King Bear and the Common Key

The polar bear: king of the Arctic food chain

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While in the den they do not eat, drink, urinate or defecate. Pregnant females are usually the first to enter dens in the fall. These females, with their newborn cubs, are the last to exit dens. Adult males, on the other hand, enter dens later and emerge earlier than most other bears.

In northern areas, bears may spend up to 8 months in dens, while in areas with relatively mild winters, such as Kodiak, some male bears stay active all winter. Brown bears have an exceptionally acute sense of smell, exceeding that of dogs. Contrary to popular belief, bears are not nearsighted. Their eyesight and hearing are comparable to humans.

They can run in short bursts up to 40 mph 64 kph and are excellent swimmers. By all indications, bears are extremely intelligent and most have individual personalities.

Brown bears Ursus arctos , also known as grizzlies, occur throughout Alaska except on islands south of Frederick Sound in southeast Alaska, west of Unimak in the Aleutian Chain, and Bering Sea islands. They also occur in Russia, northern China, northern Japan, Europe, western Canada, and in limited portions of the northwestern United States. In spring, black and brown bears are usually found on low elevation south-facing slopes, and in riparian forests and wetlands for early green vegetation and moose. During summer, brown and black bears are most commonly found in mid-elevation herbaceous habitats, in low elevation river bottoms and fluvial benches for early berries, and in high elevation burns and openings for berries.

In some areas they also focus on anadromous waters for salmon. In fall, brown and black bears are most commonly found on large rivers for salmon and associated riparian forest areas for roots, late berries and fruits. In the Interior, bears focus on alpine and subalpine berry patches. In winter, most brown bears are in hibernation dens in alpine and sub-alpine areas; most black bears are in dens in forests. Bear populations in Alaska are healthy and productive. Densities vary depending on the quality of the environment. In areas abundant food, such as the Alaska Peninsula, Kodiak and Admiralty Island, densities as high as one bear per square mile 2.

In central Alaska, both north and south of the Alaska Range, bear densities tend to be intermediate, about one bear per mi2 km2.

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These figures do not mean that each bear has this much territory for its exclusive use. The area occupied by any individual bear overlaps those used by many other bears. Alaska Department of Fish and Game. General Description Brown and grizzly bears are classified as the same species even though there are notable differences between them. Food Brown bears are very adaptable and like humans, they consume a wide variety of foods. Life History Cubs are born in the den during January and February.

Range and Habitat Brown bears Ursus arctos , also known as grizzlies, occur throughout Alaska except on islands south of Frederick Sound in southeast Alaska, west of Unimak in the Aleutian Chain, and Bering Sea islands. Status, Trends, and Threats Bear populations in Alaska are healthy and productive. In , guides at the Spirit Bear Lodge, in Klemtu, saw eight, the most since the lodge had opened six years earlier.

This bear at the river, a female that has a cub, was first spotted two and a half weeks ago. There are no other bears here, no competition, no males to kill her cub—which they sometimes do to get the female back into estrus. Charles says he has returned with guests from the lodge eight times, and only once did mother and cub not appear. Yesterday she left the cub alone with Charles and his party for ten minutes, as if she wanted the cub to learn that people are not so bad after all. It is illegal to hunt a white bear under any circumstance, but a hunter with a permit could take a black bear carrying the gene.

Charles says the cub is a male in its first year of life. After a minute or so mom re-emerges from the woods without the salmon, slips back into the pool and catches another one. She sits on some rocks and tears its flesh apart and devours it. The diet of all the bears here, and of the local wolves, is primarily salmon, berries and seaweed.

The native people eat these same foods, along with deer and halibut, mussels and sea urchin. Salmon, though, is the sine qua non of this ecosystem.

Alaska Department of Fish and Game

Bears carry the salmon into the forest, where the rotting carcasses, rich in nitrogen, fertilize the soil. The nitrogen permeates the trees and the flowering plants; even the snails and slugs get it.

The sea feeds the forest, and the bears are the bearers of these nutritious infusions. Each river is on its own schedule, with four of the seven Pacific species—sockeye, coho, pink and chum—running up the same river at different times.

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Climate change, though, is threatening these runs by warming up the waters, and thus threatening the bears that fatten up on the salmon to get through the winter. Overfishing is also a problem here. The pink salmon that we watch the mother bear devour are already dead.

Having spawned and expired upstream, they have floated down. Others are really picky and will only eat the brain and eggs. There is a huge range in the personalities of individual bears, just like us. Her cub comes out of the woods and joins in the feast. The mutation probably rose to prominence during the last ice age, hypothesizes Kermit Ritland, a population geneticist at the University of British Columbia who led the study that identified it.

Glaciers then covered most of the Pacific Northwest. Later, as the glaciers melted and the sea rose, some of the bears might have been stranded on these islands while others traveled back to the mainland. Part of this study involved researchers dressing up in white or black coveralls and entering the river to see which outfit spooked the salmon less. So the white forms seem to have a slight edge in the quest for protein, but not enough for their mutated gene to have more than a 10 to 30 percent frequency.

The mom and cub cross the river, which is only 30 feet wide, and go down into another pool behind some rocks, which the mother climbs up and peers over, now only 50 feet away. With only her head visible, she studies us intently, drinks us in and sniffs us out with her ash-colored nose, the way elephants do with their trunks. The mom decides not to come any closer, and she and the cub slip into the woods.

I wonder what she makes of the brace of cameras clicking away, of all the attention she is getting, like a celebrity at a photo op. She is a celebrity, an official animal of British Columbia, and the panda of Canada. At this point, about a third of the Great Bear Rainforest is fully protected, and not all of the First Nations have signed off on the most recent agreement proposed by a coalition of environmental groups and adopted by the provincial government.

This Rare, White Bear May Be the Key to Saving a Canadian Rainforest

If it were constructed, tankers would have to navigate the narrow, rocky, mile-long Douglas Channel, and a spill could be catastrophic. The bear, like the white buffalo of the American plains, is traditionally seen as a giver of good luck and power to those it appears to. This was the first one built since the early s, because missionaries and governments, after arriving in the late 19th century, had banned the ceremonies, dances and other cultural practices that took place in there. It hung around for a few days, and then disappeared as mysteriously as it had come.

All of us by the river agree that the patient female we have been observing is no ordinary bear, and that we too have had a brief encounter with a very special being. During the five and a half hours we hang out with the bears, we have plenty of time to take in the majesty of our surroundings. Out in the channel behind the research vessel, five humpback whales are spouting geysers as high as trees. They are bubble feeding, creating a net of air bubbles through which they will swim up from below with their mouths open and gobble up the disoriented krill.

Behind the forest that lines the sea, hidden from view, huge granite domes rise up to 5, feet. Some have waterfalls spurting down their sheer walls from higher, snow-fed lakes. Philip Charles says there are white mountain goats on the summits. In winter, when the shoreline is white with snow, the goats sometimes come down to feed on seaweed and mussels.

But this one is especially magical, even mystical. Not only because of the bears—and their gentle, nurturing side that we are witnessing—but because the whole ecosystem, swarming with life on land and sea, puts being alive into a perspective much different from our modern urban one. We are at one with all that surrounds us. We breathe the same air; we are all of a piece. The Kitasoo have many stories about shape-shifting, with animals taking human form and vice versa. The greatest shape-shifter is the sea otter.

Bears are regarded as particularly close to humans; if you take off the fur, bears become people. In one story, a woman is kidnapped by and marries a handsome man who is actually a bear, and they have three kids, with human faces and bear bodies. One of the kids is the color of snow because of a deal that Raven, a trickster and Creator of everything, had made with the black bears long ago.

He remained black for the rest of time, but he convinced the bears to agree that some of their cubs would be white. In another story, told to the Canadian poet Lorna Crozier, people and animals could once talk to each other. The first bear to meet a human taught the human what plants to eat and how to catch salmon. The bear was about to teach the human all about hibernation, when another human came along and killed it with an arrow. This is why, the Kitasoo say, people have to collect food and firewood to make it through the winter, instead of sleeping through its cold, dark months.

Its success depends not only on the spirit bear, but also on the coastal black bears and the grizzlies, which also attract tourists and keep the ecosystem healthy.

Doug Neasloss, 33, a member of the Raven crest clan, was a guide for Spirit Bear Lodge until he became chief councilor of Klemtu, a position he held until There are also poachers only interested in selling bear livers to the lucrative Chinese market. By owning the license, Raincoast prevents hunters from being able to shoot the bears there. In , nine nations belonging to what is called the Great Bear Initiative voted to ban all bear hunting in their traditional territories, but the provincial government is still issuing licenses there.

Darimont and Neasloss realized that the first step in protecting both grizzlies and black bears, including the white ones, was to collect baseline data about their numbers, movements, relatedness and behavior. Housty, who has a degree in natural resource management, knew about a passive hair snag that others had used with success in the interior.

It consists of a square of barbed wire maybe eight feet long on each side and a foot and a half off the ground, with a stack of sticks and moss in the middle that reek of fish. And when the bear comes by the trap, night or day, infrared video cameras fixed to nearby trees start recording. I spend a day with Neasloss and year-old Krista Duncan, who collects the hair and video footage from the traps and rebaits them.

The material is sent to a lab at the University of Victoria, where the DNA is extracted, along with other information, and matched up with the video. This noninvasive method of data-gathering, as opposed to darting and radio-collaring, is in keeping with the deep respect the coastal people have for the bears. What the hair-trap data are showing so far is that the grizzlies are on the move, probably looking for rivers with more salmon, Neasloss and Darimont think. Some grizzlies are swimming out to the islands where the white bears are. When a grizzly appears on a river where black bears are feeding on salmon, the island bears, white ones included, bolt into the forest.

Or they might switch to increased nocturnal foraging.

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