By Jessica Kerr
jkerr@bowesnet.com
Monday November 06, 2006

Scientists are using unique techniques in an effort to monitor the grizzly bear population around Hinton, and two took the time to tell interested residents about it.
It was a full house at the Hinton Training Centre Nov. 1 as Gord Stenhouse and Marc Cattet enlightened Hintonites on one aspect of the Foothills Model Forest grizzly bear research program.
“Hinton is built, and we reside, in the middle of grizzly bear habitat in Alberta,” Stenhouse, program lead, said.
He told the crowd that there are a myriad of activities going on within that habitat — municipal expansion and development, oil and gas exploration and extraction, and mining.

“These are the easy things to hone in on,” Stenhouse said, adding that human recreational activities can also have an affect on wildlife.
He told the crowd that the last estimated population of bears in the Hinton region was 42 in 9,000 square kilometres.
When the grizzly bear research program set out in 1999, one of its aims was to find a way to use health indicators to help keep track of the bear populations.
This is where Cattet, a wildlife health specialist with the Canadian Co-operative Wildlife Health Centre, comes in. He has been working with the program since the beginning monitoring the health of grizzly bears around Hinton and comparing the results with other data collected.
Cattet started his portion of the presentation by explaining the difficulties encountered in attempting to accurately determine wildlife populations.
“Although we can estimate the size of a wildlife population, we cannot effectively monitor it over time,” he said.

Counting bears or other wild animals can be difficult — they are often on the move and the landscape can make it hard to pick out each animal in an area.
Cattet said another technique for keeping track of wildlife requires capturing them and either tagging them or inserting a microchip under the skin, but that can be costly and time consuming.
When the Foothills Model Forest grizzly bear research program started seven years ago, they thought they would use the opportunity to gather information about the bears, rather than just identify them and let hem go.
“When we started in 1999 we said, ‘Let’s put some focus on the health of individuals’,” Cattet said.
So, the group of researchers started capturing grizzly bears, sedating them and taking a variety of samples and measurements.
Once caught, the bears are weighed and measured. The scientists take the bear’s heart rate, as well as measuring the amount of oxygen in its blood. They extract a small tooth that, when analyzed, can indicate the animal’s age — and they take blood samples.
Lastly, the researchers look at what the animal does once they are done with it.
“That, again, gives another sense of its health,” Cattet said.
For the first few years, he said, the researchers just studied the affect their actions were having on the health of the bear. Since 2003, however, they have been looking at how the changing landscape is effecting the bears’ health.
Cattet explained that a number of factors can be linked to grizzly bear health.
For example, they have found that bears that live in areas with more roads tend to be larger — both in length and weight.
As well, bears that live in areas with less protection, more roads or other forms of human activity, tend to have higher stress levels and bears in those areas tend not to live as long.
“We’re really just scratching the surface,” Cattet said.
“Over the next five years, we’re working on developing a practical and reliable technique of detecting long-term stress in wild animals.”
He added that in doing so, the researchers might be able to catch trends before the animals’ health starts to fail.
The findings in the bear population around Hinton have been mixed.
“We found some animals that are in poor health and we found some animals in excellent health,” Cattet said.
For more information on the grizzly bear research program visit www.fmf.com.

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