Griz study gets cash infusion

By HEIDI DESCH - Hungry Horse News

A last-minute save from the U.S. Forest Service will keep a grizzly bear study in the Northern Continental Divide Ecosystem alive.

Flathead National Forest Supervisor Cathy Barbouletos announced to a group of wildlife and land managers last week that she has been able to secure $377,00 from area forests to continue the study.

Last spring a NCDE subcommittee met in Choteau with the subject of the meeting being that the state would not be able to pay for the entire multi-year study after this year.

So, Barbouletos went to work. She asked national forests with lands inside the ecosystem to see if they might have leftover funds from the 2007 fiscal year, which ended Oct. 1.

Officials from the Lewis and Clark, Lolo, Helena and Kootenai forests, plus the regional office in Missoula were able to come up with the money to help continue the monitoring study.

"The biggest issue is the money," Barbouletos said last week. "It's all about the money."

The money will help continue a population and trend study of the bears.

A genetic population study started in 2004. Researchers used DNA to estimate the number of grizzlies in the area by collecting hair samples.

Now, a population trend study is being led by Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks research biologist Rick Mace. The study involves trapping female grizzly bears with radio or satellite tracking collars, and monitoring those bears for birth and mortality. The study should tell whether the population is increasing or decreasing.

"Unless you have a trend you can't make any conclusions" about the grizzly bear population, Barbouletos noted.

The Forest Service funding will allow work to continue for the next five years.

The monitoring program works in an area that covers all of Glacier National Park, the Bob Marshall Wilderness, the Swans and lands along the Continental Divide from the Canadian border nearly to Ovando.

A total of 57 individual females have been monitored since 2004.

Crews must also often capture bears in remote areas — taking horses into the wilderness for weeks at a time.

Culvert traps are flown in to the location and baited with the hopes of catching a female grizzly.

A screening procedure has cut down on the number of male captures. Crews monitor video of sites before actually setting a trap. Once a female grizzly is seen frequenting the site then the trap is set, hopefully resulting in a female capture.

Still, crews often come up empty-handed.

Even once a bear is fitted with a collar things can go wrong.

Mace said maintaining $5,000 GPS collars can be difficult. Some bears are particularly hard on the collars.

"No other bear study in the world has bears biting off the collars like our bears," Mace said.

There has been one bear in Alaska that damaged its collar, he noted.

So, Mace and others are working on ways to reinforce the collars with Kevlar or metal.

Although the collars are expensive, Mace said they are actually less expensive than traditional radio collars, which must be regularly monitored from chartered aircraft. The GPS collars also provide better information, allowing Mace to regularly download information on a computer.