After 30 years of researching grizzlies, Alberta biologist Gordon Stenhouse(Leader of the Foothills Research Institute-Grizzly Bear Research Program) remains optimistic that the Griz can indeed have a continuous home from the Yellowstone to the Yukon if we are willing to make a few compromises in our land planning and road builiding regimines........Stenhouse and Veterinarian Partner Cattet have also discovered that captured bears are vulnerable to a potentially deadly syndrome called Capture Myopathy........... This is a catastrophic muscle meltdown that happens when some animals overexert themselves trying to escape from a leghold trap.........Stenhouse's new protocol when trapping bears for scientific study is to use culvert traps with alarm systems that cut down on the time it takes to reach the bears and initiate their least invasive examination of them

'There is still a future for grizzly bears'

 By Ed Struzik

 In the spring of 1999, biologist Gord Stenhouse captured a healthy, six-year old grizzly bear on the east slopes of the Rocky Mountains. G16, as she came to  be known, was one of 18 animals he got in the first year of a study designed to determine the number of bears in a 5,352-square kilometre area along the east boundary of Jasper National Park. For nearly three years, Stenhouse and his colleagues were able to track G16 with the help of a satellite collar that transmitted her movements several times a day. But when the collar fell off in 2002 because of a failing battery that triggered the release, they never saw or heard from her again.

G16 could well have been alive when Stenhouse and I set off by helicopter this spring to search for more animals. Grizzly bears can live well into their 20s. But given her propensity to roam the Whitehorse Wildland Park area where there are mines, roads and clear-cuts in the adjacent regions, there was a chance she may have been one of the more 250 grizzly bears in Alberta known to have been legally shot, poached, or killed by predators, cars, trucks and trains over the past 10 years.

It is warm and windy when pilot John Saunders fires up the engine of the helicopter that day in Hinton. By the time we fly over Fiddle Pass to get into the Whitehorse wildlands, light rain, mixed at times with snow, is falling. Saunders has just radioed in to tell the folks at the Cheviot coal mine what we are up to when we spot a female and her cub racing into a stand of spruce trees along the slope of an alpine valley. Seeing that she isn't wearing a satellite collar, Stenhouse decides to capture her.

This is a tense time for the capture crew, especially for University of Alberta biology student Terry Larsen, who has the task of shooting the bear with a tranquillizer dart from the doorless side of the helicopter. First, Saunders drops me and Stenhouse off on a nearby mountaintop to lighten the load. Then, when Larsen successfully darts and downs the animal 15 minutes later, we are brought back to the scene.
Well aware that the bear could suddenly rise from its slumber and charge, Stenhouse and Larsen move in with a rifle, making as much noise as they can to ensure the bear is fully tranquillized. When they find the animal's breathing is slightly laboured, they administer oxygen much as a doctor would for a patient in distress. Then they check if the animal is thermally stressed as a result of the helicopter chase. Time is of the utmost importance in cases such as this. The crew has less than an hour to draw blood, get hair samples, weigh the animal and do whatever else they need to do before the drug begins to wear off.

Larsen checks for a tattoo that is put on the gums of every bear that has been captured over the years. It turns out to be G16. She is now 18 years old, weighs 104 kilograms and is apparently in good health."This is really good to see that an animal like this can live for 18 years or more in an area like this," says Stenhouse. "It suggests that in spite of what some people fear, there is still a future for grizzly bears in this part of Alberta."

.Stenhouse has learned a lot of things about bears over the years. But one of the more troubling studies he, Cattet(animal Vet) and others have done was one that suggests captured bears are vulnerable to a potentially deadly syndrome called capture myopathy. This is a catastrophic muscle meltdown that happens when some animals overexert themselves trying to escape from a leghold trap.

Cattet got the idea of looking into this a few years ago when Stenhouse phoned to tell him he had recovered the carcass of a grizzly bear that had been captured in west central Alberta just 10 days earlier.The animal had such a severe case of capture myopathy that its chest, bicep and pectoral muscles were pure white and brittle as chalk.Now a wildlife researcher and veterinarian with the Canadian Co-operative Wildlife Health Centre in Saskatoon, Cattet decided to examine blood and tissue samples he collected from 127 grizzlies caught in Alberta between 1999 and 2005.

Much as Cattet didn't want to believe it, the results showed a significant number of those animals caught in a snare were showing signs of serious stress for alarmingly long periods after they were processed and released back in the wild. Inconvenient a truth as that was, the study convinced Stenhouse that he had to rely on less invasive means of studying the animals. Now more than ever before, he and his colleagues are using bait and barbed wire to snag hair from the animals so they can extract DNA. They are also collecting fecal samples that offer similar information. No longer do they use snares. Instead they use culvert traps fixed with alarm systems that signal when a bear has been trapped.

Having spent the better part of 30 years studying bears, Stenhouse is convinced there is still a lot for him and others to learn, particularly when it comes to managing bears in environments inhabited by people and industry

Stenhouse's research efforts have morphed into something much bigger. No longer is he simply counting bears along the Jasper/ Wilmore/Grande Cache Wilderness corridor. He and colleagues at several universities in Canada and the United States are homing in on everything and anything that might help wildlife managers figure out what they and industry leaders need to know to prevent grizzly bears from suffering the same fate as woodland caribou.

Grim as the picture sometimes seems to be here in Alberta, Stenhouse remains hopeful. "I am optimistic about the future of grizzly bears in Alberta," he says. "In Sweden, for example, you have a large density of grizzly bears on a landscape that includes many people and settlements, and active forest management. They have a well regulated and managed grizzly bear hunt right now, and they have recovered their population from a low of about 130 bears in 1930 to 3,500 bears today.