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January/February 1997 issue	In this issue Table of Contents Editor’s Notebook Feature: Grizzly bears Write to Know Our Home and Native Tongue

Suppose one of them tripped and fell, or failed to climb fast enough? From a warden service perspective — "protect the park from the visitors, and the visitors from the park" — Four Toes was a four-legged lawsuit looking for a plaintiff. The area manager put out the hit on Four Toes, who wasn’t long in taking the bait. I remember how he charged the steel door of the culvert trap trying to get at my partner and me. And I remember how the old bear wailed, more in sadness than in anger, to be confined in that rank and adamantine barrel with the smell of his own fear. There was no room in Alberta for a robber grizzly bear nearly 20 years ago, when Four Toes was destroyed in the one place where he should have had a chance to survive — Canada’s first and most famous national park.

Now, on a blistering hot August day, sweat trickles down from under my old felt hat as I ride — on a horse named Wasp — up the Spray River trail. I am back in the grizzly country of Banff National Park, this time with biologist Charles Mamo, a member of the Eastern Slopes Grizzly Bear Project. Along with a sister study, the West Slopes Bear Research Project, led by biologists John Woods, based in Glacier National Park, and Bruce McLellan of the B.C. Forest Service, this is one of the most comprehensive looks yet at grizzly bear habitat, behaviour and demography in Canada. I am here to learn if there is a future for the descendants of Four Toes in the central Rockies ecosystem of Alberta and British Columbia, a remnant of the species’ once vast southern range.

We stop near a foot bridge beneath the Sundance Range, where a nameless creek tumbles from the pines. I had viewed it a few days earlier from the passenger window of a Jet Ranger helicopter, as biologist John Paczkowski took a satellite location on a radio-collared female grizzly bear known as Number 40, and photographed the site. The data was passed on later to Mamo for verification in the field.

A muted, musky odour has the horses snorty as Mamo leads the way into the woods, his notebook in hand. He is pleased to find grizzly bear signs right away: logs have been torn up to get at ant nests. But there are more subtle clues, like the tiny stems of showy locoweed, delicately nipped off. (A grizzly bear is at least 80 percent vegetarian.) Mamo sketches the scene in his notebook; he points out the lodgepole pine and spruce, the hairy wild rye, the fireweed and the buffalo berry of this montane plant community, and notes which of them the bear has fed on.

The Eastern Slopes Grizzly Bear Project is centred on the Bow River watershed, an 11,400-square-kilometre study area. The Spray River is a tributary of the Bow. Roughly longitudinal valleys like the Spray, with their connecting passes between ranges, are wildlife corridors, genetic pathways linking sub-populations of wolves and grizzly bears from Montana to the Arctic Ocean. The Bow River valley was once part of a genetic pathway, but it has been radically obstructed by a works of man.

In these mountains and foothills, most of Alberta’s remaining grizzly bears struggle for elbow room with mankind, 200 of them in the mountain national parks and an estimated 600 on other Alberta lands. Of Banff National Park’s 6,641 square kilometres of mountains, only three percent consists of the critical montane habitat (valley bottom, open forests) needed by large mammals for survival. One half of that tiny portion lies in the Bow Valley, where wildlife must compete with humans for the most productive habitat. Development around towns like Banff, Lake Louise and Canmore has reduced the habitat to a fraction of its former potential for large predators. Despite townsites, ski resorts, golf courses, shopping malls, an airstrip, industrial parks, a transcontinental highway and railway line, the Bow Valley proper is still grizzly bear habitat. But last year, only four grizzlies, all of them males, were desperate enough to cross its barrier highway on a regular basis.

Mamo’s radio receiver shows Number 40 about a half kilometre above us and heading north — toward the Banff townsite and the Bow Valley. Bears roam widely, feeding on a succession of plants and berries and investigating any enticing odours — such as carrion, or barbecued steak. Number 40’s route might lead right onto somebody’s patio. If she skirted the town undetected, she would have to dodge CPR freight trains only to find her way blocked by the elk fences along the divided stretches of the Trans-Canada Highway.

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