Earth & Sky

Links:

In search of the last continental American wilderness (TheLocalPlanet.com – November 13, 2003)

Many can’t bear grisly thoughts of grizzly bears (TheOlympian.com)

Do you know the difference between a black bear and a grizzly bear? Take this Montana Department of Fish, Wildlife and Parks test

Bear Conservation Around the World (Smithsonian National Zoological park)

Interview with Katherine Kendall

ES: Thanks for speaking with Earth and Sky today. Let’s start with some background about the Northern Divide Grizzly Bear Project.

KK: I was asked to do this research because, this is one of six grizzly bear recovery zones, where the federal government has mandated to try to recover the grizzly bear population from it’s current threatened status. This particular ecosystem, called the Northern Continental Divide, occupies the NW corner of Montana. And very little work has been done on grizzly bears at an ecosystem level for this population. It’s difficult to assess the success of the management efforts that have been put into place to try and recover the bear without knowing what the status of the population is. It’s a pretty simple, straightforward assignment, in that the Northern Divide Project’s goal is to estimate the size of the grizzly bear population in this eight million acre ecosystem.

ES: Why has it been so difficult to get a good count of bears?

[7:58]
KK: Bears are really difficult to count, and partly that’s because they’re solitary animals – they don’t herd up. You can’t go and spot a big herd of them and spot most of them. The only time they travel together is when females have cubs. So, they’re out there, and they live generally, and especially in this ecosystem, in areas that are heavily vegetated – those with a lot of forest cover, even in the areas that don’t have trees – very brushy places. So it’s difficult to even observe them. They generally avoid people, and they’re often most active during the night and at dawn and dusk. So it’s really hard to just go out and observe bears.

And, the other reason is that it’s in an area like this (Northern Continental Divide). It’s in a very large area, and a lot of it is roadless, and it’s really rugged mountains. It’s really difficult and expensive to do a population estimate. There just simply hasn’t been funding available until now to address this problem.

ES: Grizzlies are still listed as “threatened” under the Endangered Species Act. Why do you think this happened?

[12:30]
KK: Well, the two biggest reasons for grizzly bear decline have been loss of habitat and excessive mortality. For instance, in northwest Montana, this was a real mecca for bear hunting in the late 1800s. And actually, hundreds of animals were taken every year for sport hunting, so much so that the bait that they used to go bear hunting with, that was thought to be the biggest threat to big game populations on what was to become Glacier National Park, was killing these elk, and moose and deer in order to bait bears in to hunt them. So, big hunting pressure on bears, and grazing conflicts, particularly with sheep, in the first half of the 1900, there were sheep grazing all throughout all of the mountainous areas and the Rocky Mountains. The sheep herders found the bears really easy and attractive to kill sheep, domestic sheep. So they pretty much shot all bears on sight – black and grizzly bears. And then just general predator control, and people not feeling safe with bears around, pretty much eliminated them from all but the most wilderness areas. And that’s why these remnant populations that still exist south of Canada, occur in the Yellowstone area, and the Glacier National Park – Bob Marshall Wilderness areas, primarily, the two largest populations that remain. And there’s a couple of other very small populations in northwest Montana, northern Idaho, and then the occasional sighting in North Cascades and northern Washington.

ES: Can give me a little bit of background about bears in North America?

[15:12]
KK: There are three bear species in North America, the grizzly bear – also known as brown bears – the North American Black Bear, and polar bears. The black bears occur in almost every state still. A lot of states have recovered their populations from being extirpated or at very low numbers in the 1900s. And now, there are fairly good populations in most states, and most of Canada. Grizzly bears, however, have a lower reproductive rate, they have a longer interval between litters, and they have smaller litters in general. And because they’re a little more aggressive, they have more trouble coexisting where there are a lot of people. Or I should say, the bears do just fine, but people aren’t comfortable with people there. There’s just a few remnant populations, there’s many, many more black bears than there are grizzly bears in North America right now.

ES: What caused a turnaround in attitudes towards bears, from extirpation to conservation?

[17:29] ******
KK: Part of the change in attitude had to do with the Endangered Species Act. The grizzly bear was one of the first species listed after the ESA act was passed, and that has meant that all of their federal and state agencies that have some responsibility for managing grizzly bears and their habitat have had to come up with a plan to promote recovery. That’s meant that a lot of restrictions have been put on how many roads can be put in, and how much access can be allowed in National Forests, for instance, and trying to protect bears from excessive mortality and leave enough habitat for them so that their population can recover. So, a lot of time and effort has been put into grizzly bear management. And yet, in this ecosystem, we don’t have any measure of the population size from which we can judge whether these efforts are effective. And then a more pressing issue is that bears are now being seen outside of the official grizzly bear recovery zone that’s specified in the Fish and Wildlife Service’s recovery plan. They are re-occupying areas where they haven’t been seen in 30 or 40 years, so there’s some indication that our efforts have paid off, and the bear population is in better shape now than it was when it was listed in 1975. But we don’t have any proof of that without going out and actually developing a credible population estimate.

ES: What’s your involvement in this effort to get grizzly numbers?

[20:18]
KK: I’m the leader of the Northern Divide grizzly bear project. And our task is to estimate the size of the population to a known degree of precision. And we are going to do that throughout this eight million acre area, using some relatively new techniques that involve snaring hair with barbed wire hair snares, and then using DNA fingerprinting techniques to identify the bears that left the hair. And by sampling during multiple periods of time, I can develop a mark-recapture estimate of the population size.

ES: Can you describe a little more about how you intend to do this?

[21:29]
KK: In open area, like in areas like Alaska and Canada, where bears occupy tundra, where there are few trees and there’s not a lot of vegetation to hide – it’s much easier to observe the bears and do actual counts by observation using radio collars as a marking device and then flying to see how many animals you see that are marked and unmarked, and then you can do a proportion that estimates population size from that. That’s not possible to do down here, because of the thick vegetation. Quite frankly, we didn’t have a good technique before these DNA methods were available. So, one technique that had been tried to index the population size, was to look at the number of reproductively active females in the population, thinking that it would be easier to differentiate family groups, because of the number and the size of the groups, and that sort of thing, and by putting together the total number of observations, and then totaling that over three years, because that’s the reproductive interval between litters of cubs, that you would perhaps get this minimum count of reproductively females in the population, and then manage from that basis. But that has not worked out that well, because the visibility has been so poor here that we just don’t see that many family groups to build that index on.

ES: How did you decide to choose the DNA sampling technique to count bears?

[25:00]
KK: A group of technical experts was convened a couple of years ago to try to decide what would be the best approach in estimating population size in grizzly bears in the Northern Continental Divide Ecosystem. And we considered radio telemetry, which is the standard approach in some areas. But we rejected it as being the most viable technique in this ecosystem in estimating population size, because we still need to observe the animals once they’ve been collared, in order to develop a population estimate. Radio telemetry of bears works really well to monitor population trend that is to look at, over time, whether the population is increasing or decreasing. But, to get the actual size of the population, it is not the best technique when you have heavily vegetated areas. So that was what pointed us in the direction of using these new DNA hair-snared base sampling, where we collect hair samples from across the study area, and then identify, through genetic analysis, the species, sex, and individual identity of each bear that left a hair sample. And we can use that to model population size. The way that we estimate population size from the data is a technique called mark-recapture estimates. And, it’s based on the fact that if you go out and capture a bunch of bears and put a mark on it, or, in our case, if you are able to get a hair sample that identifies the individual, that’s like it’s been marked. We can identify it if we capture it again. So you go out and you take your first sample. And you have a number of individual animals that you know that you sampled the first time. And then you go out and you sample again, totally independent of that first sample. And you get another sample pairs, you identify the bears from that. Some of those bears are ones that you caught before, i.e. they were marked, and some aren’t. And by looking at the ratio – you know how many were marked. And if you look at the ratio, of marked to unmarked, and then apply that to the number you knew were marked out there, you can identify how many in the total population are unmarked. And that’s our population estimate. That’s a simple Lincoln-Peterson index of population size. the models get a lot more complicated than that, and we will be doing four mark-recapture sessions for our sampling, but it’s all based on that concept.

ES: Sounds like these hair snags could hurt! Do they hurt the bears?

[29:17]
KK: Well that is the beauty of the DNA hair-based sampling. It’s often referred to as non-invasive sampling, because we don’t have to handle, or even see the bear in order to get a sample from it. What we do is put out a single strand of barbed wire, low, stapled on to a number of trees to make a little coral. And then we put a scent lure in the middle. And when the bears are attracted to that, and they slip under the wire, or they step over the wire to come and investigate the scent lure, they rub against some barbs and leave hairs behind. It doesn’t hurt them at all, and in fact, I think they actually like it, because we’ve put barbed wire up on some trees that bears naturally rub against, and they come back over and over again, even though there’s barbed wire on it. We actually see them rubbing on fence posts and barbed wire fences. So, it’s very easy on the animals, and it’s easy on the people who have to deal with them. It’s much safer than actually trapping a grizzly bear and tranquilizing it, and having to handle it, and put a radio collar on it, and fly – it’s dangerous flying in the mountains, and low-level flying in small planes to radio track them. So, all the way around, it’s less invasive and intrusive for the bears, and it’s safer for people. And it helps preserve wilderness values, because we don’t need to do those aerial tracking flights.

[32:13]
ES: Can you give me a historical picture of grizzly populations in North America?

KK: Before European man came to North America, there were probably, generally estimated that there were about 50,000 grizzly bears in North America south of Canada. And that population declined to about 1000 animals when the bear was listed in 1975. There isn’t a lot of information on the status of the population in the Northern Continental Divide Ecosystem, and whether it’s responded well to conservation measures put into place once it was listed as a threatened species. But there are some indications that the population in the Yellowstone ecosystem has increased, and it is perhaps at 400-500 animals, and in addition, there’s probably 30 animals a piece now in the Cabinet-Yak ecosystem, and the Selkirks in northern Idaho.

ES: So why should we do it, why should we conserve grizzlies?

KK: I guess the question of why preserve grizzly bears south of Canada – there’s been a lot written in the literature about that. A part of it has to do with, why conserve any species, and just let them all fade away as development takes over? I think there’s inherent value in preserving all the species. They are an important part of the ecosystem. They’re one of the top predators in ecosystems where they occur. And, so, I think in at least some areas, we should make every attempt to preserve the full compliment of native species in natural areas in order to allow those ecosystems to function in a natural way. I just think it’s right. I think that we’d all be ecologically and spiritually poorer if we let grizzly bears go extinct and just only happen in Canada, or Alaska.

ES: What kind of future do you see ahead for grizzlies?

KK: I think the future is problematic for bears, grizzly bears in particular, because humans don’t tolerate them well. And we continue to expand subdivisions and industrial development into their habitat, and we just aren’t’ very good at being able to co-exist with bears. It’s possible, but people have to make some concessions. They can’t leave out their dog food, and garbage, or you’re going to have bear troubles, and end up with the bears dead. I think that we’re going to have to work very hard in order to retain grizzly bears on the landscape, even in these protected areas. I think the bears have responded to the efforts that a lot of agencies have made in order to try and recover them in the last 25 years. But, it’s something that has to continue. We can’t just say, “well, they’re recovered.” Yes, they seem to be doing well in Yellowstone, and probably the Northern Continental Divide. But, if you look at the long-term picture, having 1000 bears, or even 2000 bears, spread out over six different ecosystems south of Canada, is a very, very small number. Some excessive mortality, just some sort of catastrophic disease or something could easily put a major dent and possibly cause those populations to blink out. A thousand animals aren’t very many animals. In recent years, we actually have exceeded the mortality limits set in the recovery plan for bears, grizzly bears, in the Northern Continental Divide. We don’t really know that’s excessive mortality, because that number is based on a proportion of the population, and maybe we’re not estimating the population very well. But, we still continue, even with the intensive efforts put into place because the bear is listed as a threatened species, we still have fairly high mortality, so I think it’s going to take constant effort, and a commitment, continuing commitment, to keep bears on the landscape.

ES: Do you have any “bear stories” that you’d like to share during your encounters with them?

KK: Well, I have a couple of things. I was charged by a bear, a sow with a cub, when I was working at Yellowstone. And, um, it was a bluff charge – it came really close. It didn’t touch me, and everything ended up just fine. But that was exciting! One thing that I like to share with people is that, every year, we get observations from people in the park that see bears at play, swimming and frolicking in ponds or sliding down snow fields, getting up, walking back up, and sliding down again, sows and cubs doing that kind of play activity, and I think it’s really cool to see that. And, another thing, over the years, I’ve always been amazed at what restraint bears show, as far as their interactions with people. We get a lot of visitors in some areas of Glacier Park, and they’re hiking along, and most of them are never aware that there are grizzly bears really close by, not causing any trouble at all, just quietly moving out of their way as they come through. That’s the stuff you don’t hear about, because people aren’t aware of it. And, every year we also get observations of somebody that was watching a bear on a hillside and saw people hiking through – they were too far away to warn them or anything – and the bear hears them coming and fades off into the bushes and leaves them alone. I kind of like those stories.

ES: Have you spent a lot of time out in the field and bear habitat?

KK: I have, over the years. This project is so large, that I’m pretty much not in the field, just administering. I’m getting ready to hire 180 people to work out in the field next year. But, over the years, I have spent a lot of time (out in bear habitat). It’s really fun to go into these hair traps that we set out. You go in, and you try to put it in a place you think bears will be, and set it up so it’ll maximize the number of bears that will try to come in. And then you wait two weeks, and you come back and see what you get. So it’s really exciting to come back and see big gobs of bear hair all over the wire, and the big pile of wood that we always stack up to pour the scent lure (on), they always tear that apart, and rub, roll in it. It’s just neat to see the evidence. And then to have the DNA results come back, and find out that that particular trap had three different grizzly bears come into it during that 14-day period, that’s really exciting too. We actually took some remote camera shots at a hair snag station in 1998 in Glacier National Park, and there must have been 12 different bears we got on film coming into this one site. One one of the bears liked the foul scent of the scent lure so much that she started rubbing her neck in it, and pretty soon she was on her back, with all four paws up in the air, rolling in this stink. That was really fun to see how they react to it. And that actually, when we tested the scent lure at a research facility at the University of Washington, is exactly what the bears did with their favorite scents – they’d start salivating, and rubbing, and rolling in it.

ES: So, what’s in this scent lure that makes bears so excited?

KK: (Laughs) That’s the putrification. The main scent lure that we use is something that we brew up we up ourselves, and it is aged fish and cattle blood. And what we do, is get 55-gallon barrels of whole fish, and let them sit in a warm room for a couple of months, and we use the liquid produced from that. And, (we use) cattle blood that’s also aged, and that is really foul. It’s totally disgusting, but bears are keyed in to that rotting carcass smell, because they have really good senses of smell, and it’s how they locate food. In the spring, when they come out of their den, they often locate animals that were killed in snowslides during the winter. And they’ll dig them out of the snow, and feed on them. So, it’s highly attractive to bears, and it’s a very effective scent lure for us.

ES: So how are you collecting the data?

KK: We are doing two types of samplings. One is more or less a grid, a 7×7 grid that we’re putting over the study area. And in each one of those grid cells, we’ll be putting a hair trap. and, so it’s approximately 660 hair snag stations that we’ll have out at any one time. They’re left out for 14 days, and then the hair is collected from them, they’re revisited, the hair is collected from them, and then they’re taken down and moved to another site within each of these grid cells. And we do that four times – four two-week trap sessions is how we refer to it. In addition, at the same time that’s going on, we also have people out visiting rub trees. These are trees that the bears naturally like to rub against, we don’t put any sort of scent lure on those to attract the bears. They just rub on trees and other fence posts and power poles and stuff, just because it feels good and it’s a way of communicating with other bears that they’re around. This summer (2003), in preparation for sampling next year, we identified over 5000 rub objects across the ecosystem. And, we will have people out monitoring those, collecting hair periodically from them. So we have a separate, independent way of sampling from the baited hair snag stations – so two types of sampling. One of the things that we have to do in order to put up hair snag stations on lands where cattle is grazed, either on public land where there are cattle allotments, grazing allotments, or on the private land that’s occupied by grizzly bears, we needed this past summer to make fences around the areas where we’re going to put our little hair corrals next year, to fence out the cows. Because, for some reason, they are attracted to these little barbed wire fence station sites, and the trample them and tear them apart, so we had to fence the cows out in the areas where we’ll be putting hair snag stations next year in grazing allotments. So, in addition, this summer, we had to contact, and get written permission from over 100 private landowners to either access, to put up traps on their properties, or to access other areas where we needed to put up scent stations or rub tree monitoring. So, we had a lot of preparation to do before we could go out into the field next year.

ES: What stage is the project in right now, and can you give me a time-line for it?

KK: The Northern Divide project, the planning stages began in 2002. I held a technical study design planning workshop to look at various issues having to with the study design and how best to accomplish this work. And then, in 2003, we actually did field work, identified rub trees, constructed cattle exclusion fences and contacted land owners, so that we had that all set up in time for the sampling, which will be occurring in the summer of 2004. We’ll have approximately 200 people out in the field constructing hair snag stations and sampling hair off of rub trees. And, for the summer, once we get those samples, we will then enter the data and pass the samples along to the genetics lab that will be identifying the individual bears for us. We expect that we will get somewhere between 20,000 to 40,000 hair samples from this effort. And, it’s going to take the lab a long time to analyze all of those, because it’s fairly involved analysis. So, we expect that the genetic analysis probably won’t be complete until early 2006. And then, once we have those data, we can develop the population estimate and complete our data analysis and write up the final report. We hope to have that done by the end of 2006. So December 2006 is our target date.

ES: Why’d you choose the summer as the time to go out and monitor these hair-snag stations?

KK: Well, first of all, you can’t study bears in the winter, because they’re all hidden in their dens – so you really can’t find them. So that leaves six months when they’re active in this part of the world. And, we won’t be sampling until June because the interior of Glacier Park and the Bob Marshall Wilderness is not accessible due to high water and snowfields over the pass – too much snow. You really can’t get into that country until mid to late June. So, that’s why we’re not getting started until June, and we want to be finished before the hunting season starts, because we don’t want to be baiting anything into these sites during the hunting season. The hunting season begins in September, so that pretty much leaves June, July, and August to do this work.

ES: I wanted to get back with you about the private landowners you’ve dealt with in making this project happen. What’s the reaction been so far?

KK: You know, it’s been interesting to deal with the private landowners. A lot of them are ranchers, farmers, that are on the outer edges of the study area. And there’s a wide range of views about bears in general – from people that think that grizzly bears are neat and want to have them around, and don’t care if they’re on their ranches, to people that don’t really want to have them around. They view them as dangerous to their livestock, and have real concerns about the expansion of bears into these lower elevation habitats. But, it’s been really interesting to contact them. Almost everybody seems to appreciate the need for actual information about bears, and what their status is, and what their distribution is. So, by and large, we’ve had excellent cooperation from private landowners that are fascinated about the project and anxious to help make it a success – including letting us work on their land. A few people have turned us down, either worried about having a scent lure attract bears to their site, or not interested in being involved in the project. But the vast majority has been anxious to help, and are looking forward to seeing what the results show us.

ES: What’s been the biggest obstacle so far in this project?

KK: The scope of this is daunting. I’m not aware of any other research project done at a scale like this – eight million acres, most of it being roadless wilderness and extremely rugged terrain. Having to have people get out on the ground and visit every corner of that big wilderness area – I guess that’s the biggest challenge in running this project, trying to ensure that all of the crews are collecting the same data in the same way, and having that quality control built into the way we do business enough that people scattered over such a large area – you know, this is larger than the states of Maryland and Delaware combined, the study area. And, some of the duty stations that people will be working out of are three days from the nearest road. So, just trying to plan for quality control and safety, safety not so much from the bears, but from people crossing fast rivers, deep water, snow fields, on steep slopes, and knee and back injuries, because they have to carry a lot of weight, backpack a lot of weight around off trail through dead fall (fallen trees) and that sort of thing, I think that’s the biggest challenge.

ES: I appreciate your taking time out to talk with me today. Do you have anything else you’d like to share with Earth & Sky?

KK: I think what’s neat about this project is the non-invasive nature, that we’re able to study bears without having to handle or even see them. It’s a pretty elegant way, and it’s exciting to have this new technique available to us. It’s really neat that we going to get the first ever information about how bears are using this huge chunk of land. We’ll also be able to look, from the genetic analysis, we’ll be able to see if highways, or developed areas, are preventing movement, and isolating parts of the population from each other. So that has some implications for long term management across these transportation corridors in particular, to keep the segments of the population connected. And then the scope is totally unprecedented. I mean this is just huge, huge mind-boggling stuff. The size of it.. it’s kind of hard until you know what the country’s like, and you know how difficult it is to move around, and what’s involved. But I think that’s worth highlighting, because it’s going to be huge.

ES: I don’t quite follow about being able to track bear movements – how do you do that, or do you?

KK: We won’t be using the data to track movements, because we won’t be sampling enough to do that. We can identify – we’ll know if the same bear showed up at a different trap session at a different area. We do see that kind of moving around. But it’s not enough information to describe a home range. What it will give us is a snapshot of the relative density of bears in particular areas, which the difference in density may be due to habitat quality, or it may be due to conflicts with people and mortality sinks, and that sort of thing. The managers are going to be very interested in seeing how the population is using this area, and whether they need to put more protections in place in some areas, or whether they can loosen up some of the restrictions on use in others. One of the things that I didn’t talk about, is that one of the motivations for having this project, for doing this project, is that some people believe that the bear has recovered enough to be delisted and removed from federal protection. So this data will be an important piece of information in deliberations concerning potential delisting of the grizzly bear in this ecosystem.

ES: Is your group making that decision?

KK: No, it’s status, as far as progress towards recovery, has to do with guidelines set up in the recovery plan, and it mostly just has to do with the total number of animals, and their trend, and the population trend. This project will establish the number. A concurrent project that the State of Montana will be starting using radio telemetry, they’ll be monitoring trend, and using this population estimate to anchor that trend on, as a baseline for their trend monitoring project. So, size and trend are the two big ones. And then, at some point, it’s a decision that really gets beyond where the biologists are involved. It gets to be a political decision about whether they can be delisted or not.

ES: How important is this study in the question over whether or not they should be delisted?

KK: It will be huge. It will play a pivotal role in the delisting question. And, we just won’t know what it will tell us until we do the sampling. But the total population size has a lot to do with whether people will feel conformable enough to take the bears off the endangered species list.

ES: Do you expect to find more, or less, bears than currently thought as a result of your count?

KK: I guess I have two thoughts about that. One is that the project that I did between 1998 and 2000, which is called the Greater Glacier DNA Project, looked at two million acres, which is actually the northern quarter of this study area for the new project, we did this sort of sampling and made a population estimate. And the population size, prior to that study, had been estimated thirty years before based on just sightings. And the general sort of thought had been was that we had maybe 200 grizzly bears. The DNA project came up with an estimate of 300 – a lot more than we had previously known about. And I would expect – the same might be true, we still don’t have a good population, any good, current estimates for the whole ecosystem. But I suspect that we’re going to find a fair number of bears, that there’s more bears out there than we can ever see because that’s just the way that grizzly bears are. I think the results should be encouraging, as far as grizzly bear conservation goes. The impact it will have on whether bears are delisted or not, that’s not something that I can really predict, because that gets into a political and a judicial process. My job is to provide solid information to base those decisions on.

Special Thanks to Today’s Interviewee:

Katherine C. Kendall
USGS Glacier Field Station
Glacier National Park
West Glacier, MT