Fall 2002 - The North Cascades

Fall 2002 - The North Cascades

Rightful Place?
by Sonja L. Cohen
Photos by Katie Kulla

Geologist Ned Brown's encounter happened on a hot August day in 1996. A helicopter dropped Brown and two geology students at a high ridge area of the North Cascades, just inside the Canadian border. While standing alone at the edge of a meadow, Brown saw a large bear cooling itself in a snow patch 100 yards away. Brown's previous encounters with black bears taught him what to do in this situation - yell at it and wave his arms.

The bear charged.

Brown yelled louder and waved his arms frantically.

"At that point, it noticeably picked up speed toward me," he said.

Frightened, Brown jumped behind some bushes and prepared to fight the bear with a 2-pound rock hammer, the only defense he had. But the bear didn't follow him; about 30 yards from Brown, it veered into the trees.

Later, after Brown calmed down, he checked the bear's tracks in the snow. They were huge, about seven inches across, with long claw marks. Two days later when the helicopter returned for Brown and his students, the pilot said they were sharing the ridge with a grizzly bear. He didn't need to tell Brown - Brown had met the bear.

What makes Brown's experience so remarkable is not that a grizzly charged him, but that he saw one at all.

Chris Morgan, wildlife ecologist and bear specialist, holds a cast of a grizzly bear's paw, using his own hand to cmparatively illustrate the size of the bear.

Grizzlies were once numerous in the North Cascades, said Chris Morgan, wildlife ecologist and bear specialist. Morgan is the director of Insight Wildlife Management, a research and education group in Bellingham. IWM is one of the groups facilitating the Grizzly Bear Outreach Project, an independent project aimed at listening to concerns about grizzly bears and educating the public.

He said trapping records from the Hudson Bay Co. report 3,788 grizzly bear hides shipped from the area between 1827 and 1859. Commercial trapping, habitat loss and hunting continued to devastate the grizzly population for more than a century.

In 1975, the grizzly bear was listed as threatened under the Endangered Species Act and in 1982, the federal government designated the North Cascades as one of six Grizzly Bear Recovery Plan areas in the lower 48 states.

Washington's grizzly recovery area encompasses 10,000 square miles of forest, mountains and valleys, with at least 100 different plant species important to the bears' diet, making it an ideal location for the threatened grizzly.

Despite the 1982 national recovery plan, officials do not have plans for active grizzly recovery steps in Washington. While Yellowstone, a smaller recovery zone, has a grizzly population of about 350 bears, the North Cascades recovery zone remains practically vacant.

"There's probably between five and 20 (grizzlies) right now," Morgan said.

The region needs 200 to 400 grizzlies for a successful repopulation, Morgan said. Even a fully recovered population would be widely spaced because the North Cascades recovery area is so large.

"There isn't going to be one behind every tree," Morgan said.

Doug Zimmer, chair of an information and education subcommittee of the North Cascades Grizzly Bear Management Committee, said to get population estimates, scientists look for patterns in the types of bear sightings and the distance and time in between them.

"Seasoned bear biologists look at sighting data over a period of five years and make the best guess based on the data," Zimmer said.

Morgan called grizzlies the "mystery species of the North Cascades."

"People don't know how many there are now, data is insufficient on how many there were earlier this century, but we have enough evidence to suggest there are a handful left," he said.

The elusiveness and rarity of the bears complicates efforts to count them.

"Looking for a grizzly bear is a lot like looking for a needle in a field full of haystacks when the needle is trying to avoid you," Zimmer said.

A major blockade to recovery is the Environmental Impact Statement, a document outlining the effects of proposed activities on the environment. Re-introduction cannot begin until an EIS for the North Cascades is complete and accepted.

"It's partially a problem of funding," said Don Gay, Mount Baker Ranger District wildlife biologist. "It would cost at least $1 million just to fund the Environmental Impact Statement, with meetings and all."

Morgan also said he believes money is a major issue.

"Funding is one of the major restrictions to recovery of this population and that's largely because more government attention has been focused on other grizzly bear recovery centers, such as Yellowstone and Northern Continental Divide systems," Morgan said.

Morgan said another hindrance to the recovery effort is the bears' biological processes. Grizzly bears are the second slowest reproducing land mammal in North America, after the musk ox.

"It's a survival strategy," said Zimmer. "If you have lots of big bears in the same area that require lots of food they'd all starve."

The bears spend many years teaching their cubs to survive. Zimmer said this strategy worked until the invention of the modern firearm, which allowed hunters to kill bears faster than they could reproduce.

"The process of getting to a recovered population can take 100 years - it'll take 100 years in this case," Morgan said.

But David Gaillard, program associate for the animal advocacy group Predator Conservation Alliance, said grizzly recovery in Washington was put on the back burner years ago.

"It's been the neglected corner of grizzly recovery for years," he said.

Bear management biologist Anne Braaten said she thinks this neglect is the result of more active efforts in the Rocky Mountains.

"People were already so involved with the Rocky Mountains that it took a long time for the (government agencies) to acknowledge this area," Braaten said. "That's changing though."

Morgan said he thinks more attention might soon be focused on the North Cascades recovery zone because grizzly bear populations in the Rocky Mountains are stabilizing.

While Washington's recovery efforts are on hold, British Columbia's grizzly recovery is moving ahead in the North Cascades.

Morgan said British Columbia is considering augmenting current bear populations as part of their recovery process, but this is separate from recovery efforts in Washington.

"An interesting thing about the B.C. population is that if theydo augment, there is a chance that some of their bears could head south because of course they don't recognize international borders; no passports required," Morgan said. "So I think that's another good reason for educational efforts this side of the border."

Part of the educational effort includes distinguishing between the terms recovery, reintroduction and augmentation.

Morgan said recovery is the process of protecting and encouraging a population to grow to the point where it can sustain itself and ultimately be removed from the endangered species list. Reintroduction is moving animals into an area they formerly inhabited but no longer do.

Morgan said a small number of bears still exist in the North Cascades, so augmentation, adding to the existing population, is one of the main options for recovery in the region.

"The vast majority of people agree that grizzly bears have a rightful place in the Cascades and that they should be encouraged to recover," Morgan said. "Some people draw the line at augmentation. They believe if it can happen naturally, fine, but perhaps we shouldn't be adding them."

The Okanogan County Farm Bureau is currently gathering information about the possible implications of grizzly recovery.

"It's a hot subject," said Joel Kretz president of the bureau. "The general public over here is strongly against it."

Kretz raises quarter horses, cattle and poultry, as well as occasionally harvesting timber. He said recent economic depression has affected the Okanogan area.

He said he fears grizzly recovery would cut off economic possibilities in that part of the state.

"What makes me nervous is the absolute army of biologists and the stream of regulations that would run rural people off the land," Kretz said. "I think (farmers and bears) have a chance to get along, but rural areas won't get by economically with the regulations that go along with it."

He said the idea of grizzlies in the nearby Pasayten Wilderness Area does not bother him, but when the government talks about lowland habitat for the bears they are talking about his backyard.

Kretz said the federal and state government already own 80 percent of Okanogan County. Now, with proposed grizzly reintroduction, Kretz said he wonders if the community will survive.

"How much is enough?" he said. "They have 80 percent. Do they need 90 or 100 percent? Then where do they put us?"

Kretz said his group will reserve judgment until all of the facts are clear, but they are concerned.

The wildlife advocacy group Defenders of Wildlife has a compensation program to reimburse ranchers for lost livestock, Gay said. In Yellowstone, grizzlies occasionally eat sheep because they are easy targets, but grizzly bears are primarily vegetarian.

"It surprises a lot of people to hear that (grizzlies) are 90 percent vegetarian," Morgan said. "Just 10 percent of their diet is made up of animal matter."

In reality, climbers and hikers are most likely to encounter grizzlies if the bears recover in the North Cascades, but they have expressed support rather than fear about grizzly recovery.

"It's a big area," said Steve Glenn, Bellingham Mountaineers climbing class chairman. "I don't see any reason why climbers and bears can't coexist."

Gay said Yellowstone statistics show a one-in-a-million chance of physical interaction between hikers and grizzly bears.

"In my years of experience working in grizzly bear country they've always amazed me with their patience and understanding demeanor," Morgan said. "Bee stings, lightning strikes, snake bites, stick ups - they're all things that people need to be more concerned about."

Knowledge is the key to safe bear interaction, Morgan said. He said with proper education potentially dangerous scenarios are easily avoidable.

"Grizzly bears don't want to waste their energy with aggression," Morgan said. "They'll avoid aggressive interactions as much as a person would like to."

He said the grizzly bears' value in an ecosystem is their role as an indicator species - those species whose presence indicates that the environment is healthy.

"We're managing large wilderness areas well if they can sustain large viable grizzly bear populations," he said.

While Brown said he would like to see bears recover to sustainable populations, he can't get past the memory of a grizzly bear charging him.

"I have mixed feelings on this subject," he said. "I support efforts promoting recovery of the natural ecosystem. (But) grizzlies scare me."

Senior Sonja Cohen studies journalism at Western. She has previously been published in the Bellingham Herald, The Western Front and the AS Review.

Fall 2002 - The North Cascades

Rightful Place? by Sonja L. Cohen Photos by Katie Kulla

Rightful Place?
by Sonja L. Cohen
Photos by Katie Kulla