Grizzly bear research could be on horizon

Members of the Interagency Grizzly Bear

Committee – made up of state, federal and tribal agencies

responsible for bear management – ran a pool in 2003 to guess the

number of grizzlies in the Northern Continental Divide Ecosystem,

an area that includes Glacier National Park and the Bob Marshall

Wilderness.

“Everybody put $20 in an envelope and

it got put in a safety deposit box until I came out with my

estimate,” research biologist Katherine Kendall explained at a

presentation in Libby last Wednesday. “Every single one of them

were low – lower than the estimate.”

Kendall, research biologist for the

U.S. Geological Survey’s Northern Rocky Mountain Science Center,

described the methods her team used and the painstaking measures

the group took to ensure accuracy in determining the 2004 grizzly

population in the 9,600 square-mile recovery zone.

The Lincoln County commissioners hosted

Kendall’s visit to speak on the subject since the county Resource

Advisory Committee has agreed to move forward in supporting a

comparable study in the Cabinet-Yaak grizzly bear recovery

zone.

Using ballpark figures, Kendall figured

it would take about $1.15 million, 38 field crew members and three

years to replicate a DNA grizzly bear population study in the 2,600

square-mile Cabinet-Yaak recovery zone.

The NCDE study was funded by a federal

appropriation. The RAC and county commission hopes to pool together

resources from many stakeholders in order to make a study in the

Cabinet-Yaak feasible.

“I feel like in the NCDE we were

managing blind, putting all sorts of restrictions on land and

spending all kinds of money and we had no way to measure whether

what we were doing was any good at all for grizzly recovery,”

Kendall explained. “It sounds like a whole lot of money and it is a

lot of money, but when you put it in the context of everything else

it impacts .…”

Her study indicated that 765 grizzly

bears roamed the NCDE in 2004. That is 2-1/2 times more than the

agencies’ minimum estimate, Kendall said.

“Most of the agency people felt like

that was a real minimal number, that that was way low, but nobody

knew how low it was,” she said.

Kendall is now in the process of

replicating the study to determine the trend of the grizzly bear

population since 2004.

Government management agencies

respected the study as a reliable piece of data, Kendall said. In

taking unprecedented precautions for this type of study and

employing outside experts to weigh in on her methods, the study

came out with a surprisingly low margin of error of only 3.8

percent.

Kendall said she is part of a team that

is planning for the management of grizzly bears after the

population in the NCDE is taken off of the endangered species list.

The proposal to delist, Kendall said, stemmed from her population

study as well as from a Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks radio

collar study that estimates that the NCDE grizzly population is

increasing in the area at 3 percent per year.

Kendall explained at last week’s

presentation how she conducted the NCDE study and how a study in

the Cabinet-Yaak would need to be modified. The main difference,

she said, is size. The NCDE is geographically more than 3-1/2 times

larger than the Cabinet-Yaak. The smaller the population of bears,

she said, the tougher it is to get an accurate count.

Kendall’s team divided the NCDE into

7-by-7-kilometer grids and gathered samples in each grid by setting

up hair traps – a string of barbed wire hanging between two posts –

and identifying tree rubs where bears naturally discard hair. Field

crews gathered hair samples in each grid on four occasions at

14-day intervals.

For better accuracy, Kendall suggested

making smaller 5-by-5-kilometer grids in the Cabinet-Yaak and

increasing the number of hair-gathering sessions to five.

With each re-sample, teams pick up hair

from a few more bears, which aids in precision, as well as in

statistical modeling to determine the total population based on the

number of bears discovered.

The NCDE grizzly study took 2-1/2

years, Kendall said, the bulk of which was dedicated to the genetic

analysis of thousands of samples, which reveal species and sex of

the bears.

Knowing the genetic make-up of each of

the grizzlies and where they were located provides a wealth of

other information, she said, including whether bear populations are

fragmented and along what lines.

Kendall said she is helping agencies in

Alberta design the same grizzly project in the southern half of the

province for next summer.

It takes a lot of work and a group

effort, she explained.

“You cannot pull off a project like

this without all of the agency partners, private partners,

nonprofits, so it’s truly been a collaboration,” she said.

Kendall will give a presentation in

Libby again at a RAC meeting on Wednesday, Feb. 15 at 6 p.m. in the

Forest Supervisor’s Office.