A Grizzly bear - Date/Photographer unknown.

8 October 2012

Grizzly Bear Losses in Mountains Coming Off the Rails

Banff Alberta - Two more dead grizzlies on the railway tracks and no one is shocked in the least.
 
If it's not quite an official shrug of resignation, there's no real surprise that two young members of a rare and threatened species would die beneath the wheels of a freight train.
 
In Banff National Park, a place where wildlife is supposedly protected, blood on the tracks is predictable, so predictable, in fact, the lack of dead grizzlies so far this year was the real wonder.
 
"It's a significant concern for us any time a grizzly bear mortality event takes place, we were hoping we'd make it though the season without one," said Steve Michel.
 
"But typically, on average, there are one or two deaths a year."
 
And 2012 will be no different, after a radio-collared sow and her two yearling cubs were caught on the tracks about 10 kilometres west of Banff on Friday night.
 
The mother bear, known as #130, survived, but the Canadian Pacific train instantly killed both cubs.
 
One of the dead grizzlies was later found to be a male, but the train all but obliterated the other yearling, Michel says the gender of that bear will probably never be known.
 
The deaths bring the number of grizzlies killed on Banff National Park rail tracks to 13 since 2000, but that's only part of the story.
 
Two more grizzlies were killed by trains just out of the Banff boundary near Canmore and a third was fatally struck just inside Yoho National Park.
 
Add in six cubs which died as a direct result of losing their mothers to trains, and 22 grizzly deaths in and around Banff can be blamed on the railway in the past 12 years.
 
For a national park with roughly 60 surviving grizzly bears in total, it's a horrifying rate of carnage.
 
"The fastest train I've clocked was going 95 km/h, and I very regularly clock them at 70 to 90 km/h," said John E. Marriott, a wildlife photographer and outspoken critic of current bear protection in the parks.
 
"Absolutely I would like to see an enforced speed limit through the park, but it won't happen."
 
Marriott isn't alone in believing slower trains would give both humans and bears more time to react, but he's cynical.
 
After watching so many of his beloved camera subjects killed, Marriott says he believes there's too much cash at stake to reduce the speed of freight, dead bears be damned.
 
But a spokeswoman for Canadian Pacific says nothing has been ruled out, including a reduction in speed, as part of a five-year, million-dollar study on grizzly mortality on the tracks.
 
"Whether or not speed is a factor is something we need to research further," said Breanne Feigel.
 
The study, being conducted by the University of Alberta and Montana State University, started this year with collaring and tagging of 11 grizzlies.
 
"Our hope from CP is that out of this tragedy, we can learn why these incidents are occurring," said Feigel.
 
The goal is to find out exactly why and when bears are on the tracks, and that's something that has officials mystified following Friday's collision.
 
Feigel said there was no obvious reason for the bruins to be loitering near the rails and an investigation turned up none of the usual attractants, such as spilled grain.
 
She says train crews have become hyper-vigilant about watching for bears along the tracks but the darkness on Friday night, when the bears were hit, blinded their efforts.
 
But excuses aren't flying with animal watchers like Marriott, who's long criticized both trains and the traffic for killing too many of Banff's wild residents.
 
After a record-setting year for black bears killed in the park, 16 have died so far, Marriott says the grizzly deaths are a devastating way to end the season.
 
"If one of them was a female, that's a particularly big blow because we just don't have that many females left," said Marriott.
 
"But either way, these are two young grizzly bears which will never reach adulthood."
 
Michael Platt.