By Pemberton Gateway Village Suites Hotel

09/19/2014 Winston - The Legendary Bear

A Grizzly Bear Is Born in the Mid 1970's http://www.pembertonwildlifeassociation.com/news/2012/2/1/winston-the-legendary-bear/ (RePosted by Myson Effa Manager Pemberton Gateway Village Suites ) Sometime in the mid 1970s, our story grizzly was born somewhere in the Upper Lillooet River watershed. He probably had a healthy upbringing because he became a large powerful dominant bear. He was also to become a local legend through his interaction with the local human population. This account of his life in the Pemberton Valley and travels elsewhere is based on several interviews with local witnesses, journalistic accounts and reports from Ministry of Environment employees who were responsible for the management decisions and field implementation of their mandate. We start the story in September 1999 on John and Denise Van Loon's seed potato farm 25 km northwest of Pemberton in the Lillooet River Valley, (confusingly referred to as the Pemberton Valley). The family dog Coffey was performing her usual watchdog duty, an essential role on a farm with livestock and poultry to protect. For several weeks the Van Loons had noticed more than the usual alarmist barking. An eerie quietness had settled over the farm of late. The usual sounds coming from the barnyard were muted. On the night of September 9, intense barking and a commotion from the poultry house got their full attention. John picked up his .308 rifle and shells and went down the driveway, Coffey glued to his side. Picking out a pair of eyes in his flashlight beam, John shot at what he had now determined was a grizzly bear. The bear "let out a huge roar" and took off in the dark with the dog following. John called Coffey off and did the right thing, returning to the house and to bed. John noted later that in his haste in the dark night, he had mistakenly picked up the wrong caliber rifle shells, .30/30 instead of the .308, accounting for his apparent poor aim and the risk that he may have killed himself rather than the intended target. The grizzly, as it turned out, suffered only a minor wound low on the front shoulder, the wrong shells did not have nearly the destructive effect that the .308 shells would have had. This could have been another ending to the story had the correct caliber shells been used. It was now a serious situation with a wounded grizzly loose on the family farm. The next morning, the Van Loons surveyed the damage from the night before, no sign of a bear, but 13 dead turkeys. John called the Provincial Wildlife officer to report the situation. Predator control officer Dennis Pemble attended right away setting several snares at the farm site. These would be designed to hold the trapped bear temporarily to permit further handling procedures. After setting the trap, Dennis left the farm intending to await word from the Van Loons. He didn't even make it back to his home in Abbotsford before he got the call from John that the bear was caught already. This was about 4 o'clock that morning. He turned around and travelled back to the farm right away. AN ANGRY BEAR GETS TRAPPED The trap site had been ravaged by the angry bear. The grizzly had dug a huge trench around the grove of alder that served as a tether site for the trap (see photo to right). With two other technicians helping, the grizzly was tranquilized and loaded on to a culvert shaped container mounted on a trailer. He was provided with an ear tag and a radio collar and trucked to Boston Bar about 220 air/km east of Pemberton on the Fraser canyon to be released at the headwaters of Anderson Creek, an easterly tributary of the Fraser River. Unfortunately, the now wide awake and agitated animal destroyed his radio collar when backing out of the cage at the release site so his movements could not be subsequently tracked. Dennis remembers the bear actually chasing the truck down the road before a photo could be taken. Once more, on a mid October dawn several weeks later, the farm's tranquility was interrupted by a commotion from the poultry house. John was not expecting to see the grizzly bear again, so he boldly approached the poultry house, this time with the correct caliber shells in the rifle. With dust and feathers everywhere dimming the early morning light, he was startled to see the huge rump of the bear that he thought to have seen the last of about 5 weeks ago. There was no thought at all that the bear would be back. There were only about 10 meters and a couple of fuel drums separating John from the bear as the bear backed out of the chicken house. John recalls the bear seeming to be distracted by the noise of a neighbor's machinery taking his attention away from John and enabling him to deliver the fatal rounds before becoming a victim himself. The bear was described as an old male in good condition with only deteriorating teeth an impediment to his overall condition. His ear tag identified him as the previously trapped turkey killer. This could have been the tragic end of an interesting but not unusual example of the homing capabilities of grizzly bears, or for that matter, many other animal species. This bear had traversed approximately 220 kilometers through unfamiliar territory to return to his home in the Pemberton Valley in a matter of a few weeks ....... or was this the final chapter in the life of a truly remarkable bear who had been given the name "Winston" eight years earlier? The upper Lillooet River and its tributary the Ryan River, which flows into the Lillooet from the west a few kilometers downstream of the Van Loon farm is considered by biologists to be prime grizzly habitat, currently supporting a healthy population of bears. According to a report by Ministry of Environment Biologist Steve Rochetta to the Pemberton Wildlife Association in 2008 the population in the Ryan at that time numbered six males and seventeen female grizzly bears. The whole Squamish-Lillooet corridor including the Toba Inlet to the west has an estimated population of 59 grizzlies. The habitat capacity was estimated at 200 grizzlies. Regionally, the numbers in the corridor have been reduced and their genetic diversity compromised through several modern human activities with the Upper Lillooet watershed including Ryan Creek being the exception. Grizzlies require huge ranges. MALE BEARS CAN COVER A LOT OF TERRITORY A male can dominate 3,000 square kilometers. They are not social animals (at the apparent communal gatherings on coastal salmon streams in the fall grizzlies tolerate each other out of expediency not out of enjoyment of each other's company). Recreational, residential and resource extraction activities have fragmented and reduced these habitat ranges and migration corridors. This has affected the bear's mobility required for accessing food sources as well as the potential for beneficial genetic mixing in offspring. It is thought that intense logging activity in the Ryan watershed in the 1970s and 1980s may have made the habitat inhospitable, driving the bears down to forage on farm produce including livestock which would explain the dramatic increase in bear sighting and activities on farmland in the 1980s and 1990s. Traditional animal husbandry practices in the valley included disposing of beef carcasses on the outlying farm areas where they were readily available to hungry bears. This would also have been a factor in the increase of sightings. On the broader front, in the 20th century North American grizzly populations were in severe decline. Where in the western U.S. there were once an estimated 50,000 grizzlies, there are now only 900, residing exclusively in the north western states of Wyoming, Montana, Idaho and Washington. Currently BC's population is estimated at 16,000 bears with 900 remaining in Alberta. There is no fossil evidence of grizzlies south of the recent glacial ice sheets prior to about 12,000 years ago. They moved south into the plains and Rocky Mountains only after the ice had left. GRIZZLY BEAR RECOVERY PROJECTS In recognition of the severe declines, the U.S. established in 1983 the Interagency Grizzly Bear Committee whose mandate was to co-ordinate the recovery programs in the 4 states mentioned. BC's Ministry of Environment became a full participating member of the committee in 1991. The stage was set, then, to extend the program north across the border into Canada with the hope of re-establishing grizzly populations in the four states of the North Cascades. This recovery region became the North Cascades Grizzly Bear Ecosystem (NCGBE) whose grizzly habitat capacity was estimated to be 200-300 bears. Their numbers had been reduced through overhunting to where there were less than 20 bears remaining, all on the Canadian side of the border in the Manning Park area. Within the Canadian portion of the NCGBE (total area 11,400 square kilometers), geographically bounded by the Okanagan Valley to the East and the Fraser Valley to the West, a core recovery area of 1,600 square kilometers was designated. The area was chosen on the basis of the historical presence of grizzlies and the low probability of potential conflicts with humans. There were no existing grizzly populations contiguous with the NCGBE. The Okanogan and Fraser Valleys were barriers to migration and the existing population in the recovery area was too low. It was thought therefore that population recovery would not occur naturally. GRIZZLY RELOCATION IN PEMBERTON In the 4 years from 1988 to 1991, nine grizzlies in the Pemberton area were killed or relocated. Grizzlies had become increasingly habituated to farm life (for reasons already stated) and the local farm community was demanding action or the bears would be at the mercy of local vigilantes. Bear raids on root crops and especially Michael and Julia Ross's carrots as well as scavenging of beef carcasses were common. Whether the bears were actually preying on live animals is still a matter of some local debate. Allen McEwan reports that in 50 years of domestic cattle grazing in sub alpine grizzly habitat in neighboring Miller Creek, there has never been a confirmed grizzly kill. In April 1992, Provincial Wildlife Biologist Bob Forbes met with the local Cattlemen's Association to address issues related to grizzly bear habituation in the Pemberton Valley. He said that we "cannot continue to permit bears to occur in close proximity to human habitation in the Valley".

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