Scientists seek proof that grizzlies still roam Washington wilderness

Of all the hazards in the Cascades wilderness, one unlikely danger is a confrontation with a grizzly bear. Scientists and conservationists warn that the days of the grizzly in Washington are numbered.

Grizzlies used to roam most of what is now the U.S. but the rarely seen brown bear is now protected by the federal Endangered Species Act. In Washington’s North Cascades, their numbers are so few that nobody knows for sure how many exist.

This summer, wildlife pathologist Bill Gaines, with the private Washington Conservation Science Institute, was among a group that set up cameras and what are called, “hair snares.”

“A piece of barbed wire about 100 feet long that we hang from trees in a big circle and in the middle of that we pour some stinky, smelly attractant, (fish guts and elk blood, for example.) It’s really nasty stuff,” said Gaines. The hope is that a grizzly will leave a tuft of evidence of his presence behind. This is a followup to a larger, three-year project to identify grizzlies in the North Cascades.

“We put in about 600 of these hair snares and remote cameras and we have not been able to document a grizzly bear in that effort,” Gaines lamented.

They picked up samples of black bears and photos of other wildlife, but not a single grizzly bear.

“I think we can conclusively say that we got very few bears still out there,” Gaines concluded.

Grizzly bears are more common in British Columbia and transplantation might be the long-term solution to the dwindling North Cascades population, said Joe Scott with Conservation Northwest. The Washington North Cascades and Bitteroot Mountains of Idaho are among five designated grizzly recovery areas in the U.S.

Visitors to the wilderness have reported a few sightings. In his 30 years in the woods, Gaines remembers just one possible grizzly sighting, from about 30 yards away.

“It was a fairly brief encounter and it turned and ran away and that left me wondering whether we still have them and where are they and how many are there?”

Scott said there is abundant protected habitat in Washington but commercial activities in the woods, such as mining, logging and road building, particularly in southwestern B.C., are threats to the grizzly bear.

“We believe and the science shows that we can have economic activity, even in the back country, and a robust grizzly bear population if we pay attention to how we manage those activities.” But Scott said that requires a plan for recovery, with definitive goals, objectives and government leadership.

Scott said grizzly bears have among the lowest reproductive rates of any North American mammal, posing another challenge for grizzly bear recovery. Females with cubs are particularly vulnerable to impacts on habitat because they won’t venture into populated areas, even if that’s where they can get food.

“Add the human impacts and you can see why their populations continue to decline or at least not recover,” said Scott. He said we need to improve connections among habitat areas to encourage more migration from the B.C. coast into the U.S. Cascades.

“In the fairly near future, there aren’t going to be any grizzly bears in Washington to recover, they’re going to be gone, so we need to work on this pretty quickly,” warned Scott.

Added Gaines, “I do think that the grizzly bears in the North Cascades are so few that they will go away without help.”