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All Research Articles
A four and a half year old female grizzly was struck and killed by a train last Thursday west of Banff.
Bear 109, the offspring of the well-known Banff Bear 64, was struck on the tracks near the Fireside day use area at the junction of the Trans-Canada Highway and Bow Valley Parkway.
Parks Canada human-wildlife conflict specialist Steve Michel said the female grizzly wasn't killed instantly but made it a short distance away from the railway across the parkway and died under a spruce tree.
It’s been a good year so far for grizzly bear recovery efforts in northwestern Montana.
Wayne Kasworm of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Services office out of Libby reported last week no known grizzly bear deaths so far in 2010. Meanwhile, plans call for another female grizzly relocation to the Cabinet Mountains this summer.
Hope and Lily, the reunited black bear cub and mother in the woods west of Ely, spent much of Thursday playing and nursing, and didn’t spend any time apart.
That’s the report from Ely bear researchers Lynn Rogers and Sue Mansfield, who brought cub and mother back together Wednesday night after a separation of more than five days.
A mathematical analysis for the first time has uncovered the prospect of a sudden, dramatic decline among Canadian polar bears as they starve to death.
“This is much, much different. This is not a gradual change,” said Dr. Andrew Derocher, one of the world’s leading polar bear authorities and co-author of the study. “We’re looking at a decrease by 20 or 30 per cent or even much more in a year.”
The study was released this week just as Environment Canada is meeting to decide, also for the first time, whether polar bears should be declared a species at risk.
EAGLES NEST TOWNSHIP (12 MILES WEST OF ELY) - Sue Mansfield started crying as soon as she saw the cub's face.
Even with the cub 30 feet up a cedar tree, Ely bear researcher Mansfield knew it was Hope because of its light face.
After being missing since Friday evening, with researchers holding out little hope the cub was still alive, friends of Ely bear researcher Lynn Rogers called about 6 p.m. today to say they had a lone bear cub treed. The cub came down and was captured less than two hours later.
ULUKHAKTOK/HOLMAN - Robert Kuptana has been hunting polar bears for decades but last Tuesday was the first time he saw a brown bear running across the sea ice.
"Why would a grizzly bear be hunting seals?" he said. "It's a land animal. They wait for fish in rivers."
The Inuvialuit elder was Ski-Dooing outside of Minto Inlet hunting for polar bears when he spotted the brownish-coloured bear in the midst of a group of a couple hundred seals half a kilometre ahead of him.
MAPLE VALLEY, Wash. - State fish and wildlife experts on Sunday did a "hard release" of a bear that was caught near Maple Valley.
The 400-pound black bear had found a bee hive and showed up in the neighborhood three nights in a row.
This time of year bears are waking up and hungry.
With a 259-pound black bear sitting several yards away, Mark Ternent calmly packed his gear into his vehicle.
No, Ternent wasn’t being careless or taking an unnecessary risk.
Having worked with bears for the last 20 years in several states, including grizzlies in Wyoming, Ternent simply knows when a situation is safe and when caution needs to be applied.
It comes with experience.
When Bill Powers set up a camera to record the movements of deer and raccoons in his Murrysville backyard in 2004, he never imagined that his work would someday have a worldwide following of nearly 1 million viewers.
But a female bear in Minnesota changed all that.
For months, Powers' motion-activated cameras have been streaming live video on the Internet of Lily, a 3-year-old black bear who denned in Ely, Minn., and her cub, Hope, whose Jan. 22 birth was captured by Powers' Export-based company, PixController Wildlife Webcam.
A black bear spotted in Portage on Friday night is evidence that such sightings are on the rise, and state Department of Natural Resources officials are encouraging people to report activity.
From March 29 through the end of April, DNR officials received notice of six black bears in Columbia, Sauk, Richland, Iowa and Crawford counties.
Kentucky Department of Fish and Wildlife spokesperson Steven Dobey says there are more bears now than we've had in the last 100 years.
The wildlife official says in Pike and McCreary County alone there are 300 to 400 bears.
A public hearing on the Department of Environmental Protection's proposed black bear management policy, a scientifically designed, common sense mix of hunting, education, research and non-lethal bear management tools, is set for tomorrow night at the State Museum in Trenton.'
Commissioner Bob Martin in March approved the New Jersey Fish and Game Council's 2010 Comprehensive Black Bear Management Policy, which will be under consideration at the public hearing, which starts at 6 p.m. on Tuesday, May 11. If the proposed policy is approved, it would allow the first bear hunt in the state since 2005.
The oldest mother black bear in the Whistler ski area pushes her forepaws up through dense forest litter and across the rim of the deep daybed. Her chest cavity slumps into the daybed's 40-cm deep depression as the sigh of physical relief momentarily empties her stress-ridden body. Her son squirms up against her, wedging his 20-kg body between mom and a towering escape cover of old growth Douglas fir.
For years, naturalists and wildlife photographers have flocked to McNeil River and Brooks Camp in Katmai National Park for some of the finest wild bear viewing in North America .
But beginning in June 2011, a new option will put Kodiak Island visitors in the middle of one of the thickest concentrations of the world's heftiest brown bears.
Biologists in the Northwest Territories have confirmed that an unusual-looking bear shot earlier this month near Ulukhaktok, N.W.T., was a rare hybrid grizzly-polar bear.
The unusual-looking bear caught the attention of biologists after David Kuptana, an Inuvialuit hunter, shot and killed it on April 8 on the sea ice just west of the Arctic community, formerly known as Holman.
Bear managers suspected the Northern Continental Divide grizzly population has been increasing, and now a six-year trend study has confirmed an annual average growth rate of 3 percent.
The findings were presented at a meeting Wednesday in Kalispell by Rick Mace, a research biologist with Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks who led the population trend study.
It flies in the face of conventional wisdom, but one solution to control nuisance black bears in the United States may be to offer them snacks, one biologist says.
Especially in the western United States, black bears will often break into cars, homes, and campsites in search of food. And as humans increasingly move into bears' habitats, more bear-human interactions have been occurring, experts say.
KALISPELL - Grizzly bears are slowly gaining ground in Montana's northern Rocky Mountains - where populations are growing at about 3 percent per year - but researchers warn the scales could tip if long-term protection efforts are relaxed.
"The trend is up," said research biologist Rick Mace, "the trend is good. But I think it's going to take continued vigilance" before the bears can be removed from the endangered species list.
In the year of the census, Montana 's grizzly bears are standing up -- or, rather, shinnying up against trees -- to be counted.
The hair that grizzlies leave on trunks and branches acts as a kind of genetic calling card, and scientists have been gathering it, strand by strand, to track the threatened species' population trends. This new high-tech kind of bear hunt is preferable to the conventional radio collars and baited hair traps because it is cheaper and less risky -- for scientists and bears alike.
IDAHO FALLS, Idaho - The U.S. Sheep Experiment Station north of Dubois in eastern Idaho won't turn out sheep in one of its grazing plots because of concerns over grizzly bear habitat.
Sandy Miller Hays is a spokeswoman for the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which oversees the sheep station.
Hays said the East Summer plot wouldn't have a direct effect on grizzly habitat, but to reach it sheep would have to cross U.S. Forest Service land designated as a sensitive habitat area for grizzlies.
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