http://canadianpress.google.com/article/ALeqM5g_JLyfMj8mPs7ZkL0ft122McQ7xw   CALGARY — Alberta will continue to suspend its controversial spring grizzly bear hunt into 2009 amid growing evidence that numbers of the iconic carnivore are significantly lower than earlier estimates.

But Sustainable Resource Development Minister Ted Morton won’t order a status review of the grizzly - which could see the bear listed as a threatened or endangered species - until a five-year official count is completed next year. “We’ll keep the moratorium in place until we get the numbers in,” Morton told The Canadian Press in an interview. An average of 14 Alberta grizzlies were “harvested” yearly until the province halted the hunt for an initial three-year period in 2006 in order to get a handle on how many of the bears still prowled its forests. Not only is 2008 the last scheduled year of the hunting ban, it is also the final year of a half-decade-long scientific survey that uses DNA from hair samples to count the province’s bears in five different geographical regions. And until the entire count is completed, Morton said he would not change the way Alberta classifies and treats its bears, despite being “sympathetic” to their plight. “I think the responsible approach is to wait for the research to establish the approximate grizzly bear population before implementing new policy,” said Morton.

Before the survey, it was generally believed that Alberta had somewhere between 700 and 1,000 grizzlies. “Obviously, it seems pretty clear that they’ll be lower than some of the guesstimates that had been made earlier,” Morton conceded. The numbers from last year’s count, which focused on Alberta’s southern tip along the Montana border, are due to be made public within weeks. And this summer’s count will focus on bears in the remote northwestern forests. Gord Stenhouse, chairman of Alberta’s grizzly bear recovery team and head of the DNA census, speculated that only about 500 grizzlies remain in the province “and maybe less.” “The big message is that certainly there’s far fewer bears that have been found and counted in the province of Alberta than what many people expected.” Such dwindling numbers would qualify the Alberta grizzly to be reclassified from its current title as a species “that may be at risk” to “threatened” and perhaps even “endangered” according to international standards. But Stenhouse also said that ecosystems like Yellowstone National Park in the northwestern United States has proven that bear populations can recover “with the appropriate help.” Earlier this month and after six years of work, Alberta released the final draft of its grizzly bear recovery plan. Amoung the 78-page document’s numerous recommendations are to set specific standards for core grizzly habitats and to strictly limit motorized access on oilpatch and logging roads. And while the grizzly recovery plan didn’t receive any new funding in this week’s Alberta budget, Morton said core bear habitat protection will be included in his upcoming land use framework. The minister also suggests that “some progress” has been made in reducing the known human-caused grizzly mortalities in Alberta from 35 in 2003 to just nine last year. Louisa Willcox, director of the U.S.-based National Resources Defense Council’s wild bears project, said the need is “critical” for Alberta to implement a grizzly recovery plan. “I think in Alberta we know enough to know that there’s a real dire situation with the potential of a declining population and pretty low numbers in a highly fragmented ecosystem.” Willcox said a yearly grizzly bear hunt easily becomes a “red-herring issue” when the big-ticket items surrounding care habitat protection and road density limitations are not addressed. With likely fewer grizzlies in the entire province than within the Yellowstone ecosystem, Alberta must somehow find ways to keep its sparse bear population connected to promote cross-breeding. “And for that to happen, you need binding standards and there are no binding standards in this recovery plan,” she said. While other at-risk species like wolves have been successfully re-introduced to the northern states from Canada, bears are much slower at reproducing and therefore take a longer time to rebuild a decimated population. Recent studies have also shown that Canadian grizzlies are even slower to reproduce because of the harsh habitat conditions, with bears not even becoming sexually mature until seven years-old.