Subject: [BCEN LW:] David Suzuki: Bearing down on grizzlies

Publish Date: April 29, 2008
http://www.straight.com/article-143761/david-suzuki-bearing-down-grizzlies
By David Suzuki and Faisal Moola

Years ago, I was surprised to learn that a grizzly bear is protected in the United States, but if it walks across the border into British Columbia, it can be killed for sport. So we did a program on them for The Nature of Things. I was amazed to see pictures from the 1800s of immense piles of skulls from grizzlies that were slaughtered to make room for early settlers on the prairies. Grizzlies were not just mountain animals; they flourished on bison all the way across Canada to Manitoba and south to Texas and California (where the only place you’ll find one now is on the state flag)! Grizzlies need space – tagged animals have been known to travel over hundreds of kilometres in a season. But the cumulative impacts of habitat loss and fragmentation from logging, mining, road building, urbanization, and other land-use pressures have forced them into isolated patches of territory.

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Bear Matters has permission to post recently submitted letters to Premier Campbell and Minister Penner by Biologist, Wayne McCrory, RPBio 

Date: Tue, 29 Apr 2008 06:31:30 -0700To:  “OfficeofthePremier, Office PREM:EX” <Premier@gov.bc.ca>From: Wayne McCrory <waynem@vws.org>Subject: Fwd: Coastal Grizzly bear no-hunting areas?

Dear Premier Campbell,

As you well know grizzly bear hunting is a very controversial issue in the province and that the European Union still maintains its ban on the import of grizzly bear trophies from B.C. Valhalla Wilderness has been active in conservation in B.C. including the B.C. coast for the past 30 years, starting with the Khutzeymateen Grizzly Sanctuary. One of the successes of this habitat protection is that is part of a much larger grizzly bear no-hunting reserve from 1982. Two more such areas were proposed nearly two years ago, including a large one that encompasses some of the spirit bear conservancy areas.

A consultation process was started by the Ministry of Environment nearly 1.5 years ago but stalled out last year. I recently asked Minister of Environment Penner what was happening with these grizzly bear no-hunting reserves and he had not even heard about them. Please see my e-mail below. What are the province’s plans to implement these grizzly bear no-hunting reserves and why is the process taking so long? Sincerely, Wayne McCrory. Spirit bear project coordinator,Valhalla Wilderness Society.  Date: Fri, 25 Apr 2008 09:02:51 -0700

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Bad Hunting

Warning: this video is disturbing.

A plea to stop killing Haida Gwaii’s ‘trophy’ bears.

By Susan Musgrave
Published: April 24, 2008

TheTyee.ca

A sign, in Spanish, at the entrance to the zoo near my apartment in Cali, Colombia, read TAKE PITY ON THE ANIMALS. A groundskeeper explained to me why the sign had been posted.

“We had a bear once, he was a disappointment. He wouldn’t wake up unless you threw rocks at him. Then he would rear on his hind legs and roar.

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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.

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West Coast couple and their children live what they speak
http://www.canada.com/calgaryherald/news/reallife/story.html?id=ef89162d-caf2-42e8-b1fe-c302ec0f0b8f
Kim Gray
Calgary Herald

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Whistler Question, April 17, 2008

After reading last week’s Whistler Question article regarding garbage/bear issues, collection of an underweight cub to Critter Care, and proposing birth control drugs to a resident female bear, I need to respond with concerns for black bear management in Whistler. I have been studying black bears within the RMOW for now 15 years.

First, local government does not seem to acknowledge the seriousness of unchecked garbage issues in Whistler. Each year there seems to be some reason for not exploring bear-proof containment in residential areas.

Yes, recycling and waste reduction is important, but I think that a bear population feeding for more than 40 years on edible human garbage at various dump and now residential/commercial sites is a significant issue. And as a result of garbage feeding, dangerous behaviours are evolving (breaking into houses/vehicles and one person injured) not to mention multi-generations of bears exposed to this degrading behaviour.

Bears are extremely visible landscape indicators that need proper management, which means containing garbage to the best of our ability and providing outreach to people.

The latter is progressive each year, but I’m sorry to say, RMOW, that effective bear-proof garbage containment is non-existent and the bears have proved it.

Second, the destruction of the young mother bear Juniper and cub in 2007 has sparked some kind of misled emotional urge to save bears in poor condition that would otherwise perish naturally. Yes, death is not nice to see, especially with a cute little cub, but it is a part of nature - a healthy nature. Taking an underweight cub to a facility where it is cared for by people and fed supplemental food, only to be released into a population where human-habituated and human food-conditioned behaviours are currently running amuck, is not healthy.

Bear numbers in Whistler are healthy. I would like to see the science that states they are not. A growing bear population such as Whistler’s needs natural mortality, not interference. Mean annual survival rate for cubs in 2006-’07 was 86 per cent and has never dropped below 70 per cent since 1996. The highest cub production recorded in the last 14 years was 50 cubs in 2006-’07. Even at 70 per cent annual survival rate, that is a significant number of subsequent juvenile bears released into the population.

Comparatively, across North America, annual cub survival rates have frequently ranged from 30 to 70 per cent. And thus, our current problem in Whistler - generation after generation of juvenile bears lured to the unchecked availability of garbage.

And third, we are now bypassing the garbage issue again and proposing to change bear biology by giving the mother bear Jeanie (resident to Whistler Mountain) birth control drugs just because we haven’t had the know-how to do something about the very core of this conflict - garbage.

Short-term or long-term birth control restrictions are rash approaches to wildlife management when other options are better applied.

Manipulating female bear biology is a “cop-out” which says to me that we are trying to keep this bear alive at any cost (to her, of course, not to people) which has nothing to do with understanding and proactively dealing with seasonal bear behaviour.

We need to deal with Jeanie as best we can, which included what we did last fall - bear proofing her route and successfully pushing her from the Village. And Conservation Officers need to appreciate the knowledge we have on this bear (as • they have done in the past) and allow adaptive management to safely guide her through the seasons.

It takes work to coexist with our bears and I believe Jeanie and other bears deserve that.

Michael Allen, Black Bear Researcher, Paradise Valley

MARK HUMEFrom Tuesday’s Globe and Mail E-mail Mark Hume <mailto:mhume@globeandmail.com>   | Read Bio http://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinions/columnists/Mark+HumeBio.html>   | Latest Columns <http://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinions/columnists/Mark+Hume.html> 

April 15, 2008 at 3:57 AM EDTVANCOUVER — A record number of grizzly bears were killed in British Columbia last year, according to new figures released yesterday by environmental organizations.“It’s kind of shocking … very disturbing,” Chris Genovali of the Raincoast Conservation Society said of provincial government statistics that show 430 grizzly bears died in 2007, bringing the total to nearly 11,000 killed in the province since 1975.“I don’t think you can call that a sustainable harvest,” said Mr. Genovali, whose group has long been lobbying for a moratorium on B.C.’s grizzly bear hunt.

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(Also See Sample Letter to Premier Below) 

Petition: It’s a very easy user-friendly petition. But after filling in your name and address and clicking NEXT you have to fill in the next page, too. If you don’t want to list five friends, click on NO THANK YOU and you will receive confirmation that your name is on the list. 
Here’s the link.http://www.thepetitionsite.com/1/halt-the-hunting-of-black-bears-on-haida-gwaii

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9AIjV3lJ0Bs A Hunt on Haida Gwaii

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NASCALL RIVER: CASCADE-STUTSLEM VS. PRIMEX INVESTMENTS

UNNATI GANDHI
Globe and Mail
April 5, 2008

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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

BELLA BELLA, BRITISH COLUMBIA, Canada, April 1, 2008 –/WORLD-WIRE/– Two years after B.C. Premier Campbell announced a “historical land use agreement” that was intended to protect Canada’s Great Bear Rainforest, it remains unlegislated. Although the land use agreement was supposed to establish new conservancy boundaries, new large scale industrial proposals are planned within these same areas—leaving the world renowned Great Bear Rainforest under threat once again.

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