Crews battle elements to collar grizzly bears

Dealing with snow, high water, horses and trapped grizzly bears hasn't been easy, but it's been successful so far this summer for those involved with an ongoing population trend study.

Since the end of April, about 30 grizzly bears have been captured for management and research purposes across the sprawling Northern Continental Divide Ecosystem.

Of those bears, 10 have been fitted with radio or satellite tracking collars as part of the research aimed at determining whether the grizzly bear population is stable, growing or declining.

"This year has been exceedingly difficult," said Tonya Chilton, research assistant with Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks.

Chilton explained that collars have a release mechanism timed to drop after two years, and this year there was a sense of urgency to get in the field as early as possible because nine collars are scheduled to drop.

But the weather didn't cooperate. "We had snow a month to a month-and-a-half later than we anticipated," Chilton said.

The mid-June snowstorm in Glacier National Park chased a two-person trapping crew out of the Many Glacier Valley. They relocated to more accessible target areas in the Swan Valley and later returned to the park, working in the snow.

The first crew into the Bob Marshall Wilderness encountered high water and deep snow.

"One of their creek crossings was five feet deep so the horses were swimming," Chilton said, noting that the wilderness work presents safety challenges.

Instead of culvert traps, leg snares must be used. And there aren't any pickups to retreat to, if for instance a cub is caught in a snare and the mother bear is roaming nearby.

"It is remote," she said. "It can be kind of crazy riding up to a trap you've set on a horse. Just working with horses alone has its own safety issues … Sometimes I trust the bears more than I trust the horses."

The 10-day wilderness hitches also require preparedness, with adequate food and road-kill bait for the traps.

But it's been a successful trapping season, said Jim Williams, the state's Region One wildlife manager.

"They've done a lot given the circumstances on a very limited budget," Williams said.

"They" is actually a conglomeration of wildlife managers and researchers around the 8 million-acre ecosystem.

Jamie Jonkel, a state grizzly bear management specialist who works on the southern end wilderness, captured a female grizzly bear near Ovando. His counterpart in Choteau, Mike Madel, has caught five bears on the Rocky Mountain Front, including at least one female.

Canadian wildlife officials caught a female in the British Columbia Flathead drainage for the study. And wildlife officials with the Confederated Salish-Kootenai Tribes have captured bears for the trend study and other research projects.

The study - led by research biologist Rick Mace of Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks - mainly involves monitoring female grizzly bears for births and mortalities. But for statistically valid trend information, the study requires a minimum number of 25 collared bears annually for at least 10 years.

"We have at least 35 trend bears on the air right now [with radio collars] in the ecosystem," Chilton said.

Trapping efforts will continue into October, with Childers estimating that at least another five females need to be collared. It's not an easy task, considering that males often are caught and bears that are captured for conflict management reasons cannot be included in the study.

Those bears have a higher likelihood of getting killed, and that would distort the study's mortality estimates.

The trend study, in its fifth year, is tied closely with the results of a genetic population project led by Kate Kendall, a researcher with the U.S. Geological Survey in Glacier Park.

That project, which involved a massive effort to collect bear hair samples during the summer of 2004, will yield a "snapshot" population estimate for the entire ecosystem when the results of the genetic analysis and statistical modeling are published later this year.

The trend study will determine what direction the population has taken since 2004.

Williams said grizzly bears have been turning up far beyond the fringes of the ecosystem's official boundaries, leading some to believe that the population is faring well.

"The hunch is that bears are doing OK," he said. "This study will shed light on that."

However, the study has been operating on tenuous, shoestring funding. In fact, Williams, said it is "unfunded program" compared to an established grizzly bear population monitoring program in Yellowstone National Park.

The work that has occurred during the past five years has been cobbled together, with the trapping crews often being diverted from other duties to get the work done.

Finding more reliable ways to ensure the project continues is a major goal of the Northern Continental Divide Ecosystem Committee, a panel of state, federal and tribal land and wildlife managers.

Reporter Jim Mann may be reached at 758-4407 or by e-mail at jmann@dailyinterlake.com