http://calsun.canoe.ca/News/National/2007/09/25/pf-4523871.html
September 25, 2007
Report says little done to save grizzly bear
By PABLO FERNANDEZ, SUN MEDIA

The grizzly bear is on the verge of extinction and the government is doing precious little to save the largest prairie and mountain predator on the continent, says a report released yesterday.

The study, which was penned by the Sierra Club of Canada and the International Fund for Animal Welfare, evaluated the Government of Canada’s Proposed Recovery Strategy for the Grizzly Bear, Prairie Population, and gives the initiative — which concludes the grizzly will never recover — a scathing grade.

In June 2003, the grizzly was officially classified by the federal government as extirpated from the Canadian Prairies.

But the feds’ recovery strategy offers no blueprint with which to return the grizzly to its ancestral lands, effectively putting those that remain in the refuge of the mountains in greater peril, said the Sierra Club of Canada’s national campaigns director Jean Langlois.

“Environment Canada has formally condemned the prairie grizzly bear population to extinction,” he said. “To make matters worse, they have so far refused to act on scientific recommendations to legally protect the remaining Canadian grizzly bear population.”

Apart from failing to lay out a recovery strategy, citing that the re-introduction of the grizzly to their native ground is simply not feasible, the government initiative also fails to identify the animal’s critical habitat.

Under SARA, the feds’ Species at Risk Act, those steps were to have been taken by the government by June 2007 for the 386 species listed under the act as threatened with extinction.

“The recovery strategy is incomplete, lacking mandated due diligence including solid research and adequate references from which to base the final decision of, ‘recovery of this species is considered not technically or biologically feasible,’ ” says the report.
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http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20070925.wgrizzly25/BNStory/Science/?page=rss&id=RTGAM.20070925.wgrizzly25

Grizzlies: A home on the range?
Environment Canada feels a reintroduction won’t work but activists urge
further study
MARTIN MITTELSTAEDT
>From Tuesday’s Globe and Mail
September 25, 2007 at 5:08 AM EDT

Large numbers of grizzly bears once roamed the Prairies from Calgary to east
of Winnipeg, but the carnivorous mammals were driven to extinction there
during the 1900s, and Environment Canada concluded this summer that nothing
can be done to bring them back.

Yesterday, conservation groups accused the government of failing to show any
scientific evidence on why it’s a lost cause to reintroduce the big bears
into this broad area.

The conservationists are not yet calling on the government to start shipping
grizzlies into parts of the Prairies, but they are asking Environment Canada
to study the controversial idea and give it a fair hearing before rejecting
it out of hand as being impractical.

“The government has completely failed to do its due diligence. It is lacking
any kind of scientific rigour,” Barbara Cartwright, a spokeswoman for the
International Fund for Animal Welfare, said of the government’s plan to do
nothing for the bears.

The IFAW, along with the Sierra Club of Canada, jointly issued a report
yesterday critical of the government’s position. The report said
“reintroduction of the grizzly bear is possible,” and that having a larger,
more widely dispersed population of the animals, created by transferring
some from areas where they are abundant, would be critical to ensuring the
long-term survival of the species.

The groups did not say where on the Prairies they thought grizzlies could be
reintroduced.

But this summer, Environment Canada issued a proposed policy that concluded
that trying to bring the Prairie population of grizzlies back from
extinction “is considered not technically or biologically feasible at this
time.”

It said a key problem facing reintroductions of the bears is what it called
the “lack of social acceptance” by farmers, livestock producers and rural
residents who “generally have a negative attitude toward grizzly bears.”

Another problem is that in areas where people and bears share the same
habitat, humans tend to start killing the large predators. “Human-related
mortality is the greatest threat to the persistence of grizzly bears today,”
Environment Canada said. “The recovery of the grizzly bear to the Prairies
is not feasible due to a lack of habitat and an inability to mitigate
threats.”

The proposed federal position has been endorsed by the governments of
Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Alberta.

The proposal to make no effort to create a bear population on the Prairies
was open for public comment until last week. Environment Canada plans to
review comments for 30 days, and then decide whether it should change its
position.

Before European settlement, grizzly bears lived throughout western North
America from the Arctic to as far south as Mexico.

They are now found in a few isolated pockets of the continental United
States, where about 1,200 exist, along with about 22,000 in Alberta, B.C.
and the three territories, and another 30,000 in Alaska. But this area is
less than half their former range.

The remaining bears in Canada are not at high risk of dying out, unlike
their extinct Prairie cousins. They are considered a species of “special
concern” under Canada’s endangered species act, which means the population
needs to be monitored to ensure there is no further erosion of numbers.

Grizzlies were a common fixture throughout the Prairies and the boreal
regions of Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba, according to sightings by
early explorers. Their numbers declined in tandem with European settlement
and the destruction of plains bison.

After 1900, only a few isolated pockets survived. A hunter shot the last
bear in Manitoba in 1923. One was shot in the Pasquia Hills of eastern
Saskatchewan in 1939. The last reliable sighting of a grizzly was in the
Porcupine Hills of Saskatchewan in 1960, according to Environment Canada.

Although the animals are occasionally seen on the Prairies, in places such
as the Milk River and St. Mary River in Southwestern Alberta, these bears
are considered to be part of the mountain population on a foray and not
members of the extinct Prairie group.

The two environmental groups said failing to help the grizzlies would set a
bad precedent for all cases in which a species-recovery effort would be
difficult.

“This kind of approach, asserting that the factors that put a species at
risk are insurmountable obstacles to recovery, would inevitably lead to the
conclusion that recovery is not feasible for any species at risk,” they said
in their report.