Forest Service funding saves grizzly study
A last-minute bailout from the U.S. Forest Service will save an ongoing grizzly bear monitoring study in the Northern Continental Divide Ecosystem.
Jim Satterfield, the Region One Supervisor for Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks, announced at an NCDE subcommittee meeting in Choteau last spring that the state could not pay for the entire multi-year study after 2007.
"Basically, the subject of that meeting was, 'We are broke,'" Satterfield told the panel of land and wildlife managers Wednesday in Kalispell.
About two weeks ago, Flathead National Forest Supervisor Cathy Barbouletos realized that national forests with lands inside the ecosystem might have carryover funds from the 2007 fiscal year, which ended Oct. 1.
She contacted officials on the Lewis and Clark, Lolo and Helena national forests and found that was indeed the case. The forests, plus the regional office in Missoula, combined to pitch in $377,000 to continue the monitoring study.
"She's just been a magician keeping us in money," Satterfield said, referring to Barbouletos, who has been on the subcommittee for 10 years and was instrumental in rounding up funds for a 2004 genetic population study.
"The biggest issue on this committee has always been money. It's all about the money," Barbouletos said Wednesday.
The worthiness of the genetic population study, which will generate a snapshot population estimate from the summer of 2004, will depend largely on the population trend study that has been led by Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks research biologist Rick Mace. The study involves fitting female grizzly bears with radio or satellite tracking collars, and monitoring those bears for births and morality. Over time, data produced by the study will reveal whether the population is increasing or decreasing.
"Unless we have a trend, you really can't make conclusions" about the state of the ecosystem's grizzly bear population, Barbouletos noted.
The Forest Service funding will allow the study to carry on for another five years, with the state contributing about $250,000 over the same period, along with paying salaries for Mace and other full-time bear managers.
The monitoring study is logistically difficult and labor intensive, requiring crews to capture female bears throughout a 7 million-acre area that encompasses the entire Bob Marshall Wilderness Complex, Glacier National Park and surrounding lands. This week, a crew is taking horses about 33 miles into the wilderness interior for a two-week hitch. Crews came up empty-handed on two similar treks earlier this year.
A total of 57 individual female bears have been monitored since 2004, but collars go "off the air" as they are damaged, dropped or bears die. Mace's crews try to maintain a minimum number of collars within the study area every year; this year there are 28 active collars.
Mace said maintaining $5,000 GPS collars has been difficult in some cases, with the NCDE bears being particularly rough on them.
"There is no bear study in the world that has bears (damaging) them like our bears," Mace said.
For that reason, Mace and others are brainstorming for ways to reinforce the collars with Kevlar or other protective material. Although they are expensive, Mace contends the technology is actually less expensive than traditional radio collars, which must be regularly monitored from chartered aircraft that cannot always fly, because of poor weather conditions. The GPS collars also provide better information on bears, allowing their movements to be regularly downloaded on a computer.
The trend monitoring study will ultimately provide a key component for any proposal to delist the NCDE grizzly bear population, and so will the genetic population study led by Kate Kendall, a U.S. Geological Survey researcher based in Glacier National Park.
Kendall updated the subcommittee on Wednesday about the final results of a genetic study conducted from 1998 to 2000 on 2 million acres in the greater Glacier area. The study involved collecting 5,000 bear hair samples at scent-baited sites surrounded by barbed wire and from "rub trees" that bears frequently use as back-scratching posts.
DNA analysis of the samples identified 185 individual bears from the 1998 samples, and 222 individual bears from the 2000 samples. Using a mark-recapture statistical analysis, Kendall and her team produced an official population estimate of 319 bears for 1998 and 339 bears for 2000.
The 2004 study, conducted over the entire NCDE, detected 545 individual bears from hair samples collected that summer. The statistical analysis to produce a population estimate for the ecosystem is not expected to be finished until next year.
Reporter Jim Mann may be reached at 758-4407 or by e-mail at jmann@dailyinterlake.com