The province's recently released grizzly bear numbers don't tell the full story of what's needed to help Alberta's grizzly populations, Alberta conservationists say.
Jim Pissot, the executive director of Wild Canada Conservation Alliance, and Nigel Douglas, Alberta Wilderness Association conservation specialist, both see the report as a call to the government to limit motorized access to grizzly habitat. "Reducing human caused mortality and particularly regulating motorized access to core habitat is absolutely essential to recovering this population," he said. "The report makes that clear, page after page.
"The areas, say from Hinton all the way down to Crowsnest Pass, the bears in those units are relatively isolated from other bears in Western Canada," he said. The report calls the area south of Highway 16 (connecting Edmonton to Jasper) a "population sink," which could support a sustainable population if human caused mortality — it highlights motorized access — is reduced.
Pissot said that on the Eastern slopes, it's the narrowness of the habitat available to bears that makes it important to protect their land more actively. The more isolated a population, the greater the number of mature bears needed to sustain a population, he said.
"Bears just occupy a thin ribbon," he said, "between the height of land and the human populated, agricultural and acreage-populated land to the East.
"They occupy a thin ribbon, they are not well connected to other populations of bears and there is a huge amount of human activity following the seismic lines, the timber and oil and gas roads — and fueled by the number of off-road vehicles in large populations such as Calgary."
The new status report on grizzly bears underlines some of the work being done by the AWA on the Bighorn area for quite a while, Douglas said.
The Bighorn region's western edge — west of the Forestry Trunk Road — the area which abuts Banff and Jasper National Parks, has been identified as an area that may be seeing declining numbers of grizzly bears and with the report's recommendation that motorized access be reduced in these areas, it seems to bolster AWA calls for change in that area, Douglas said.AWA has been advocating protecting the area as a wildland park.
"We've had a focus on the Bighorn area for many, many years," Douglas said. "We've been arguing for better protection in the bighorn area since the 1970s."
It used to be part of the national parks in the late 1800s when Banff National Park was first created, he explained. But it was shortly thereafter removed. It was also protected by the province in 1987, he said and then unprotected over a decade later.
"It's had kind of a checkered history," Douglas said. "Basically motorized access wasn't allowed in Bighorn, but there's never been any enforcement to stop it and in 2002 rather than trying to enforce the rules they decided to try to figure out how to manage it."
AWA feels that there should not be motorized access in there, Douglas said. Partly because it's an important source of clean drinking water . . . and partly for the effects on wildlife such as grizzly bears."
AWA's main concern is with quad use in the area. And though their initial focus on the area wasn't limited to grizzly bears, better planning of access was a primary concern. Pissot too is calling for designated off-road areas in "appropriate places" and off-road vehicle trails that offer responsible recreational opportunities, but he said that these routes must not penetrate into areas that are essential for the recovery of Alberta's grizzly bear population.
Dave Ealey, communications person for Alberta Sustainable Resource Development (SRD), also said that reducing motorized access to core habitat areas was important. And that the report reinforced the work being undertaken by the province's 2007, Grizzly Bear Recovery Plan.
And while Ealey could not say whether the established number of 691 Alberta grizzly bears would meet a provincial target, or not, he said: "Certainly it's important to have the populations as stable as possible, and the populations in as much of the accessible habitat as possible and that's a part of what's in the recovery plan and we're already working towards that, we're already working towards trying to find the best ways to manage access.
"And where we want to have the greatest priority is in the core grizzly bear areas."
There are also secondary grizzly habitats that are farther out from the eastern slopes that will also be monitored and where SRD will also want to ensure that there's still habitat for grizzly bears there, he said.
The task of regional SRD staff in the future, he said, will be to put conditions and work with industry and recreational users in areas where grizzly bears live to reduce human impact and reduce human encounters with grizzly bears in grizzly habitat.
A recovery plan doesn't necessarily mean that every grizzly bear population needs work, Ealey said. But Canmore's right in the middle of bear country and with a concentration of residential areas and highways, it is an areas that is of high priority to put access management techniques in place.
Alberta's Endangered Species Conservation Committee (ESCC) has a meeting March 12 where they will discuss a recommendation to be put forward to Sustainable Resource Development Minister Mel Knight for a designation for the animal. ESCC recommended a designation of threatened status for grizzly bears in 2002, but that recommendation was not accepted at the time.
This 2010 update is a response to a contested 2002 report that lacked the modern scientific techniques, such as DNA analysis that this report employs. The previous grizzly status report, Ealey said, was dependent on several studies, which had been conducted over a long period of time. The 2002 report, he added, made assumptions that, through follow-up work, were found to be less accurate than needed to be.
"There could be just the same number of bears back then as there are now, we've just found a better way to count them this time around," he said. Importantly for SRD, the 2010 report will establish a benchmark by which changes in grizzly populations can be monitored.
And though the province did not accept ESCC's recommendation for threatened designation in 2002, it has since improved its knowledge of bear mortalities and bear populations, and can now make a better assessment of whether Alberta's bears can sustain themselves, he said.
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By Richard Citherbert Son, Calgary Herald
