This week I look into the life of Grizzly 122, better known as the Boss, as he emerges from his winter den and marks the true start of spring in the Rockies. I also look into Montana’s Glacier National Park and the rapid rate of glacial melt it is experiencing, and how it also has implications on a local level.
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Grizzly Bears emerge from their Winter Dens
This is the time of year when the mountains begin to come back to life. In Episode 72, I started the watch for the first bears of 2019 to emerge from their den. I heard rumours of bears being spotted in Kananaskis, but the first one I can confirm is Banff’s reliable grizzly 122, better known as The Boss.
Banff Park staff were expecting him to emerge from his den any day, but when he was spotted on a wildlife camera on March 19, the news was greeted with new urgency. For the Boss, the Canadian Pacific Railway mainline has been part of his key home range for years. He spends a great deal of time on and near the major travel corridors and the tracks provide him with huge amounts of food.
In episode 46, I talked about a theory being tossed out that because the Boss is so protective of the CPR mainline, that he might actually be protecting other, perhaps more naive bears from being hit by trains. You can check out that episode at MountainNaturePodcast.com/ep046
Train and vehicle impacts are critical causes of mortality for bears in the Canadian Rockies. In fact, between 2000 and 2012, 14 bears were killed along the CPR mainline between the eastern boundary of Banff and the west boundary of Yoho National Park.
A wise man once told me that good judgement comes from experience…but experience comes from bad judgement. You may be listening to this and thinking….hmmm, that’s something I can relate to. Well, although bears aren’t people, Bear 122 can absolutely relate to this sentiment. He is the only bear in Banff National Park to be struck by a train and somehow he survived without major injuries. Good judgement comes from experience, and the Boss has that in spades.
The tenure of the Boss has turned train vs bear mortality stats on their head. During a 2011-12 study, 21 bears were satellite collared. Every two hours, their position was sent to researchers. Of these 21 bears, only 4 regularly wandered the CPR mainline. During the time they were monitored, they checked out the tracks 20% of the days.
As researchers examined the bear scat located within 150m of the tracks, 43% contained evidence of feeding on grains that were spilled from rail cars along this main thoroughfare. Come autumn, when natural foods become more scarce, 85% of the scat contained grain. Along with grain, scat found near the tracks was also much more likely to contain elk, deer, and moose hair.
Of the four bears visiting the tracks, three were 3 youngsters, and then there was The Boss. The research showed the younger bears focused more on grain, while the Boss had a different agenda.
He was attracted by grain, but far more focused on carcasses left behind as trains retired elk, deer, moose, and other animals. To add some perspective to that, between 1982 and October of 2017, 1,256 large animals were killed by trains traversing the parks.
That translates of more than 50 hoofed animals each year. That’s a lot of food, but still, it pales in relation to the amount of grain deposited each year. In episode 19, I talk about a study that showed that some 110 metric tonnes of grain per year are left behind on the tracks between Banff and Yoho National Parks. That’s enough grain to supply the annual caloric needs of 50 bears.
Thankfully, 50 bears aren’t snoozing along the tracks at the moment…just one. In the spring, the Boss literally plunks down and naps at the side of the tracks, rising now and then to do a short wander to sniff out grain or carcasses.
A number of years ago, I found myself just a few metres away from him while wandering around the track area near Baker Creek. He was up. He was active. But he was metabolically in a holding pattern waiting for the spring to arrive when new shoots, and dandelions, signal the true beginning of the summer feeding season.
As a guide, it surprises guests to know that those of us that are out on the landscape day in and day out don’t just know good places to spot bears, but that we get to know individual bears. Bear 122 is one of several that I’ve gotten to know over the years. Every one of these “old friends” has personalities, ranges, and unique temperaments.
This year, Bear 122’s emergence is especially significant. Biologists knew he’d be around, but they had a major problem they were frantically dealing with – a train wreck that derailed 20 rail cars, 10 of which were full of grains, including canola.
Canadian Pacific Railway staff have been frantically cleaning up the grain, fully aware that the spill was perfectly timed to the spring emergence of bears in the Rockies. While much of the grain has been slurped up by grain vacuums on the tracks, park staff strategically deposited two roadkills to try to divert the Boss from the easy pickins along the tracks.
This is what I love about science. By studying bears like 122, researchers already knew that he was motivated less by grain than by meat. Placing carcasses may temporarily divert his attention from this other currently available, high-calorie food source, at least long enough for the cleanup to be completed.
Park staff also know he’s just the first of many bears to emerge as spring temperatures warm the landscape. The big males are always first to appear in the spring, followed by smaller males and females. Females with new cubs are the last to emerge from their winter dens.
As spring slowly exiles the cold temperatures and deep snows of winter, bears like 122 begin to think about the mating season. Grizzly and black bears mate in the spring, while bear cubs are born in winter dens, often near Christmas.
Bears don’t produce many young, and the chances of those cubs surviving to procreate are also slim. Grizzlies in the Central Canadian Rockies have some of the lowest productivity rates of any bear population. This is a particularly tough landscape to be a grizzly bear. There’s a reason dominant bears like the Boss take advantage of nutritional conveyor belts like train tracks because there’s not a great deal of additional food available.
The north coast of British Columbia and Alaska are lands of milk and honey when it comes to bears. There are 5 kinds of Pacific salmon along with more than a dozen different kinds of edible berries. Here in the central Rockies, there are no salmon. In fact, fish forms a miniscule part of all of our bear’s diets.
Bears also have unique reproductive characteristics. Spring is for mating, and while spring is merely beginning at the moment, come early May, bears like the Boss will aggressively look for sows to mate with. While mating may begin in May, June represents the peak month that male bears hook up with eligible females.
These sows aren’t really looking for Mr. Right – they’re looking for Mr. Right Now. During the brief period, they’re receptive to mating, they may mate with more than one male.
Also, in female bears, the act of mating stimulates ovulation. This means that a single female may have several eggs fertilized by different males. In the end, different cubs in a single litter may have been sired by different dads.
Here’s another cool thought. Female black and grizzly bears mate in the spring, but they give birth in their winter dens, often around Christmas. Well, it only takes a few months to make a bear cub so the math doesn’t work out. They should, like all good Canadians, have summer birthdays.
After a female mates, the fertilized eggs divide just a few times before going dormant. This bundle of cells, or blastocysts as they are properly called, then floats freely in her uterus for up to 6 months. Come late fall, if that female is in healthy condition, the blastocysts embed into the uterus wall and begin to divide anew. If she’s not healthy, her body will just reabsorb those cells and the cubs will never develop. This gives bears more control over its population than most other animals.
Members of the weasel family, like wolverines, also exhibit this same delayed implantation, as this adaptation is usually described.
The Boss has mated with the Rockies most iconic female bears over the years.
One of these females was Banff’s very famous Bear 64. I watched this particular bear for most of my career. For 25 years, she called the Town of Banff home and was often spotted in and around the townsite. It wasn’t uncommon for trails to be closed when she was lucky enough to find an elk or deer calf to feed on, or when the buffaloberries ripened adjacent to the townsite.
Bear 64 was first collared way back in 1999. At that time, she was young enough that she had not yet had any cubs. Over the years, she had at least three litters.
Her tenure on the landscape coincided with the development of the first satellite collars and she was one of the early bears to be fitted with one. In a 2014 Story in the Calgary Herald, Banff Human-wildlife conflict specialist Steve Michel stated:
“We’ve been able to further piece together how grizzly bears use the landscape in given seasons, specifically, in her case, it was interesting to see how she would utilize areas quite close around Banff and utilize some really good habitat, both foraging on vegetation in the spring, hunting elk calves and feeding on buffaloberries in the summer and the early part of the fall.
“She was able to use all of those different areas and strike a really good balance with people.”
She was a favourite of locals and tourists alike. She was very tolerant of people and managed to walk the tightrope of living and feeding in and around the townsite, while still staying out of trouble. She tolerated people but didn’t seek them out.
This was also a time when Parks Canada was just beginning to get a better understanding of how wildlife used the underpasses that had been installed on the first two phases of the newly twinned Trans Canada Highway between the Banff Park Gates and the Sunshine Overpass.
Grizzly 64 became an important part of that story as she explored recent changes to the Bow Valley caused by the highway fencing and the new underpasses. As she gradually learned how to use the underpasses, and later the overpasses that were added as the twinning project expanded, she taught her cubs how to use them.
Grizzly 64 disappeared in 2014. It’s presumed that she died of old age; she would have been 25 years old that spring, and that’s a pretty good run for a female grizzly in the wild.
Sixty-four, along with the Boss, were the parents of Canmore’s most tragic bear, number 148. After the presumed death of sixty-four, 148 took over her territory around Banff and Canmore. Unfortunately, she was not as successful as her mother at negotiating the delicate balance between staying wild and running into trouble around people.
In the end, she was relocated to Kakwa Provincial Park west of Grand Cache in northern Alberta. Later, she crossed the British Columbia border where she became the last grizzly to be legally hunted in British Columbia before the grizzly hunt was permanently cancelled.
Her loss was an embarrassment for the community of Canmore where she had numerous run-ins with locals. In every case, she did exactly what she was supposed to do. She made sure that people knew that she was in charge and never once had a contact incident with people. Unfortunately, wildlife on provincial lands does not receive the same level of tolerance, or protection as they do when they stay within the boundaries of the National Park.
Many of the incidents near Canmore also involved people illegally in areas closed specifically for Bear 148. In the end, it’s always the animals that pay. I hope that people in Canmore took a hard look at how our decisions as a community led to the loss of this iconic bear.
Another female that received the affections of the Boss was Grizzly 72, a 22-year-old female that was considered to be the Matriarch of the Lake Louise area. Like 64, she was well known to locals and tourists, and also managed to raise numerous cubs over the years, including some of the Boss’ offspring.
Like 64, her satellite collar helped park biologists to get a much clearer understanding of how grizzlies travel the mountain landscapes around Lake Louise. She was one of the original research bears during the famous Eastern Slopes Grizzly Bear Project which took place between 1994 and 2004. Bears like 64 and 72 were especially important to researchers because of their long tenure on the landscape.
As highways were twinned and crossing structures built, these old females were some of the bears that helped researchers to adapt the designs and locations of crossings to better suit the bear’s needs. In essence, animals like these bears told researchers where to build each new structure. Their use of the mountain valleys and highways left their legacy behind in these important tools that help keep their descendants safe as they now negotiate an ever more crowded park.
Like Bear 64, grizzly 72 quietly disappeared and her last gps location was somewhere in the Chickadee Valley in Kootenay National Park in 2014. In a single year, two of Banff’s most iconic female bears were gone.
Thankfully, the Boss is still active and exploring. I’ve met this amazing bear a number of times. On one occasion, I was with a group at the Stanly Glacier Trail. My colleague, Dave Honeyman and I were on day-1 of a 15-day hiking program. Just as we began our bear safety talk for the trip, right near the point where you cross the bridge near the trailhead. The Boss wandered right past us, just across the narrow creek. He then turned right and followed the myriad other hikers that were already ahead of him on the trail.
We decided that there were other places we could walk on that particular day. Grizzly 122 was completely unconcerned with us as he slowly plodded his way up the trail. For our guests, it was a very exciting moment. As guides, it was a much closer approach than we ever want our guests to have, but the Boss once again showed how he has survived here so long. Like bears 64 and 72, he’s learned how to thrive on a crowded landscape. Let’s hope he’ll be a part of the mountain story for some years to come.
Next up…Montana’s Glacier National Park is losing its namesake.
Glaciers in Montana’s Glacier National Park disappearing fast
As the most northerly of the National Parks in the contiguous U.S., Glacier National Park is also one of its mountain jewels. The winding Going to the Sun Road ascending towards Logan Pass and then downhill to Lake McDonald passes through spectacular mountain scenery. The park attracts millions of visitors every year. In 2018, almost 3 million visitors descended upon this remote park.
If you’re travelling east to west on the road, stop at the Jackson Glacier overlook for your best opportunity to see one of the parks 26 remaining glaciers.
Unfortunately for glacier lovers, these namesake features of this park are disappearing at an alarming rate. While the park had around 150 glaciers as recently as 1850, most have long since disappeared, and those that remain are shrinking at faster rates every year. Even though most of those 150 glaciers were still present when the park was established in 1910, by 2016 the number had dropped to just 26, most of them very small.
It’s important that we define a glacier when discussing their disappearance. A glacier is a very special body of ice, and not all ice patches in the mountains are glaciers. To call something a glacier, two key factors have to be present. First, the ice has to form from the compression of snow, much like snow on a sidewalk can turn to ice from the weight of many people walking on it.
It’s still not a glacier though. When I think of ice, I think of the brittle ice that I get out of my freezer. However, under the right conditions, the ice in the mountains can begin to act more like a thick liquid, and as such, it begins to move and flow, slowly downhill, under the force of gravity. At this point, it becomes a glacier. If it’s no longer moving, than it’s not a glacier, it’s just a block of ice.
Glacier National Park scientist add one more condition to this: it has to be at least .1 km² or around 25 acres in size. Smaller size ice bodies tend not to flow and so this helps provide a visual parameter that can be used when studying patches of ice from aerial surveys.
Geologically, the glaciers in this area are relatively new, forming approximately 7,000 years ago, and growing dramatically during the Little Ice Age that occurred between 1400 AD and 1850. In episode 70, I look into a new theory that the Little Ice Age may have been partially caused by the Spanish arrival into the New World, and the rapid depopulation that occurred soon after. You can check that episode out at MountainNaturePodcast.com/ep070.
As early as 1914, visitors to the park began to notice that the glaciers were shrinking. Recently, the U.S. Geological Survey published an analysis of the glacier margins over time. They looked particularly in the years 1966, 1998, 2005, and 2015/16. This gave them a 50-year record of glacial retreat in the park.
The report states:
“that all glaciers have been reduced in area since 1966 with some glaciers having been reduced by as much as 85% by 2015. The average area reduction over the approximately 50-year period is 39%. Currently, only 26 glaciers are larger than 0.1 square kilometres (25 acres) which is used as a guideline for deciding if bodies of ice are large enough to be considered glaciers.”
Glaciers are essential to high-elevation mountain landscapes. They’re the water tower for the future and provide vast contributions to the annual runoff of mountain rivers and streams, especially in late summer and fall when spring snowmelt has ended and rivers would otherwise have much lower flows. This is taking place at the same time that demand for water has been increasing. Without the contributions that glaciers provide to annual water flows, water shortages will likely be much more common.
In virtually every mountain landscape in the world, including the mountains of the Canadian Rockies, the same thing is occurring, and ecosystems are being forever changed.
People often forget that with the exception of the St. Lawrence River, almost every river system on this continent gets a vast portion of its river flow from the mountains.
With Glacier National Park being a little further south than the central Rockies and the mountains of Banff, Jasper, and Kananaskis, they are experiencing much more rapid melting and can be a barometer for our future glacier loss.
Glaciers operate on a simple budget. If snow accumulation exceeds summer melt than glaciers expand in size. If melting overwhelms the glaciers ability to replace the melting snow each winter, the glaciers shrink.
With winters like this most recent one, it’s often easy to confuse weather with climate. A single season does not reflect the overall climate in an area. In fact, even these cold winters can also be attributed to warming climates. Glacier has seen its mean annual temperature increase 1.33C since 1900, a number that is almost twice the global average. Spring and summer temperatures have risen, and more often, precipitation falls in the form of rain, and not the snow needed to replenish glaciers.
In Banff, Jasper, and Kananaskis, glaciers are also melting faster and faster each year. As a glacier shrinks in size, it exposes more dark rock to the warming rays of the sun. These rocks absorb more solar radiation, increasing the rate of melt even more, and so on. This positive feedback loop is causing our glaciers to rapidly follow the trends in Glacier National Park.
Dr. John Pomeroy, who leads the Cold Water Lab and the Global Water Futures Program with the University of Saskatchewan, stated in a 2018 CBC story that our mountain snowpacks are melting both faster and earlier in the season. This sets us up for droughts and paves the way for earlier and longer forest fire seasons.
As we lose our winter snowpacks, and our mid-summer river flows drop due to less glacial melt, we could see much more prolonged droughts on the Canadian prairies as well. Glacial melt in the Canadian Rockies feeds rivers flowing to three separate oceans. What happens in the Rocky Mountains has continental significance.
With large glaciers, hot, dry, weather caused glaciers to melt faster, adding more water to the river, and providing a buffer during dry seasons. In a future without glaciers, those supplemental flows are also missing. Current estimates predict that 80% of the glaciers in the Canadian Rockies will be gone by 2100.
Our water tower for the future is slowly running dry.
And with that, it’s time to wrap this episode up. Don’t forget to check out the show notes at MountainNaturePodcast.com/ep075 for links to additional stories. Also, don’t forget that Ward Cameron Enterprises is your source for all things Rocky Mountain Related. Drop me a line at ward@wardcameron.com if you’d need a guide, or guidance, to help make your trip to the Rockies a memorable one. If you ‘d like to connect with me on Twitter, you can hit me up @wardcameron, and with that said, the sun’s out and it’s time to go hiking. I’ll talk to you next week