Bear Matters BC

Joint NGO Statement on Tigers for the Honorable President Hu Jintao’s 2006 Visit to India
Wild tiger populations are recovering in a few places, but most are in steep decline. Tigers now occupy 40 percent less habitat than they did 10 years ago and only 7 percent of their historic range.

There are many threats to the survival of wild tigers, including habitat destruction, prey loss and conversion of forests to agriculture. One of the most insidious threats is poaching to supply the illegal trade in tiger bones for health tonics and skins for decorative uses. The deadly results have been underscored by the total loss of tiger
populations in places such as India’s Sariska Tiger Reserve.

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Vancouver Sun
Published: Wednesday, November 29, 2006

Zoo pandas eat, sleep and, if the zookeepers are lucky, make little pandas. They also make a lot of money for China, their native land, which rents them out to zoos around the world, including the Chiang Mai Zoo In Thailand. The Thai zoo pays China $250,000 US a year for Chuang Chuang and Lin Hui. Luckily for the Thai zookeepers, the panda pair also do one other thing — they poop, about 25 kilos a day between the two of them. Why is this lucky for the Chiang Mai Zoo? Because it’s developed a way to make paper products out of the panda poop, and these little souvenirs — notebooks, fans, bookmarks and key chains — are selling quite nicely. So far the zoo has raised $8,200 US through panda poop paper, an entirely new kind of P3.
© The Vancouver Sun 2006

Tuesday 28 November 2006
Here in what’s been called America’s Serengeti, park visitors say they still find fresh tracks of the grizzly bear in snowy valleys, a sign that the West’s largest land carnivore has benefited from one of the greatest species-recovery programs since that of the bald eagle. But ever since the federal government indicated about a year ago that it wanted to remove Yellowstone’s 600-plus grizzlies from the threatened species list by early 2007, a debate has been going on about whether the apex predator is genuinely ready to lose its protected status or whether this is a case of politics at work. Already, advocates for keeping the bear protected are predicting lawsuits that could tie up the government’s effort in court.

Other conservationists and federal officials say the Endangered Species Act has worked for the grizzlies in America’s first national park, where the bear was listed as threatened in 1975 when its population fell to 136. In the early 1970s, many bears were killed partly because of poorly managed garbage sites. Grizzlies elsewhere in the lower 48 states still would be listed as threatened, officials said. One possible consequence of delisting of the grizzlies in and around Yellowstone would be state-regulated trophy hunts in the three states outside Yellowstone and the easing of restrictions on killing “nuisance” bears on private property, activists say.

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An investigation of public opinion about the three species of large carnivores in Slovakia
Sunday 26 November 2006 at 23:24 | write a
Knowledge of and attitudes towards the brown bear (Ursus arctos), grey wolf (Canis lupus) and Eurasian lynx (Lynx lynx) and their conservation and hunting management in Slovakia were assessed in 2003-04 by written questionnaire survey. This study aimed to identify what most influenced levels of acceptance, for example geographic region (relative carnivore abundance), socio-demographic factors, level of fear, knowledge and previous experience of large carnivores, perception of population size or particular carnivore species. Download: Wechselberger M., Rigg R. and Betkova S. (2005). An investigation of public opinion about the three species of large carnivores in Slovakia: brown bear (Ursus arctos), wolf (Canis lupus) and lynx (Lynx lynx) . Slovak Wildlife Society, Liptovsky Hradok. x + 89 pp.

Friday 24 November 2006
A fence along the Line of Control (LoC) designed to keep out militants is curbing the movement of wild bears and leopards which are now wandering into villages and killing people, officials say. The animals were until recently able to roam through forests in the divided Himalayan region of Kashmir. But they are unable to penetrate a heavily defended barrier built by India from 2003 to stem guerrilla activity linked to a freedom struggle. Officials say while the fence has cut the numbers of militants crossing into held Kashmir and of shoot-outs with soldiers, Kashmiris living in isolated hamlets now face an altogether different threat.

“Fencing is one of the reasons that has restricted the trans-border movement of wild animals in the border areas of the state,” Qazi Muhammad Afzal, Kashmir’s environment minister, told Reuters. “If people stand divided due to the fence, then so do animals.” More than a dozen people have been killed so far this year by wild animals — five in the past month alone — and scores of others have been injured, wildlife officials say. At the weekend, a man was dragged from his mud house in Baramulla district by a leopard as he slept and a woman was mauled by a black bear in the Kupwara region. Leopard and Himalayan black bear populations have increased after a ban on hunting was enforced in held Kashmir in 1970, and the loss of pine forests had already increased contact between animals and people.

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Prepared for
Parks Canada,
Mountain Parks (1998)

Mike Gibeau,
Resources and the Environment Program, University of Calgary

Background

̊ Translocation of bears has been a common short-term solution and an alternative to the immediate destruction of “problem” bears for the last thirty years. The object was to prevent further nuisances and mortality however, evidence now questions the effectiveness of this management practice.

Considerations

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Swan Valley conservation plan being revised
By The Associated Press - 11/16/06
KALISPELL (AP) — The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is reviewing Swan Valley land use agreements struck more than a decade ago in the face of Plum Creek Timber Co. plans to sell 10,000 acres of land for private real estate development.

The review of the Swan Valley Conservation Agreement includes an analysis of how real estate sales might impact both wild lands and wildlife.

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Nov 15 2006

A GRIZZLY sow and her cub who posed a safety risk to humans for several weeks were destroyed by a local resident Nov. 5.

The grizzly sow and her 1-1/2 year old cub showed up three times at a residence near the Kleanza Creek and Bornite Mt. area Nov. 4 and 5, leading a resident to shoot both bears to save his property and his dog, who scuffled with the bears on their last visit, said conservation officer Darryl Struthers.

Afterward, the resident called conservation officers to report what happened and provide a statement to them, which is required under the Wildlife Act, he said.

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SHANNON MONEO

Special to The Globe and Mail

VICTORIA — As the season changes from fall to winter, so too do the risks encountered by drivers on British Columbia highways, who must add the movement of wildlife to their list of concerns.

Large animals such as moose, deer and elk are mating and moving erratically. Their mineral cravings draw them to salt on winter roads. And darkness prevails, obscuring wildlife.

The Insurance Corp. of British Columbia says out of $2.27-billion in claims in 2004, drivers who hit wildlife cost the public insurer $23-million.

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Monday 13 November 2006 at 19:52 |
A Thai zoo, which has hosted a couple of pandas for four years, will play “porn” videos for the male next month to encourage them to breed in captivity, the project manager said on Saturday. The pair — living chastely together at the zoo in the northern city of Chiang Mai since arriving from China in 2003 — would be separated in December, but stay close enough for occasional glimpses of each other, said panda project chief Prasertsak Buntrakoonpoontawee. “They don’t know how to mate so we need to show the male how, through videos,” Prasertsak told Reuters. He said Chuang Chuang, the six-year-old male, would be shown the videos on a large screen when he might be feeling amorous. “We’ll play the video at the most comfortable and intimate time for him, perhaps after dinner,” Prasertsak said, hoping Chuang Chuang would then use the techniques on Lin Hui, a five-year-old female. The zoo is hosting a four-day international panda conference that starts on Monday, drawing 200 wildlife and panda specialists from around the world.


Sunday 12 November 2006
A study commissioned by the state Department of Environmental Protection says it would be expensive and ineffective to try to control New Jersey’s black bear population using birth control, according to a published report. The study, An Analysis of the Feasibility of Using Fertility Control to Manage New Jersey Black Bear Populations , written by three experts in wildlife contraception, comes as Gov. Jon S. Corzine is considering whether the state should go ahead with a bear hunt this December or whether it should explore other options to control the number of bears. “Fertility control does not look like a viable option,” one of the report’s authors, Mark A. Fraker, a wildlife biologist with TerraMar Environmental Research in Ashland, Ore., told The Star-Ledger of Newark for Wednesday’s newspapers.

According to the study, capturing bears so they could then be sterilized or given a fertility vaccine would be prohibitive because it costs about $1,000 per animal to snare them. Also, while the birth control efforts have worked on deer and wild horses, the wildlife experts said they have never been tried on bears in the wild.

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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.

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Wednesday 8 November 2006 at 09:50 | write a
[from LCIE] Serbia constitutes part of the distribution of two brown bear populations. In the west it overlaps with the Dinaric-Pindos population that stretches down the western Balkans from Slovenia to Greece. In the east there are a few bears in the mountains that form the very southwestern end of the Carpathian range. However, this bear population is relatively isolated because it is seperated by the Danube river from the rest of the Carpathian range. In an effort to reinforce this eastern population plans have been made to translocated a few bears from the west to the east during the coming years. On the 30th of October a single 103 kg male (named Djura) was live-captured in the west of Serbia and translocated the 250 km to the east. More releases are planned for next spring.

Your Province

Letters

Letter
Published: Sunday, November 05, 2006

As students at Central Community School in Port Coquitlam, we are very angry that a Nelson man shot a mommy grizzly bear and her two babies.

Now there are only 57 South Selkirk grizzly bears left.

We feel sad for the bears, and we want to cry about it. The man said he felt threatened, and that’s why he shot the bears.

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>photo:Malcolm Fitz-Earle’05  Friday 3 November 2006
Damage caused by wild bears has increased sharply across the nation recently, and the areas where bears were spotted have expanded from mountainous regions to residential areas. Bears were spotted in residential areas of Kanazawa on Oct. 17; Numata, Gunma Prefecture, on Oct. 24; and in Yonezawa, Yamagata Prefecture, and Fukui on Oct. 30. What is unusual this year is the number of wandering, wild bears that have turned up in residential areas where they have not been spotted before. There are two types of Japanese wild bears–brown bears, found in Hokkaido, and black bears, located in Honshu and Shikoku. This year, there has been a remarkably high number of black bear sightings. At a meeting of local government officials in charge of dealing with damage caused by bears held by the Environment Ministry on Oct. 25, 4,888 black bear sightings were reported as of Sept. 30. The figure is substantially higher than the 3,077 sightings reported over the same period in 2004, when a large amount of damage was reported nationwide.

An official from the ministry’s Wildlife Division said, “The range of places where wild bears are active has been spreading toward areas at the foot of mountains.” The number of bear sightings often fluctuates depending on whether nuts are plentiful, but there are several more reasons for this year’s increase. Prof. Toshiki Aoi at Iwate University pointed out that the concentration of people in cities, the deterioration of forests and hills near residential areas, and a change in the way humans are in contact with nature have all contributed to the increase.

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