USFS scans backwoods for grizzlies

WENATCHEE — Scientists this summer will launch the first large-scale effort to find evidence of grizzly bears in the North Cascades, setting out 75 to 100 hair snags and a few dozen remote cameras.

“We think there’s a few bears wandering around out there, but it’s probably very few,” said Bill Gaines, wildlife biologist for the Okanogan-Wenatchee National Forest. “Certainly we have indications the bears are just north of the Canadian border, and likely would wander back and forth,” he said.

Some attempts were made to document grizzly bears in the mid-1990s, he said, and scientists have used remote cameras to follow up on reported sightings. “In terms of a broad-scale effort, this will be a first,” he said.

About $90,000 in grants — mostly from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service but also from the U.S. Forest Service — will pay for DNA testing of the hair samples, and hire six to nine people to set up hair snags and cameras throughout the North Cascades grizzly bear recovery zone. The devices will be set up in three areas of the recovery area: north of Highway 20, between Highway 20 and Highway 2, and between Highway 2 and Interstate 90.

The recovery zone is a 9,565-square-mile area identified by federal agencies as prime habitat for recovering grizzlies. It goes from the Canadian border to Interstate 90 and includes the North Cascades National Park and most of the Mount Baker-Snoqualmie and Okanogan-Wenatchee national forests.

Right now, most biologists believe there are only a handful of the bears living in the area because they’ve had so few credible sightings in recent years, Gaines said.

There was one “pretty good” sighting in the Chiwawa River Valley north of Lake Wenatchee in the fall of 2008, he said.

A few years earlier, another bear spotted north of Tonasket was confirmed to be a grizzly by a hair sample gathered from a nearby barbed-wire fence. The last confirmed sighting in the recovery zone was in 1996, in the Glacier Peak Wilderness, he said.

Gaines said unlike the endangered gray wolves, which have started to repopulate parts of the North Cascades by traveling south from Canada, grizzlies are not as likely to just move in to a new area and call it home.

Wolves, he said, often travel in packs, or perhaps a male and female together. “Wolves have this amazing, innate desire to disperse to new areas. They can move serious distances when they do it,” he said.

Male grizzly bears are also known to travel long distances, he said, but not with a female, or family. Similarly, a female bear may travel with her cubs. “But rarely would Mom and Dad travel together. So the chances of a male dispersing, and a female dispersing and finding each other, it’s just rare,” he said.

Gaines said the fact that grizzlies are unlikely to repopulate an area on their own means that recovery may depend on relocating bears, which has made grizzly bear recovery efforts more controversial.

A final plan to recover the grizzly bear in the North Cascades has been at a standstill for many years, due to lack of funds to conduct an environmental impact statement that would look at alternatives for recovering the bear.

“As far as federal dollars that would come down through the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, nothing’s happened,” he said.

He said a grizzly bear outreach program to educate residents about living with bears is continuing, and the Forest Service has been working to improve campgrounds so that garbage containers are bear-proof.

Gaines said the effort to document grizzlies in the North Cascades will begin in late June, when crews will be trained on how to set hair snag devices and collect hair samples. DNA analysis will be conducted on hairs gathered in the snags, which will be checked every two weeks, he said. Some of the devices will also have remote cameras to try to capture images of the great bears, he said.

Gaines will be speaking about grizzly bear recovery efforts in the North Cascades on Thursday at the Barn Beach Reserve, along with author David Knibb.

K.C. Mehaffey: 997-2512

mehaffey@wenatcheeworld.com