles of the bears. The genetic profiles they put together will help scientists keep track of the animals during and after the five year project and validate the way scientists currently monitor grizzly populations over the long term.
Strobeck is using the more traditional method of extracting the DNA from the hair of the animals. He did that by setting up scented barbed wire structures throughout the study area. When the bears comes in to check it out, it invariably leaves a few clumps of hair on the wire.
A DIFFERENT APPROACH
Sam Wasser’s technique is more controversial. The American scientist extracts DNA from bear scat, or excrement. To find the scat, he brought in dogs trained at the MacNeil Island Correction Centre near Seattle, Washington, to check for drugs smuggled through airports and border zones.
Wasser trained the dogs to sniff out grizzly bear scat instead.
Although it is far too early to determine whether industrial and human activity is having a significant impact on grizzlies along the Jasper border, Stenhouse is confident no one will be able to dismiss the results."
"Some of the best scientists in the country helped design this project. Industry and government is funding it, and with all of them being involved from the beginning. I don’t see how anyone can say in the end that the results are not valid."
Later that day, Stenhouse and Munro picked up signals from two more bears. They caught sight of one high on a mountain pass before it darted into the cover of a patch of spruce trees.
The second bear was just as adept at staying out of sight.
When the signals stopped, as they do on the half hour, Bell landed the helicopter on the slope below the bear. Using a hand held antenna, Stenhouse was able to pick up the signal form the ground when the beeping resumed.
For nearly a half hour, he stood at the base of the slope searching for a bear that must have been no more than a few hundred metres away.
The sky was clear and the air was dead calm. There couldn’t have been a berry anywhere on that slope, just a few bighorn sheep for the bear to hunt.
raysweb.net/species-ej/pages/grizzlybear.html
ED STRUZIK, JOURNAL STAFF WRITER
Jasper National Park, The Edmonton Journal, September 5, 1999.
For more than a quarter of an hour, pilot John Bell circled his helicopter above the mountainside, searching for the grizzly bear on the move in the trees below.
Alberta government biologist Gord Stenhouse knew the animal was down there because a radio collar around the animal’s neck was sending a signal to a receiver on board the aircraft.
Not being able to find a 275 kg bear didn’t surprise anyone on board. Since a ground breaking grizzly bear research project got under way near Jasper last April, scientists have had an unusually intimate view of this reclusive animal’s world.
They’ve seen a bear running effortlessly down a mountainside with a bighorn sheep in its mouth, another eating an elk while a pack of hungry wolves tried to move in, a bear at 3,000 metres in the depths of snow and ice, and bears on the greens of Hinton’s golf course.
They’ve also witnessed first hand how dangerous bears can be, and how tolerant they often are when humans are in the area.
"Bears never cease to amaze me," says Stenhouse, who previously studied polar bears in the Northwest Territories. "Just when you think you’ve seen it all, they do something that reminds you how little we know about them."
In this case, not seeing the bear didn’t prove to be a problem. All the information the scientists were looking for came from the radio collar, which four times a month sends out a steady stream of data necessary to track the bear’s movements in and out of the national park.
Being close to the bear was important at the time of the transmissions, however, because the signals are relatively weak.
"A few years ago, it would have taken a biologist 15 years to get the kind of data we’re getting from a month of this kind of tracking," says Stenhouse. "We’re getting six readings a day. Over 30 days, that’s 180 locations.
"Over the next nine or 10 months, we should know more about home range patterns, den sites, habitat use and how bears respond to humans in this area than we’d ever have hoped to gather in the past."
The Foothills Model Forest Grizzly Bear project is designed to put industry, government and the public on the same wavelength when it comes to conserving grizzly bear habitat along the increasingly industrialized east boundary of Jasper National Park.
Using satellite technology, American trained drug dogs and the latest in DNA fingerprinting techniques, the $1 million study is trying to determine what effect mines, forestry clear cuts and other human activities are having on the species.
Because the species is considered vulnerable in Canada, the study will also monitor grizzly bear numbers in and around the national park.
"The presence of grizzly bears is considered to be a sign of a healthy ecosystem," says Stenhouse. "The assumption is that grizzly bears require large, undisturbed areas to survive. They take a long time to mature sexually, and they produce relatively few cubs in their lifetime. So they are believed to be vulnerable to stress and presumably to changes in the ecosystem. This study may very well confirm or perhaps disprove some of those assumptions."
The study area includes a 5,352 square km area along Jasper’s east boundary.
It takes in the national park and adjoining provincially protected areas, the Cardinal River coal mine, the proposed Cheviot mine, Weldwood’s forest management zone, a number of oil and gas exploration sites and popular recreation sites.
Twenty grizzlies in the study area have been equipped with collars capable of communicating with satellites six times a day for nine to 10 months a year. Global positioning systems help scientists track the bears.
Stenhouse also brought in scientists Sam Wasser of the Centre for Wildlife Conservation in the United States to conduct DNA studies of the animals.
NOT AN EASY CATCH
Capturing the bears to install the collars was a real challenge.
After a winter of near record snowfalls in the Rockies, spring took its time coming to the Jasper area.
High winds, rain and even snow and freezing rain tended to be the order of most days.
"I thought working on polar bears in the Arctic was tough," says Stenhouse, who once captured the biggest polar bear in Canada – a big brute he later named Stan.
"But you expect snow and cold up there, and the terrain is flat. Here it was cold and wet, and we had to find and capture many of these animals on slippery mountain slopes."
Most of the bears were lured to a specific area where they could be darted with tranquilizer guns from the air or ground.
Once they were fitted with collars, a wake up drug was administered. Most are a little groggy when they first come to their senses and desperate to get away.
But that’s not always the case.
One bear nicknamed Big Boy, for example, woke up and charged the research team, even though he had not regained control of his hind legs.
"I never saw John Bell, the helicopter pilot, run so fast," says Stenhouse. "Before I could respond, he was in the helicopter, flicking on switches, yelling at all of us to get in. Once we were in the air, Marc Cattet, the veterinary biologist who specializes in animal tranquilizers, and a guy who has worked with a lot of polar bears, turned to me in disbelief and said ‘I never saw a bear do that.’"
Even in the short time the program has been running, the information from the computerized collars has wowed the scientists. For two weeks in May, the team was able to follow the movements of Big Boy, a female grizzly and another small male bear near the park border.
BIG BOY ON THE MOVE
In that time, Big Boy moved out of the park towards the female, then spent four days with her before heading off toward the smaller male. Presumably he mated with the female. Whether there was an encounter with the smaller male is unclear, but the tracking map clearly shows the smaller animal making a bee line out of the area once Big Boy arrived.
In the short time he has been collared, Big Boy has already made a reputation for himself. The next time the research team saw the big 300 kg bear, he was 3,000 metres high climbing the side of a snow covered mountain.
"It was weird," says Stenhouse. "We saw these tracks in the snow way up high and decided to see which bear it might have been. It must have taken the helicopter 10 minutes to get up high enough to see it was Big Boy. He could have easily crossed to the other side by going over the pass lower down. But for some reason, he just went up and over the peak."
The scientists also observed things that made them think twice about the relationship between grizzlies and people in the back country.
In one case, biologist Robin Munro and Bell saw hikers walking along a trail. Above them no more than 100 metres away was a grizzly, evidently aware of the people below. "The bear just waited until the hikers passed, then it crossed right behind them," recalls Munro. "The hikers were oblivious to the bear’s presence."
On another occasion, the scientists saw a grizzly running down the side of a mountain with a bighorn sheep in its mouth.
"That sheep weighed maybe 300 pounds," says Stenhouse. "Yet, the bear was moving so fast the legs of the sheep were flapping behind it like a man’s tie blowing in the wind. It turned out to be Big Boy. The power of these animals is just awesome."
Some scientists believe that in order for a species like the grizzly to survive, there must be enough animals present to avoid inbreeding and to be able to recover from food shortages, disease and forest fires.
Grizzly bear populations on provincial lands in Alberta have increased from an estimated 550 in 1987 to more than 800 in 1999, not including the 100 animals thought to reside in Jasper.
But there is considerable debate about the current status of the species and its future given the increasing fragmentation of habitat.
That’s why Strobeck and Wasser were brought in to do DNA profiles of the bears. The genetic profiles they put together will help scientists keep track of the animals during and after the five year project and validate the way scientists currently monitor grizzly populations over the long term.
Strobeck is using the more traditional method of extracting the DNA from the hair of the animals. He did that by setting up scented barbed wire structures throughout the study area. When the bears comes in to check it out, it invariably leaves a few clumps of hair on the wire.
A DIFFERENT APPROACH
Sam Wasser’s technique is more controversial. The American scientist extracts DNA from bear scat, or excrement. To find the scat, he brought in dogs trained at the MacNeil Island Correction Centre near Seattle, Washington, to check for drugs smuggled through airports and border zones.
Wasser trained the dogs to sniff out grizzly bear scat instead.
Although it is far too early to determine whether industrial and human activity is having a significant impact on grizzlies along the Jasper border, Stenhouse is confident no one will be able to dismiss the results."
"Some of the best scientists in the country helped design this project. Industry and government is funding it, and with all of them being involved from the beginning. I don’t see how anyone can say in the end that the results are not valid."
Later that day, Stenhouse and Munro picked up signals from two more bears. They caught sight of one high on a mountain pass before it darted into the cover of a patch of spruce trees.
The second bear was just as adept at staying out of sight.
When the signals stopped, as they do on the half hour, Bell landed the helicopter on the slope below the bear. Using a hand held antenna, Stenhouse was able to pick up the signal form the ground when the beeping resumed.
For nearly a half hour, he stood at the base of the slope searching for a bear that must have been no more than a few hundred metres away.
The sky was clear and the air was dead calm. There couldn’t have been a berry anywhere on that slope, just a few bighorn sheep for the bear to hunt.
raysweb.net/species-ej/pages/grizzlybear.html