Grizzly bears and the Tahltan First Nation in northwest B.C. have coexisted since time immemorial. The Tahltan have always responsibly harvested the bears, using all parts of the animals for food, clothing, regalia, tools, medicine and ceremony. Hunting the apex predators also maintains balance in the ecosystem and ensures there’s ample caribou, moose and salmon to feed the community, according to Tahltan Central Government President Chad Day.

But when the B.C. government banned the grizzly bear trophy hunt in 2017, the system was thrown out of whack. While the Tahltan could still hunt for food, social and ceremonial purposes, sport hunting, which took about 100 bears a year from the territory, was strictly prohibited. 

Since the ban, members of the Tahltan have reported increasing numbers of grizzlies in their territory, which spans nearly 100,000 square kilometres, Day said. Community members have also reported that those bears are becoming more aggressive toward humans. More grizzlies also means fewer fish and ungulates, important food sources for the community, according to Day.

Day went out on grizzly hunt to gain a deeper understanding of the situation on a landscape. Photo: Adam Amir / Tahltan Central Government

For decades, the Tahltan have been working with the province to establish a holistic, science-based wildlife management plan that respects their jurisdiction and knowledge, but have made little progress. So in September, the nation announced its own wildlife management plan through which it encourages and incentivizes Tahltan members to exercise their Aboriginal hunting rights. 

Members are now being paid to harvest grizzly bears, black bears and wolves in key areas of the territory to restore balance between predators and ungulates and decrease pressure on fish. They are guided by traditional Tahltan practices and required to make cultural use of every animal taken from the landscape.

The Narwhal spoke with Day about the decision, the details of the plan and how Indigenous communities can take leadership roles in land and wildlife stewardship.

A map of Tahltan territory in B.C. Map: Carol Linnitt / The Narwhal

You’ve been trying to work with the province to make changes to its wildlife management system. The Tahltan Nation has made its own plan now. Can you tell me a bit about that process?

We’ve been in discussion with the province for decades about improving wildlife management. In more recent years, we’ve definitely made more progress than in previous decades, but the progress is not nearly fast enough. And it’s not nearly robust enough to address the issue of dwindling populations [of ungulates] and to address the issues with the data gaps and a growing imbalance between predator and prey that we see on the landscape. 

The province doesn’t do wildlife counts and utilize best practices for wildlife management nearly enough, but for the limited counts that they have done over the years on species like moose and caribou, those so-called scientific studies are riddled with so many gaps. But they also confirm what we’re reporting on the ground, which is that there are less ungulates. They haven’t done the predator numbers, but we know what we see on the landscape and we’re extremely confident that the collective observations on the land are accurate and tell us that there are more predators than ever.

Tahltan hunters are not permitted to kill grizzly bears with cubs. Photo: Thomas Lipke / Unsplash

I’ve seen an increasing number of grizzlies. And for the people that live in the territory and for the backcountry users, both locals and other stakeholders like guide outfitters and hikers, there seems to be a general consensus that there are not only more than ever, but also their behaviour is becoming more desperate, more aggressive, which makes sense if they’re not being hunted and if there’s a lot more pressure and competition on the landscape.

The overarching goal of the plan is to manage apex predators, which then sustains other species, but what does that mean in a practical sense? How did you decide how many animals could be hunted and how much to pay for them?

I’ll tell you the numbers because even if we did everything in our power to try and keep it close to our chest, in my experience it’s always easier just to be upfront with these things so that rumours don’t get out of control.

We have a wildlife technical team. It’s made up of biologists and they have access to scientists and all the public data around wildlife management and counts. So they know the historical data around how many grizzly bears were taken out of Tahltan territory by guide outfitters and by resident hunters before the grizzly bear [hunting] ban. They also have scientific numbers around approximately how many wolves are within our territory, which is about the size of Portugal and 99 per cent wilderness, if not more.

Our wildlife technical team came back to us and said that our territory could easily sustain a harvest of at least 100 grizzlies [a year]. We had a choice to make around whether or not we wanted to make that sex specific and we said we’re not going to make it sex specific, which is going to be controversial. We will compensate our members for harvesting adult males or females, not with cubs. If you see a female grizzly on her own, then we would treat that the same as with a male grizzly. 

We’re going to be paying our members $1,000 for every grizzly that they harvest, and we’ll make sure that they utilize it properly, culturally, and they will be protected under Aboriginal law to practise those harvesting rights in a way that is compliant or that’s consistent with Tahltan cultural practices. We will have limits on how many bears would be incentivized for Tahltan hunters. What we decided was that we would incentivize two grizzly bears, two black bears and four wolves every calendar year for a Tahltan hunter.

Tahltan hunters are paid $500 to kill a black bear. Photo: Adam Amir / Tahltan Central Government

We know that there are thousands of black bears and their population is not a conservation concern in our area. We’ve put a number of at least 150 black bears a year and they’ve got to be adults. No bears with cubs, but could be a female or a male. And you’ve got to utilize the bear properly. [The incentive for a black bear is $500.]

And then on wolves, this one even caught me by surprise, but it went back to the wildlife technical team and they suggest that it should be at least 250 a year. Again, after engaging with our hunters, we decided that we would incentivize up to four wolves per hunter at $500 a wolf.

The Tahltan wildlife department encourages hunters to target areas that have high concentrations of caribou. Photo: Adam Amir / Tahltan Central Government

Once our hunters and our people figure out this policy, they basically have from today until the end of the Christmas season to harvest up to eight animals for those incentives. It doesn’t take a mathematician to figure out that that could equate to $5,000 and if they did that the following year, there would be another $5,000. 

We offered those incentives to help reimburse Tahltans for their time and effort. The reason why a grizzly incentive would be worth more [than a black bear or wolf incentive] is because hunting grizzlies takes far more effort. And quite frankly, grizzlies would in most cases have a far more significant impact on ungulate populations in certain areas. We’re definitely going to do what we can to encourage our wildlife department and our Tahltan hunters that are going to help us with this important initiative to try and manage it in a way so that we are targeting areas that have high concentrations of ungulates, particularly around the calving season.

Day hunts on Tahltan territory. Photo: Adam Amir / Tahltan Central Government

Management of land and wildlife is something First Nations have practised for thousands of years based on traditional knowledge and observation. Do you think this plan sets an example for a different way to do things here in B.C.?

How we would manage wildlife, if we had control over all of the laws that the province has at their disposal, is obviously very different because clearly some of the decisions they made are highly politicized. And also, you know, you’ve got that famous phrase out there, “Don’t tell me about your priorities, show me your budget.” 

With this initiative, Tahltans are putting up a lot of our own money to make predator management and wildlife management a priority. And if you do the research, you’ll quickly learn that other jurisdictions that have a lot of wildlife like Alaska, Montana and Oregon spend significantly more money proportionally and the practices and the management tools that they use are far more robust than what we use in British Columbia. 

Tahltan territory spans 11 per cent of British Columbia. Photo: Adam Amir / Tahltan Central Government

And that’s a big reason why British Columbia has done such a poor job not only managing wildlife in our territory but in many other portions of the province as well. And I’m not one to step on the toes of other First Nation territories, but the reality is that as the province manages wildlife, species like caribou and moose go extinct or become endangered or can no longer be hunted for conservation concerns. 

“If you take hunting moose, hunting caribou, fishing for salmon away from Tahltan people, we’re not Tahltan anymore.”

Where do those hunters go after that happens? They come north to Tahltan territory, where there are still populations of these animals. And at the end of the day, we’re trying to make sure that we have it there for future generations. One of the strongest cultural identity pieces that the Tahltan people still hold dear and practice consistently is hunting. If you take hunting moose, hunting caribou, fishing for salmon away from Tahltan people, we’re not Tahltan anymore. So this isn’t just a battle over hunting rights or fishing rights — it’s something we take extremely seriously, because we aren’t Tahltan if we can’t do those things in our culture. We need healthy moose, healthy caribou, healthy salmon and healthy ungulate populations.

Day hunts with his eldest child. Ensuring future generations can hunt and practise their culture is one of the main motivators behind the nation’s new wildlife management plan. Photo: Adam Amir / Tahltan Central Government

Unfortunately, because the province has created practices that have so many different stakeholders having an impact on the ungulate population, we’re not balancing those harvest numbers by also harvesting predators carefully like Tahltans have been doing for thousands of years. It doesn’t take long for that imbalance to have really negative impacts on the land. That’s what we’re seeing and that’s what we’re trying to fight against.

It’s important if we as humans are going to compete for the same food sources that we have to manage all of these populations together.

I certainly think about all those things when we make a decision like this. I believe that other nations can help preserve their Aboriginal Rights and their fishing and hunting rights in the way that we’re trying to if they take some action. Maybe we serve as a good example for others. But at the end of the day, Tahltans can only try to solve our cultural rights in our territory and that’s our focus.

Tahltan territory is about 99 per cent wilderness. Photo: Adam Amir / Tahltan Central Government

A lot of people are against the grizzly hunt and have a strong emotional reaction to the idea. What would you say to them?

It obviously starts with education and people being properly informed. First and foremost, it would be good if people understood that Tahltan territory is over 99 per cent wilderness. And in Tahltan territory, there are more grizzly bears than there are people, guaranteed. There are actually probably thousands more grizzly bears than there are people. So it’s an extremely different reality. And it’s very inappropriate, if you don’t have any firsthand knowledge of what it’s like to live in that vastly different environment, to be telling the people that have been stewards of those lands in that environment for thousands of years what they should do and what they shouldn’t do. 

Grizzly bears outnumber people in Tahltan territory, according to Day. Photo: Janko Ferlič / Unsplash

Day hunts on Tahltan territory. Photo: Adam Amir / Tahltan Central Government

I think it’s also important for people to understand that even though we’re 11 per cent of the province, there has been no premier that has come out to our territory for over 30 years. Our MLA spends less than one per cent of his time in Tahltan territory, even though it’s probably over 50 per cent of the land base that he represents. We’re in a very vulnerable region of the province. And for the people that have never been here, they wouldn’t understand that. 

These are the types of facts that you share with people and they quickly understand that it’s very important to be properly informed before forming an opinion. 

“The people that think that bears and wolves are cute and cuddly animals from watching Disney movies are sadly mistaken.”

A lot of the people that admire grizzly bears are going to try to push arguments and say that not all grizzly bears eat ungulates. They’re probably going to try and downplay how many ungulates are eaten by grizzly bears. There have been some studies done in places like Alaska and other states as well that showcase just how devastating both grizzlies and black bears in certain areas can be on ungulates, particularly the calves during calving season. Those kinds of studies have never been done in Tahltan territory. So some of the anti-hunting groups will try to use that to discredit our initiative. 

Tahltan hunters have observed lower numbers of moose since B.C. implemented the grizzly bear hunting ban in 2017. Photo: Adam Amir / Tahltan Central Government

We take the position that our Elders and our culture always made it a priority to harvest wolves and bears on purpose for predator management. And obviously when they harvested these animals, they also utilized them to the best of their ability. So wolves were never eaten, but their furs were certainly utilized, and some of the bones were utilized. And then with black bears, they were heavily utilized — the fur, the bones, the meat was eaten. And then with grizzly bears the same thing, but in the modern day not as many people will eat grizzly bears but it’s certainly possible if they wanted to.

The other thing that I think is important for people to understand is that there have been studies in jurisdictions that take wildlife management seriously that show grizzly bears can harvest up to 40 ungulate calves a month. So the people that think that bears and wolves are cute and cuddly animals from watching Disney movies are sadly mistaken. And they would understand how sadly mistaken they are if they lived amongst our people and see what we see with the devastation and the true character of predators in the wilderness.  

Why is it so important for Tahltans to exercise the right to manage your resources on your own territory?

This is one of those stories that can really resonate with so many other Indigenous Peoples in so many other portions of the province. The province is always quick to point out the efforts that they are making. But sometimes I feel like if you have a house that is burning down, when it comes to things like wildlife and fisheries, the province will send you a couple buckets of water and ask to get a big pat on the back for all the efforts that they’re making to bring these buckets of water. But if, at the end of the day, the house is still burning down and not getting rebuilt or if the fire doesn’t stop burning, then they’re failing — we’re all failing. 

Even though B.C. has made more efforts with us in the past few years than ever before, the ungulate numbers are still dwindling and the predator numbers are increasing. There’s still a significant amount of work to do. We didn’t take the decision lightly. We’re just doing what we feel we need to do to make sure that we address the safety concerns and that we stop the trend and then, God willing, we reverse it so that we can create more wildlife on the landscape, more ungulates and maybe less predators and just a better balance.

Caribou have been wiped out in some territories in B.C. The Tahltan people are taking action today so the same thing doesn’t happen in their territory, according to Day. Photo: Adam Amir / Tahltan Central Government

There were caribou on Haida Gwaii, probably for thousands of years, and they were wiped out in the ’30s. My children are Wet’suwet’en and it touches me in a tender place that they basically don’t have rights to hunt caribou anymore because either they’ve been completely wiped out or there are like 10 of them left. I don’t even like keeping track of it because it just makes me so sad. And then there are other areas like our neighbours in Treaty 8 territory that have caribou pens. We don’t want to wait until we are putting our caribou in pens like cattle and putting our salmon in fish farms. 

Up close with B.C.’s endangered baby caribou — and the First Nations trying to save them

If we can manage wildlife properly, then we can maintain healthy wildlife populations, which is not just good for us as Tahltan people. It’s good for ecotourism. It’s good for other industries as well, whether that’s guide outfitting or others. I know people have a lot of mixed feelings or bad feelings about guide outfitting. But truthfully, if we do this properly, my goal is to make sure that we have healthy wildlife populations and proper wildlife practices in place so that guide outfitters, resident hunters and Tahltan people can all hunt together every year in Tahltan territory moving forward. 

I think that’s a very important message to get across, that we believe that we can manage this so that we all can get a fair portion of the wildlife. For some of these people that don’t understand our position or don’t believe in Indigenous self-determination and co-management, I just don’t understand why you would put so much hope in the province when there’s been such a long track record of failures with wildlife management. 

We cannot fail at something like wildlife management because if we fail as Indigenous people, we don’t just lose hunting opportunities like the average resident hunter — we lose our culture. That’s a really important message to get across to people, and to the world.

In a perfect world, what would you like to see?

I want to see a world-class wildlife management regime in Tahltan territory that is co-managed with the province in true partnership that provides a sustainable, long-term wildlife management system that allows resident hunters, guide outfitters and Tahltans to hunt in our nation — forevermore. We can share the resources, but we can only share our abundance if we manage it properly. And we can do that, but it’s going to require robust changes to the way we’re doing it now.

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Brian Falconer is more than happy to admit that he and his colleagues at Raincoast Conservation Foundation have dismal records as guide outfitters.

In fact, in the 33,500 square kilometres of B.C.’s Great Bear Rainforest where Raincoast holds the commercial hunting licence — which gives the organization the right to escort foreign hunters into the area to shoot black bears, cougars, mountain goats and wolverines — the success rate has been zero.

Unless, that is, you count the wildlife photos.

“The only ones that can take anyone in for trophy hunting is Raincoast and we take a different type of hunter,” said Ross Dixon, Raincoast communications director.

Guide outfitters have exclusive rights in the area of their licence to take non-B.C. residents on hunting trips. Hunting for food by B.C. residents does not come under the purview of guide outfitters.

Raincoast is now raising funds for the $100,000 deposit needed to secure the commercial hunting tenure for the Kitlope, the world’s largest intact area of coastal temperate rainforest where the longest fjord in the world stretches into the heart of the province.

The site of an old cannery in the Kitlope at Wakasu. A Canadian Pacific Railway steamer used to bring tourists here. Pictured here is the vessel Maple Leaf of Maple Leaf Adventures. Photo: Alex Harris / Raincoast

A swallowtail butterfly at M’Skusa, the final estuary before Kitlope Lake. Photo: Alex Harris / Raincoast

Trophy hunting of wolves, black bears and cougars legal in B.C.

The Kitlope has been protected from logging since the Haisla Nation and the province signed a joint management agreement in 1994. The provincial government banned grizzly bear hunting in 2017, but trophy hunting for other species is still allowed.

Cecil Paul, hereditary chief of the Xenaxiala people, described the Kitlope and the species that live there as the bank of his people.

“They have been robbing our bank for years for no purpose other than to put a trophy on their wall,” Cecil told Raincoast.

“We don’t understand this and we want to stop it.”

It is a sentiment shared by many British Columbians who are surprised to learn that trophy hunting is still allowed in the Great Bear Rainforest and in most provincial parks, Falconer said.

Raincoast has until the end of July to raise the deposit, with about $85,000 already raised. Once the deposit has been paid, fundraising will start for the $550,000 needed to complete the purchase that will give Raincoast the hunting rights for another 5,300 square kilometres, including the Kitlope Conservancy and surrounding area. The deadline for raising the full amount is December 2020, but, with the support of the Haisla Nation, Raincoast aims to have the tenure secured by the end of this year.

It may seem expensive Falconer said but trophy hunters are willing to pay more than $35,000 to kill bears, wolves and cougars and more than $10,000 for mountain goats, bighorn sheep and moose, meaning the value of commercial hunting tenures has soared.

“And remember $550,000 can’t buy half a house in Vancouver,” said Falconer, who, almost 30 years after first visiting the Kitlope at the invitation of the Haisla and Xenaksiala Nations, remains awestruck at the beauty of the area.

A black bear in the Great Bear Rainforest. Despite a ban on the trophy hunting of grizzly bears, black bears can still legally be hunted in British Columbia. Photo: April Bencze / Raincoast

‘It’s like Yosemite on steroids’

“It’s breathtaking and overwhelming. I have never seen a place like it,” he said describing glacial, milky water, trees more than 1,000 years old and granite walls stretching up thousands of feet.

“It’s like Yosemite on steroids. There’s a waterfall every 100 yards —it’s the land of waterfalls — and when you get to the head of (the fjord)  there’s a gigantic, beautiful estuary with willow and alder and sedge meadows so you have all the river species and birds. It’s the highway of the north coast for wildlife,” Falconer said.

Which is exactly what makes it so attractive for trophy hunters.

One of many waterfalls in Gardner Canal. Photo: Alex Harris / Raincoast

A river flows through an area of the Great Bear Rainforest known as the Kitlope. Photo: Alex Harris / Raincoast

The ultimate goal of Raincoast is to buy all commercial hunting licences in the 64,000 square kilometres of the Great Bear Rainforest, so the area will be protected not only from trophy hunters, but also political whims. In 2002, for instance, the Liberal government scrapped the short-lived ban on grizzly hunting brought in by the former NDP government.

The organization also hopes that, by eliminating the need for governments to compensate tenure holders, it will remove a major disincentive to restrict trophy hunting of other species.

However, everything depends on Raincoast’s capacity to fundraise and, unless there is a massive cash donation, not all offers to sell tenures can be immediately accepted

“Other guide outfitters have approached us, because they see the writing on the wall. … There’s certainly more potential. It’s the new economy. It’s the non-extractive economy of B.C. that isn’t wasteful or extractive,” Falconer said.

A grizzly bear in an intertidal area in the Great Bear Rainforest. Grizzly bear trophy hunting is now banned in British Columbia, but hunters can still kill black bears, wolves and cougars. Photo: Alex Harris / Raincoast

An estuary at Wakasu in the Great Bear Rainforest. Photo: Alex Harris / Raincoast

From hunting guides to wildlife viewing operators

There is no better illustration of the changing economy than in the Kitlope where the tenure has been held since 2015 by Angus Morrison of Wild Coast Outfitters, who is now transitioning his business to wildlife viewing.

Morrison, who also works as a helicopter pilot, said his primary motive in selling the tenure to Raincoast is conservation.

“They probably have the best plan for preserving what is left. I love the wilderness and I travel quite a bit and there is a definite decline. It’s not that I think the hunting, as we were doing it, was wiping out the animals, but the motivation behind some of it is a bit murky,” Morrison told The Narwhal.

“If the animals are already under pressure, I don’t see the point in continuing to hunt them. I think we need to slow down resource extraction and commercial fishing and I know that’s easier said than done.”

Hunting trips booked through Wild Coast Outfitters were conducted on foot and were tough going, which weeded out clients who simply wanted a quick kill, a big head on the walls and bragging rights, but there is that element in the industry, Morrison said.

“I like the idea of seeing people going out there and showing them grizzly bears and things without killing the animals,” he said.

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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.

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Wildlife biologist Helen Davis has been fond of bears for as long as she can remember. She’s radio-collared black bears and tracked them on foot, squeezed into empty dens riddled with fleas and laughed at remote camera footage of bears sliding down plastic tubes in the forest, like children in a playground.

These days she hammers plywood roofs onto hollow stumps and builds plastic dens for black bears on Vancouver Island, where extensive clear-cutting of old-growth forests and the absence of rules to protect dens has left females with a severe housing shortage when it comes time to birth and nurture their cubs.

Eagle and osprey nests are protected in B.C. It’s illegal to cut down forests where songbirds are nesting before their young fledge. It’s also against the law to trash a beaver lodge or muskrat house.

But there are no such protections for black bears — denning trees can be logged even when cubs inside are tiny. It’s up to individual forestry companies and landowners to decide whether or not to leave a bear den standing.

In April, Davis filed a complaint with B.C.’s Forest Practices Board, hoping the board would launch a special investigation that would lead to the protection of bear denning trees — mainly large-diameter yellow and red cedar trees in vanishing old-growth forests — and save some old-growth stands for future dens.

A ‘dwindling supply’ of black bear dens

“Bears are still denning in stumps of trees that were cut down 80 plus years ago,” Davis told The Narwhal. “Those stumps are still sound, but they are rotting and they won’t be there forever. We aren’t allowing new forests to become large enough to become new dens. So there’s this dwindling supply.”

Female bears can fold into a cavity whose entrance is no bigger than 30 centimetres across and their dens are “like nests,” Davis said. The females carry moss, ferns, fireweed, tree boughs and shrubbery into their den, which can be used by different bears for decades, sometimes skipping years to avoid pestering fleas that wait inside.

One female bear caught on remote camera piles up fireweed outside her ground level den, squeezes in and “keeps reaching out the entrance and pulling the bedding inside” to make what Davis describes as a “very, very delicate” home for her cubs.

“Some of the nests are just incredible. It looks like a bird’s nest. They curl up into a little tiny ball. They’re so well insulated with their fat and hair.”

Biologist Helen Davis measures a bear den. Bear den cavities often contain a lot of bedding such as tree boughs, shrubs, ferns and mosses. They look like a big bird’s nest. Photo: Artemis Wildlife Consultants

Stumps now cut too low to the ground for bear dens

Sitka spruce and balsam fir stumps are also sometimes used for denning, along with the “root bowls” — the place where the roots and stem of the tree meet — of trees blown over in storms.

“When they cut old-growth now they generally cut trees very close to the ground,” Davis said.

“And in the old days a lot of the stumps were over my head — six foot to the ground from the top of the stump. They don’t waste that kind of wood any more so any old-growth that is being cut right now doesn’t generally leave stumps that can be used as dens.”

B.C. is home to one-quarter of Canada’s black bears and has more sub-species of black bear than anywhere else in the country. Black bears, still found throughout Canada, have been extirpated from much of their historic range in the U.S. and Mexico, largely due to persecution and habitat destruction.

Ten-thousand-year-old black bear skeletons have been found in caves on Vancouver Island, suggesting the black bears that arrived soon after glaciation were larger than modern-day black bears. According to the B.C. environment ministry, “scientists believe that bears on Vancouver Island and the Queen Charlottes have retained more of their ice-age characteristics than mainland bears because of a long period of isolation from continental populations.”

The sub-species of black bear on Vancouver Island is known as Ursus americanus vancouveri. Restricted to Vancouver Island and larger adjacent islands, this sub-species is similar to the subspecies found in Haida Gwaii — primarily black in colour and with a large skull — but the Vancouver Island black bears have smaller teeth.

B.C. currently protects black bear dens only on Haida Gwaii and in the Great Bear Rainforest.  

“Dens are no less important to bears in the rest of coastal B.C.,” Davis wrote to the board in her notice of complaint, “but they continued to be removed and destroyed on Vancouver Island and other parts of the mainland coast where the supply is even lower due to extensive old-growth harvesting.”

About 80 per cent of Vancouver Island’s productive old-growth forests have been logged. Only eight per cent of the island’s original old-growth trees have some sort of protection, either in parks or because they are within a designated old-growth management area.

B.C. Forest Practices Board investigating complaint

The board rejected Davis’ request for a special investigation but agreed to look into her complaint.

Forest Practices Board spokesperson Darlene Oman told The Narwhal the board’s investigation is still on-going and it has not yet issued a report.

“I wanted to have the issue looked at as a whole and have the provincial government held accountable for more regulation to protect dens, as well as increased landscape level planning to allow some trees to grow large enough to become new dens,” Davis says of her complaint, which points out that black bears need secure and warm den sites for up to six months in order to survive winter on the coast.

She also started a petition asking the B.C. government to protect black bear dens and ensure that forest planners protect trees large enough for new dens.

Biologists examine a bear den in a balsam fir stump. When this stump rots, there are no trees large enough to replace it in this second-growth forest. Photo: Artemis Wildlife Consultants

Since 2014, Davis has had support from two forestry companies that operate in the Jordan River watershed — TimberWest and Queesto, a partnership between the Pacheedaht First Nation and Canadian Overseas Log and Lumber Ltd. — to put roofs on open old-growth stumps and build experimental black bear dens on logged land.

With funding from BC Hydro’s fish and wildlife compensation program, the wildlife biologist created artificial dens made of plastic culverts. Then, with help from an industrial designer, she built den pods, a molded form secured to the ground that mimics a natural den. “It’s kind of like an upside down plastic boat, with an entrance and a chamber.”    

Molly Hudson, manager of stewardship and outreach for Mosaic Forest Management, which manages land for TimberWest, said the company was intrigued by the idea of taking a second-growth landscape and adding den structures to see if bears would use them.

The company gave Davis permission to access its private land holdings in the upper Jordan River watershed, donating about $25,000 during the past five years to help with the project.

“There are no regulatory requirements that we have to manage bear dens in any certain way,” Hudson said in an interview. “Neither the Crown land requirements nor the private land requirements specify that.”

“But we have had a long-standing internal commitment to identify those dens and retain them wherever we possibly can.”

Hudson said the company – the largest private forest landowner on Vancouver Island  – has maintained a bear den inventory for decades, taking measurements and photos of every bear den it finds. Hundreds of bear dens have been catalogued, she said.

“Certainly we realize the importance of these features long-term on our land-base…. How that would look in regulation is an interesting question. We believe as a company that these structures are worthy of protecting.”

‘I had no idea how goofy they are’: bears play on artificial dens

The dens are designed for female bears, who are most vulnerable when they are with their cubs, sometimes preyed upon by wolves, cougars and other bears. “They’re kind of sitting ducks in the dens. So we wanted it to be a small defensible entrance,” Davis said.

There are now about 20 den pods in the Jordan River watershed, including open hollow stumps with plywood roofs. Davis has also installed four den pods and covered a hollow stump in the Campbell River area on B.C. Timber Sales land where much of the forest was destroyed by wildfire in the 1960s.

“It was completely experimental,” Davis said. “You put the thing out in the middle of the forest. How do you know a bear’s going to find it, let alone consider using it as a den?”

Subsequent monitoring showed that bears look for dens year-round and will find “anything you put in the forest,” Davis said. She’s amassed hundreds of 15-second video clips from different den pods, including footage of bears who play on top of the pods and slide down the plastic tubing.

“It’s absolutely hysterical. They seem to find them quite entertaining … I thought I really knew black bears. And I had no idea how goofy they were.”

To make sure the bears spotted the artificial dens, Davis placed “horrifically stinky” weasel lure — a mix of skunk essence, anise oil and glycerine — on branches and roots near the dens to create an interesting smell.

She also tried putting bear hair — taken from a dead bear she found in the forest — inside the dens. Only two weeks later, she returned to the pod to find that a bear had crawled in. From then on, bear hair went into all the artificial structures.

Helen Davis standing near a black bear den. Photo: Artemis Wildlife Consultants

Black bear populations reported as declining, hunting licences up 45 per cent

Davis said no one knows how swiftly black bear populations are declining because the B.C. government doesn’t do any population census work on black bears.

“Loggers and First Nations tell me that they think there’s fewer black bears but there’s no data to base that on, at least on Vancouver Island.”

‘Namgis First Nation chief Don Svanvik told The Narwhal he and other nation members have seen a marked decline of black bears in their traditional territory on northern Vancouver Island.

Svanvik, who spent 15 years working on the nation’s culturally modified trees survey crew before he was elected as chief in 2017, said black bears were a “common sight” up to about seven years ago, easily spotted because there aren’t very many things in the forest that dark in colour.

“It started to get rarer to see a bear,” he said. “It became really noticeable. It just came to mind: ‘you know, we haven’t seen a bear.’ ”

Hudson said it would help Mosaic Forest Management, which also manages land for Island Timberlands, to know the status of black bear populations.

“Some work on the population status and trends would be really helpful for us as habitat managers.”

A recent 10-year period saw a 45 per cent increase in the sale of black bear hunting licences province-wide. In 2007, about 20,000 licences were issued, rising to 29,000 black bear hunting licences in 2017, according to Davis.

“It’s not on people’s radar,” Davis said.  “People don’t care about black bears. They think they’re all over the place and they’re fine.”

This article was produced in partnership with the Small Change Fund.

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.

In 1998, Douglas Clark witnessed Manitoba’s second recorded grizzly bear (Ursus arctos horribilis) sighting of the century.

Then a warden in Canada’s Wapusk National Park, he remembers swooping down near the shores of Hudson Bay in a Bell 212 helicopter to confirm the distinctive, muscular hump of a lone grizzly running along a gravel beach ridge.

Grizzlies had been considered extirpated in this sliver of the province since the late 1800s, and Wapusk — literally meaning “white bear” in Cree — was a land ruled by the polar bear (Ursus maritimus), an apex predator that was protected at all costs.

“Get down there with a trap and a rifle and get rid of that thing!” he recalls a senior park manager telling him.

Douglas Clark initially aimed to collect data on polar bear visits to human-occupied areas in Wapusk National Park. Photo: University of Saskatchewan.

Grizzly sightings on this polar bear turf by researchers and locals increased over the next two decades. The lethal control approach has been touted by some conservation communities, with fears that grizzly bear range expansion would threaten polar bear populations.

Now, with recently captured camera trap footage showing grizzlies, polar bears and black bears (Ursus americanus) roaming the park in close proximity, Clark said he suspected his latest research may shift the conservation status quo in Canada’s ever-changing north.

“Many conservationists don’t look positively on the idea of environmental changes, especially when it affects high-profile species, like the polar bear,” Clark said.

“Grizzlies are the new kids on the block…so, it poses the question, is this change good or bad? And are we valuing polar bears more than grizzlies?”

A lone grizzly passes by a camera trap in Wapusk National Park, appearing to be foraging for food. Photo: University of Saskatchewan.

A grizzly inspects the team’s camera trap. There has been at least one grizzly bear sighting every year since 2008 in Wapusk National Park, but scientists do not yet know the extent or the drivers of their presence in what was previously polar bear country. Image: University of Saskatchewan.

A study led by Clark, published in Arctic Science, is the result of a chance encounter in 2011, when he returned to Wapusk as a conservation scientist with the University of Saskatchewan. Rigging a set of Reconyx heat- and motion-activated camera traps to the outposts of his research camp, Clark aimed to gather data for his studies on human-polar bear interactions.

However, one year in, while sifting through images triggered by park staff on snowmobiles, wandering birds and the occasional polar bear, he noticed an unexpected face wander across the frame: the first on-camera documentation of a grizzly in northern Manitoba.

Cameras snap species overlap

Shortly afterward, his team’s camera traps were picking up visits from black bears as well.

Although neither species was entirely new to the area, these snapshots were the first tangible evidence that polar bears weren’t the only carnivores to roam these lands, or perhaps, to even call them home.

A black bear moves through the tundra of Wapusk National Park, Canada. Photo: University of Saskatchewan.

“It is and it isn’t surprising…Trappers have known about this for years,” Clark said. “But having these cameras out over time, we were able to show that it was more than one bear of all of the species and that it’s repeated. It’s not just one random bear wandering through.”

Set at 85 centimetres (2.8 feet) high, the cameras could not distinguish individual bears but used an infrared flash to count bear visits to a given camera by an individual or family of bears within a one-hour period. In six years of recording, the cameras have successfully captured 401 polar, grizzly and black bear visits at three camps within the park. More than 90 per cent of these visits were by polar bears.

The camera traps are bolted to the fence posts of an approximate 15 x 30-meter (50 x 99-foot) camp compound in Wapusk National Park in northern Manitoba, Canada. Photo: Parks Canada.

The trap setup consists of four cameras facing each of the cardinal directions around the perimeter of each camp, and one additional camera for redundancy. The team lucked into a trap arrangement — in terms of height, location and distance apart — that could adequately capture the trio of species, and so its positioning has remained essentially untouched to this day.

Although no interspecies interactions have emerged, one set of photos captured a polar bear and a black bear passing by the same camera some three hours apart from one another. It’s likely, Clark says, that this narrow time frame indicates these bears were aware of each other and could quite possibly be adapting to the other’s presence. Other footage has prompted the team to suspect that some grizzly bears are even denning in the area and not just passing through.

The politics of polar bear conservation

“Suddenly, this takes us into the terrain of values,” Clark said, “and it forces us to really take a hard look at bear and park conservation in an area where a bunch of ecosystems converge, and in a time where all of these ecosystems are changing very rapidly as a result of climate change.”

How best to approach this influx of non-native predators is a question that remains unanswered. The common approach to conservation, within national parks especially, is to preserve an environment in its known state. But as much of Canada’s subarctic regions rapidly thaw and evolve, this approach becomes less realistic and more difficult to achieve. To ensure a thoughtful approach, Clark says, undoubtedly involves the local people, who harbour a deep knowledge of the land and the ecological changes it’s undergone.

However, many residents of northern Manitoba are at odds with the initiatives of polar bear conservationists and researchers, as local perspectives have historically been cast aside or, in some cases, ignored entirely. For example, researchers have fitted bears with tracking tags to understand their movements, but many communities consider the tags an interference with local hunting traditions and insulting to the bears who, in some cultural views, are considered to be non-human persons.

According to Parks Canada, Wapusk National Park has one of the highest known concentrations of polar bear maternity dens in the world. Image: University of Saskatchewan.

“The politics of polar bear conservation has been going bad for about 14 years. Conservation-wise, policy-wise, wildlife management-wise, it’s a train wreck,” Clark said. Northern Canada has been the epicentre of debates surrounding these matters, often between researchers and media, who put polar bears on an ecological pedestal, and Indigenous peoples for whom polar bears are a primary resource.

Indigenous knowledge and science ‘often tell the same story’

Chris Darimont is an interdisciplinary conservation scientist with the University of Victoria and the Raincoast Conservation Foundation who has conducted much of his research in partnership with Indigenous governments along Canada’s west coast. Darimont promotes the fusion of scientific methods with traditional wisdom and management strategies.

“Management intervention that isn’t carefully considered has a track record of making things worse,” Darimont said. Indigenous communities, he said, had managed natural resources for thousands of years in a way that was inherently sustainable and woven into their culture.

Government agencies, lacking that kind of relationship and working with limited knowledge, are “more likely to commodify resources,” Darimont said.

Generally, in Darimont’s experience, Indigenous governments on the west coast have values that align with those of area conservationists. “We find that [Indigenous knowledge and science] are frequently complementary. They often tell the same story, perhaps in slightly different ways,” he said.

“But Indigenous knowledge might, for example, provide things that science cannot, and vice versa.”

A polar bear snacking on snow. Image: University of Saskatchewan

A study co-authored by Darimont and fellow researchers in 2014 successfully combined these two schools of knowledge. Noticing an increase in grizzly bear sightings throughout the archipelago off British Columbia, his team deployed camera traps and non-invasive hair-snagging sites to track bear movements and genetics.

“We combined our photographs and genetic detections with interview data from elderly knowledge holders in two [First Nations] communities on the coast,” Darimont said. “What that did is give us data that our Western science data could never do, and that is, go back in time. What we couldn’t do is put remote cameras on these islands 60 years ago, so each knowledge source provided something the other knowledge source couldn’t … it was a pretty powerful story.”

Clark, too, said he hoped to further marry camera trap data collection with the expertise of local people in northern communities. “You can combine the robustness of the cameras with the ingenuity and knowledge that the local people have about the land that they live on,” he said. “This also gives them a way to gain a voice and some real traction in these debates about bear conservation that really do affect them a great deal.”

Rethinking conservation assumptions

In his next phase of bear conservation research, Clark plans to arm communities in northern Manitoba and Nunavut with camera traps of their own. His off-the-shelf Reconyx suite has provided a reliable view of the changing landscape. So far, however, he’s been able to capture only snapshots within the cameras’ 25-meter (82-foot) sensor range, and his curiosity of what lies beyond camp perimeters has prompted him to continue documenting the tale of the three bears in Wapusk National Park.

Clark said he thinks the information gained in Wapusk can help the conservation community around the world grapple with parallel situations. “Preserving a steady-state environment in the subarctic on the coast of Hudson Bay, or probably pretty much anywhere, is no longer an option,” he said.

“These doctrines and these assumptions in orthodox conservation thinking are really powerful, very deep-seated and hard to dislodge. Yet, the world is now forcing us dislodge them if we’re going to be able to do anything effective on the conservation front, now and in the future.”

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