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May/June 1999 issue	In this issue Table of Contents Editor’s Notebook À la carte Inside Story Feature: Landfill landscapes Saving moose by feeding the bears

The airdrop had been orchestrated by Rod Boertje and his colleagues from the Alaska Department of Fish and Game in an attempt to figure out what, apart from oncoming freights, was causing problems for the local moose. Not that the animals were endangered or even in decline. In fact, since their numbers had bottomed out in the mid-1970s, the counts had been remarkably stable. Stable and low. And that, for biologists charged with creating opportunities for moose hunting, was a problem in itself. If this region could theoretically support up to 1,200 moose on 1,000 square kilometres, why had the animals spent a decade at densities of 60 or 100? Everything had seemed in their favour: decent weather, abundant browse, restricted hunting, low wolf predation. Yet the population was stuck in the cellar. What was going on?

In east-central alaska, near the Yukon border, it rained moose for two months, on and off, in the spring of 1985. Train-killed moose — twelve tonnes in all. The last the animals knew, they had been ambling down the railroad tracks, unaware of their onrushing doom. Soon their remains were being ferried aloft by chopper and flung into the muskeg and hills around the Mosquito Fork river.

The very first season of research, 1984, provided a promising lead. Although the region supported few wolves, it turned out to have a thriving population of grizzlies, which subsisted mainly on a monkish regime of roots and berries. But during moose calving season, the bears indulged in an orgy of meat-eating. Of 33 newborn moose radio-collared that year, 17 were eaten by grizzlies.

And so it happened, in the spring of the following year, that the researchers decided to rain train-struck moose meat into the calving grounds. The idea was simple: the carcasses would serve as bait for grizzlies, which could then be caught and radio-collared, so that their diet could be monitored. Again, the results were unambiguous. Grizzlies were keeping the moose in a "predator pit" by feasting on calves during their vulnerable first weeks.

In reporting their research in the Canadian Journal of Zoology, Boertje and his group drew the only possible conclusion. To boost the moose in this system, you would have to "remove" predators. What else to do with a problem bear except kill it?

But was this really the only choice? As the study progressed, the biologists began to notice a strange blip in their graphs. Usually, when they checked the moose in early winter, they found just one cow in 10 travelling with young. But in 1985, every second cow they saw was followed closely by a calf.

As Boertje and his colleagues pondered this unexpected good news, they began to wonder if the upturn might be a result of their own efforts. There was, after all, the small matter of 12,000 kilograms of meat that had fallen, like manna from heaven, into the paths of bears and wolves that spring. Could this supplementary feeding — much of it provided, by chance, when the moose were giving birth — have diverted grizzlies and other predators from the tender young calves?

Five years later, Boertje was finally able to put the idea to the test, this time freighting 26,000 kilograms of roadkill into his research block at peak calving time. That winter’s cow/calf ratio was the highest in nine years and up to four times better than anywhere else in the region. "Diversionary feeding" had worked.

Who would have thought it? After generations of numbly killing predators, convinced that there were no alternatives, it turned out that feeding them might produce the results biologists were seeking.

Last spring, wildlife managers in the cattle country of southwestern Alberta used a variation on this theme to help reduce grizzly predation during calving. Their strategy was to "redistribute" the carcasses of road-killed deer by collecting them from rangelands in the valleys and airlifting them up into the foothills. As the grizzlies roused from hibernation and wandered downslope in the spring, they encountered the smorgasbord of carcasses that had been laid out for them, well away from the temptations of the pastures. Only one cow was taken by a grizzly (down from double-digit losses most years) and the bears went on their way with minimal interference.

"We were really going against the grain on this," admits biologist Richard Quinlan of Alberta’s Natural Resources Service. "But so far it’s all been really positive."

Our traditional confrontation with predators is literally a dead end, a joyless, repetitive routine of violence that wastes the lives of thousands of bears each year. In British Columbia alone, conservation officers shot 35 grizzlies and 1,619 black bears as "problems" in 1998. "Diversionary feeding" is no Teddy Bears’ picnic in which things always end well. Yet it stands as a welcome reminder that an oddball new idea can turn our thinking on its head, revealing possibilities we had scarcely imagined.

Candace Savage is a Saskatoon-based author of 18 books on wildlife, environmental issues and other subjects.

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