Skip to content
Join our Newsletter

B.C. home to 15,000 grizzly bears

Eleven years of research, study and modelling leads to numbers for areas where data doesn't exist
news_environment1
BEAR FACTS Grizzly bears, like this one in the Upper Squamish Valley, are protected from hunters due to the small size of the bear population in the region. But in other places around B.C. the provincial government says populations are stable enough to allow about 300 grizzly bears to be taken a year by hunters. PHOTO SUBMITTED BY MICHAEL ALLEN

Government scientists estimate the B.C. grizzly bear population is at about 15,000 bears. The number is based on a grizzly bear population-estimating model for B.C., which scientists have been working on for the last 11 years.

Titled Predicting grizzly bear density in western North America, the study was released earlier this month and contains information on grizzly bear densities from Wyoming to Alaska.

The goal of the study was to build a model that would predict grizzly bear numbers where data didn't exist.

To reach its conclusions the researchers relied on field inventory work using DNA sampling. Most of the samples used to generate the DNA information came from hair gathered at bait sites in known grizzly bear habitat.

Lead researcher and study spokesman Garth Mowat said the information generated through the multi-year study, and the resulting model is going to be used in what is termed the "harvest management system" for setting hunting limits in areas where grizzly bear hunting is allowed.

About 35 per cent of B.C. is closed to grizzly hunting. The Sea to Sky area is one of the closed areas, along with the Stein-Nahatlatch region and seven other grizzly bear regions across the province. According to provincial government numbers, licensed grizzly bear hunters successfully take about 300 grizzly bears a year. Those hunters enter a lottery system to get their licenses. Each year, hunters harvest only two per cent of the total B.C. grizzly bear population.

"We track mortality and try to track causes of mortalities so we can target those causes and try to reduce them," said Mowat in a phone interview from his office in Nelson where he is the head of the province's Natural Resource Science and Stewardship Section in the Kootenay-Boundary region.

In addition to the risk of being killed by a hunter, the two next most likely human-caused grizzly bear deaths are collision with vehicles or trains. From 2004 to 2009, a total of 358 grizzly bears were killed in vehicle collisions, railway crashes, illegal kills and through animal control measures.

A grizzly bear study conducted by the province in 2004-2005 concluded the Stein-Nahatlatch area is home to 24 grizzlies. The study, which was separate from Mowat's work, concluded the Stein-Nahatlatch population has experienced a very rapid loss of genetic variation over the last few generations because it has become isolated from other grizzly populations.

The suspected poaching death of Jewel, a mature Texas Creek female grizzly, combined with the illegal fatal shooting of a dominant male grizzly in November of 2011 in the Pemberton Meadows near the turnoff to the Hurley River Road caused concerns for grizzly bear protectors in southwestern B.C.

Wildlife experts described both animals as key reproductive members of their habitat groups. Jewel was part of the Stein-Nahatlatch group and the 20-year-old male was in the Squamish-Lillooet grizzly population grouping in the Sea to Sky corridor.

The long-term viability of the province's southern-most grizzly bears is at risk due to the small population size and disruptions to connecting corridors between regions.

A significant amount of area in south-central B.C. from Prince George down to the border with eastern Washington State is no longer home to grizzly bears due to local extinction. The width of the extinction region could become thicker if the at-risk populations on either side of the extinction zone don't survive in the years ahead.

One more key finding generated by the team of Mowat, Douglas Heard of the province's Fish and Wildlife Section, and Carl Schwarz of Simon Fraser University's statistics and actuarial sciences department, was that the North Cascades area could support several hundred grizzly bears both north and south of the Canada-USA border. Currently, that area is "largely absent" of grizzly bears, and according to the provincial government that has been the case for the North Cascades for many decades.

Despite the concerns for the grizzly bear population in the Squamish River watershed, the area around Lillooet and other regions around southern B.C., the work by Mowat, Heard and Schwarz led the provincial government to conclude that on a provincial scale the number of bears killed by people isn't related to population density in the 57 distinct population units around the province. The provincial government believes this suggests current grizzly bear hunting levels don't measurably reduce the population size.

Mowat said because of the long-term nature of the study and the incremental work done it meant the findings from the research efforts were largely predictable — but one finding in particular surprised the scientists.

"In coastal areas of the grizzly bear range, areas that do not have black bears, (there is a) vastly higher density than areas that do," said Mowat. "We were surprised by that because we'd always assumed that if grizzly bears were competing with black bears it would be for vegetative foods and that would be in the interior of the province, not salmon, which is what they principally eat on the coast."

The work of the team confirmed that greater salmon availability leads to larger numbers of grizzly bears in coastal areas.

The work by the research team revealed one other grizzly bear fact of interest. The bears are reportedly more abundant in non-forested areas. This conclusion was attributed to the plants they eat, which are more likely to grow in open environments.

Moving forward, Mowat said future study would put greater emphasis on gathering information about coastal grizzly bears, as there is currently more data available on grizzlies in the province's interior.

The full report outlining the findings discovered by Mowat, Heard and Schwarz can be viewed at www.plosone.org.