Conservation Northwest

Conservation Northwest updates Intermountain West but to make a dramatic comeback, increasing to more than 600 animals in the Greater Yellowstone area and nearly 300 bears in the Glacier Park and another 800 in the Northern Continental Divide Ecosystems in Montana. Grizzly bears are now recolonizing habitat in the Rocky Mountain front where they haven't been seen in decades. But dramatic comeback is a relative term considering there were an estimated 50,000 grizzly bears circa 1800 in the coterminous US. It's important to understand the context of loss and recovery. It remains to be seen how much tolerance people in those areas will have for continued expansion of grizzly bears from their park and wilderness havens. In our neck of the woods the grizzly bear situation is a bit different. Aside from a couple tantalizing glimpses—a video of a grizzly east of Manning Provincial Park, a photo of one captured on a remote sensing camera west of Manning, and a photo in North Cascades National Park (the first in 40 years) there is precious little evidence of the thousands of grizzly bears that once roamed throughout western Washington and southern British Columbia. Canadian film maker Jeff Turner captured an adult grizzly with his camera in the BC Cascades a couple summers ago and a hunter captured video from 2002 in the same general area. Parks, wildlife, and recreation areas Grizzly bear populations Keeping the Northwest wild "Protecting and recovering wildlife is an insurance policy for human communities because their habitat is our habitat, their waters are our waters, and their forests are our forests." —Joe Scott Now, the best hope for grizzlies returning to the Cascades is via BC's coastal and Chilcotin Mountains where populations represent a mixed bag of waning and waxing. Where numbers of bears are growing, the bruins are running into inevitable human speed bumps as they move out of pockets of more "secure" habitats that have sheltered small numbers of bears since loggers, miners, and settlers opened up southwestern BC a century ago. As the crow flies north from the Canada/US border, grizzly bear populations grow more robust and show more promising signs of recovery. The front lines in the battle to prevent further fraying of grizzly bear range are now in southern BC—in the dank coastal valleys of the Squamish and Elaho Rivers; in the Ryan, Hurley, Birkenhead, and upper Lillooet Rivers; in the Stein and Nahatlatch Valleys; in the south Chilcotin where beetles and government forest policies have literally transformed the landscape; and in the valley of the mighty Fraser River that cleaves the Coast and Cascades ranges. These rivers and in many cases the reservoirs, towns, farms, railways, and roads that nestle up to them bound the new grizzly bear neighborhoods in southwestern BC. In some cases these 'hoods are remnants of an earlier time when bear movements between them resulted in bear deaths. But in many more, these bear ghettos remain semi-isolated from each other with new challenges for the grizzly that dares to venture forth. Yet for now, the only way we will witness the recovery of grizzly bears in the Cascades of Washington and BC is for those west of the Fraser River (particularly the females, who are the drivers of population growth) to be free to move out without risk of injury, harassment, or death. In September 2012 in an upcoming newsletter we will talk about the work we are doing with our partners in BC to build those "grizzly bridges," stopping the fraying of the Great Bear's range and restoring these icons to our forests and valleys. Yellow labels denote four threatened grizzly bear populations in southwestern BC: Chilcotin, Stein-Nahatlatch, Garibaldi-Pitt, Cascades. Conservation Northwest and our Canadian colleagues are working to recover and protect these bears and help connect their habitat. Map Travis Scott Spring-Summer 2012 17

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