Conservation officers have found two grizzly bear cubs dead at the Thorsen Creek landfill in the Bella Coola Valley in B.C.’s Great Bear Rainforest.

“You could see where the cubs were hit,” inspector Len Butler with B.C.’s Conservation Officer Service told The Narwhal

“Tracks and the blood on the road” also suggest the mother of the cubs was struck, Butler said, though conservation officers haven’t found her.

The two cubs are the first grizzly bears to die from human-related causes in the Bella Coola Valley this season, which Butler called a “busier than normal” year for conflict between people and grizzlies.

Officers received a report that the cubs were run over on the Thorsen Creek Bridge on the main highway on June 30. The Bella Coola Valley is narrow.

“Bears do frequent the bridge crossings,” Butler said.

It’s “maybe anywhere from two to five kilometres across the whole valley,” Nuxalk fisheries and wildlife field coordinator Jason Moody told The Narwhal.

Grizzlies make their dens higher in the mountains, but follow creeks down to the river, following “the different runs of salmon as they arrive in the different creeks.”

The river is also where you will find communities of people. And “all these houses are on salmon streams,” Moody noted.

Getting to those salmon runs, bears pass right through communities, where other things can look like food: garbage, fruit trees and smokehouses can be enticing for bears. Nuxalk research has also shown that fruit trees become more appealing to bears as salmon stocks decline. Since 2014, the Nuxalk Nation has used hair sampling to track grizzly bear populations and movement in the Bella Coola Valley.

“If there’s no salmon, any attractant is increased in value at that point. So cherries, apples, gardens,” Moody said. It’s something the Nuxalk didn’t see when “there was always a stable supply of salmon,” he added.

“You have these wild stocks that are suffering or disappearing completely in other watersheds all around us,” Moody said.

But in the Bella Coola area, human efforts are helping to bring back salmon. The Snootli Hatchery, located 11 kilometres from town, releases various salmon species, including chum, into the Bella Coola River and tributaries.

A grizzly bear eats berries. Photo: Jefferson Bray

The problem with fruit trees

“In the area right now we do have a lot of bears that are wandering around,” says inspector Butler. “It’s been a very interesting year. The bears did come out early and start getting into the fruit trees.”

“The scat that’s up and down the highways right now is just pure cherry pits,” Jefferson Bray, who runs a small chalet and offers nature tours in the Bella Coola Valley, told The Narwhal.

The deaths of the two grizzly bear cubs don’t come as a surprise to Bray, who has kept tabs on grizzly bear deaths since moving to the area 15 years ago.

“We knowingly bait them into conflict and we don’t really do anything about it,” Bray said, referring to the fruit trees he sees around the valley, many of which are not secured with electric fencing. “These little cubs are just the first.”

Moody has been helping with the Nuxalk Bear Safety Group since its start more than five years ago. Unlike other community bear programs, this one puts the safety of bears first.

“There’s a deep respect that we have for the bears, which stems from a lot of our creation stories,” he said.

“The private homeowners have to realize there are going to be bears walking up salmon-bearing creeks.”

Grizzlies follow salmon streams into the Bella Coola Valley. Photo: Jefferson Bray

From spring to fall, when grizzly bears are out of their dens and looking for food, the Nuxalk Bear Safety Group wants to help them make their way safely through the Bella Coola Valley.

“There’s increased anxiety as they go throughout the valley because they’re getting pushed from one property to the next,” Moody said.

In some cases, property owners take things into their own hands when grizzlies are on their properties, Moody said. A video of a man shooting at a mother grizzly bear with her cubs went viral in the fall of 2018. The issue of how people deal with bears on their property is not new and far from over.

Securing potential bear attractants

There are efforts to encourage individuals to secure anything that a bear might consider food. The Nuxalk Bear Safety Group helps people with electric fencing kits to use around fruit trees and smokehouses. They also install cameras and monitor bear behaviour to see if fencing is working. Other services include pruning and removing trees and picking up things like composting fish guts from someone’s property if the person doesn’t have access to a vehicle.

Still, not all properties in the valley have been bear-proofed. Bray says part of the issue is attractant laws aren’t tough enough. In many cases, it’s up to landowners to decide whether or not they will do things like put electric fencing around fruit trees.

“The provincial laws are meaningless as they’re written and it makes for impotent, useless enforcement and it is a liability,” Bray said.

The Wildlife Act indicates that property owners are required to make sure attractants are secure, with exceptions for various activities including farm operations, leaving it up to many individuals to decide whether or not to keep attractants out of the reach of bears and other wild animals, Bray said.

While these laws are province-wide, Bray said there’s an opportunity for the Central Coast Regional District to “create a bylaw that circumvents … the exemptions made in the Wildlife Act and the Farm Act.”

“They could basically make a bylaw stating that people must contain their attractants for the safety of all in our community,” he said.

Without that, there are limits to what conservation officers can enforce, though they do encourage landowners to use electric fencing and other means to secure attractants like fruit trees, Butler said.

For Moody and the Nuxalk Nation, the big picture is keeping grizzly bears safe in the long run. The genetic population counts the nation is undertaking are showing preliminary numbers that are far less than provincial population estimates of grizzly bears, Moody said.

When it comes to grizzly bears, “Bella Coola is known as a black hole,” he said. “That’s the image we’re trying to change.”

The Bella Coola Valley used to be a destination for those seeking to make a grizzly bear trophy kill. Since British Columbia’s trophy hunt ended in 2017, Moody has noticed a fresh approach from the province.

“They have a lot more time to actually do work on the ground and with the bears directly,” said Moody.

Currently, the Nuxalk Nation is doing collaborative research with the British Columbia government to look at the sustainability of bear-viewing related activities.

Still, Moody said, there are different attitudes in the valley when it comes to grizzlies that are counter to the approach of the Nuxalk.

“We want we want people to live here … sustainably with the wildlife,” Moody said, “rather than … trying to keep this oasis of their property separate from all the rest of the Great Bear forest.”

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Living in cities my entire life, I’d never imagined that one day I’d live in a town where it was normal to keep a can of bear spray in the car for an impromptu hike — a town where the local paper would report on the local animals and your friend might give you a heads up that he saw a grizzly bear on the path by the river you walk nearly every day.

So when the time came to pack up and move to the Bow Valley, I hadn’t expected those would be the biggest adjustments. I thought maybe the abundance of tourists or the small town would have had more of an impact on the way I live my life. But it turned out, when your non-human neighbours include 500-pound grizzly bears, you pay them close attention.

The towns of Banff and Canmore, Alberta, are situated in the Bow Valley, where the Bow River weaves its way east. This river valley, nestled between soaring mountain peaks, isn’t just where people want to live and explore — many wild animals live here because there’s less rock and ice; there’s an abundance of fresh water and food. So it’s no surprise that seeing wildlife in or near town is fairly common. Grizzly bears, wolves, coyotes or elk make the news on any given week: features about their whereabouts based on the GPS points from radio collars, stories of human-wildlife conflict, tales of wolves eating garbage at campsites or an aggressive elk.

In the spring of 2017, as grizzlies were emerging from their dens to begin their months-long binge on food in preparation for the next winter of hibernation, Bear 148 started to make the news. The stories stacked up and as the weather got warmer she ventured east of the park to find food as the season changed.

Living in Banff, it didn’t take long to start to hear the local stories about popular bears that died from various human-related causes, like trains or cars. As I watched things unfold for Bear 148, even early on it seemed likely that this particular bear might not make it another year. What I didn’t see coming was the intensity of the outcry over her and the decisions officials made that affected her.

Bear 148 began to leave the national park, where there are different sets of rules for wildlife. She left to find food, like ripe buffalo berries, but walked right into the public spotlight, where she became a management conundrum for all of the biologists and officials who have to make the call about both keeping the public safe and keeping wild spaces intact.

Bear 148 munches on dandelions. Photo: Marc Breau

In late September 2017, Bear 148 was killed by a hunter in B.C. nearly 500 kilometres from her home range. Two months after she died, I decided I would create this podcast. I didn’t quite know what form it would take, but I knew I wanted to explore the challenges different wildlife policies and different individual decisions we make as visitors or as locals, pose for grizzly bears in the Bow Valley.

For me, Bear 148 was the way to see the bigger picture.

There are many stories about the relationship between people and grizzly bears in Alberta that are worth knowing and sharing.

Not all of those stories are part of this podcast. I wanted to hone in on a particular place and a particular bear because of the difficult questions wildlife managers were dealing with; because of the uproar in the community; because while in theory the rules for wildlife, like grizzly bears, are clean-cut, in reality things got messy.

Undercurrent: Bear 148 explores what it’s like for a grizzly bear trying to navigate this complex world we’ve built. In this series, you’ll hear from people living in the Bow Valley — artists, biologists, experts in human-wildlife conflict and government officials.

In the Bow Valley, and in many other places where people and wild animals live close together, people use the term coexistence. But what that term means off paper and in action is confusing and complex. As our natural world quickly changes, the footprint of our communities and activities expands. Bear 148’s story is a glimpse into some of the realities wildlife face.

The Narwhal’s reporters are telling environment stories you won’t read about anywhere else. Stay in the loop by signing up for our free weekly dose of independent journalism.