People and Bears Live in Harmony in This Wildlife-Friendly Town | Short Film Showcase

[Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] I think one of the biggest challenges in the valley, and it's been going on for over 20 years now, it's been going on since the mid-80s, is the constant change of the landscape itself within the Bull Valley. Everybody's having to learn new things every single year, and that includes animals and how they move through the valley. You know, an example of that would be many years ago, following a radio-collared grizzly bear into the Bull Valley. Here, I remember sitting at a corner, waiting for her to pop out and to try to keep her from entering into a development.

I remember her popping out onto the edge of the forest, going up on her hind legs, and looking around, and what used to be a forest the previous fall was now completely gone and was just a big construction zone. I just looked at her; it was like she was thinking, "Oh my gosh, what happened? What do I do now?" I think it was a great example of how wildlife are really struggling at times to figure out how to move through the valley.

[Music] [Music] Well, I know it's been described by some bear biologists as being one of the busiest landscapes. The grizzly bears and people continue to coexist, and I'm not aware of any community in North America that's been able to achieve what we've been able to achieve here. So, the whole story of bears and garbage in the Bull Valley started back in the 70s. In the national parks and in Canmore, there were open pit garbage dumps and bears routinely wandered through town seeking out garbage that people left curbside.

In 1980, I was warden in Banff Park, and we handled 75 bears that summer. That year, they also had a mauling; a single large male grizzly bear mauled four people, one of whom eventually died. We called him 747 because it was the largest bear that we had a record of in Banff. He was going out at night to feed on garbage from the Caboose restaurant—leftover steak bones and steaks and chicken and chicken bones.

They'd probably been fattening on people's food and garbage for a long time before who were out fishing ran into this bear at close range. Well, of his restaurant, it attacked three of them; they were seriously injured, and one person died. Everybody pretty well agreed that garbage and grizzly bears, or garbage and black bears, shouldn't mix. It was a dangerous mix, and then Parks Canada, it’s a million or two million to clean up the food garbage, and they did.

We fast forward to the early 90s. Canmore had been discovered—the town had gone from 4,000 residents to almost 10,000 residents. There was a group of citizens here in Canmore that were really concerned, that were trying to force the town council to do something about bears and garbage.

We were learning very quickly that there was a strong relationship between how we were managing our waste and the impact it was having on bears—in habituating them and attracting them into the town and rewarding them. Once that connection was clearly made, then it was, how do we change? What I thought was really fascinating is recognizing that bears can do this right, but they can’t do that. And so, that's why the hinge is facing down, because that's something we can do, and the bears have much difficulty doing that.

It has not gone through any changes in the last 20 years, and so it really shows that design, the interest, the collaboration really worked. You know, us included figured that once we got the garbage problem solved, maybe that was going to be the end of it, and then we had bird feeders. We implemented a bird feeder bylaw to negate the bird feeder issue, but bears are always searching for food.

When one thing becomes unavailable, they move to something else, and then it’s just this constant trying to keep ahead of the game and be aware of what's out there and trying to manage for it. So right now, we're going to deal with this natural food attractant, but it's right on a busy trail. There are certain areas where we're just not going to encourage wildlife to be in those areas—they're residential areas.

Part of doing that means removing the food source that is available within the town footprint. Bears can travel along the trail, but we're going to remove the food source because of the high levels of human use and the type of activity, i.e., biking. The problem is where we live; bears filter through here quite frequently, but if we leave an attractant out, they then want to stay, and they get competitive, and then you have trouble.

So, we're trying to remove any reason for a bear to stay—just allow it to filter. We only planted the trees because we wanted flowers; we didn't really want the apples. So we're really happy the town is replacing the tree with a flowering tree that won't fruit.

Canmore was a pretty sleepy little resource town, and then the Winter Olympics happened here, and suddenly Canmore became a kind of a destination, and development pressure started to grow. That was the time when the whole issue of wildlife corridors started to get talked about.

It is a fairly simple concept. I mean, wildlife need to move; they need land to access food for mates; they need to interchange genetic information between populations. Wildlife tend to use very similar pathways, and those are what we kind of refer to as corridors.

The best wildlife corridors in and around the town of Canmore are already taken up by development. All these discussions were just starting in Canmore around wildlife corridors and connectivity, happening at a time when there were also actually global discussions happening within the field of biology about the importance of connecting isolated populations—so individual national parks and reserves with regional level corridors.

If we kind of zoom out from Canmore and look at that, you know, Canmore is actually important in that it's a potential connection between Banff National Park and Kananaskis Country. It’s also, as you zoom out even more, it lights up as a really important north-south connection in a much broader reserve network that stretches over 3,400 kilometers from Yellowstone National Park all the way up to the Yukon.

The Trans-Canada Highway is a major barrier to wildlife movement, and it cuts all along the Bull Valley. Twenty years of effort have gone into highway fencing and building wildlife crossing structures that span this highway, and we know they work. The wildlife collision mortalities have decreased by 80%, and there have literally been over a hundred thousand documented wildlife crossings of these structures. They are a key part of the wildlife corridor network in the Bull Valley.

This is like the petri dish of wildlife quality science because we still could string tight topography, and that's the really important point there. There's only a limited amount of land here when you have, you know, species like grizzly bears and cougars cohabiting in areas where there's a lot of human activity; it's a real, real challenge.

[Music] The town of Canmore Council passed a motion to get a stakeholder group together to look at the issue of people, recreation in wildlife corridors, and habitat patches. In a year and a half, we’ve collected more than one and a half million photos or images, and that involves people and wildlife. But what we're seeing is that 94% of use in these areas is human use.

About 61% of them are recreating with a dog, and of those people recreating with a dog, about 60% of them have their dogs off-leash. So what that tells us is that we need to do a much better job at reducing those pressures on wildlife. Most people want to do the right thing, just like somebody in a city would check the traffic conditions before they go out on the road or skiers would check the avalanche conditions before they go skiing.

We will have resources available to educate people in terms of where they should and shouldn't be recreating based on wildlife sensitivities so that people can go in and look and see what trails they might want to avoid that day. Today, we are actually working on a small piece of the overall project to implement some restoration of the habitat patch in South Canmore, which is where we are today.

We're going to be restoring trails that are unnecessary and reducing the linear trail density throughout the area so the area is more effective for wildlife. In doing that work and trying to address how humans use the landscape in and around Canmore, we’re really giving animals the space that they need to move up and down the valley and get to the places where they need to go. We can successfully coexist with wildlife.

[Music] The valley is becoming so busy that there are people now who are choosing to recreate that opens up the whole forest to additional disturbance at a time when wildlife aren't expecting to see people around. High human use wildlife will often move under cover of darkness. So once you have people going in with lights at night, at a time that wildlife feels sick—that they should be secure—then you're having a major impact.

It's so great to be able to see what species are using this landscape, and for me to be able to know that cougars and wolves and grizzly bears are still using this area makes me very optimistic. But we are approaching a critical point, or we may even be at that critical point, and we need to start taking these steps to conserve wildlife movement through this valley for the long term, and we've still got a lot of work to do.

We're not there yet; bear 148 throughout Kananaskis Country, we call red zones. We have maps so people understand what those are, and we try and make bears understand what those are. So we just do not tolerate bears within those red zones or no-go zones. Right now, she's, you know, like a good spot, other than there's a lot of recreationalists around her.

Our reversal conditioning program works with individual bears like 148 here, and we try and teach her individually where she can and can't go and monitor her behavior. It looks like she might have moved a little bit back on front of us there.

Copy this: this is awesome for bears, but you know, I’ve seen bears eat 20 salmon a day. To get the equivalent berries, it would probably take them weeks and weeks and weeks of berry feeding. They are so focused; they know this is ephemeral; this only lasts for days or weeks. So they're just head down, and they're eating as much as they possibly can, and every time bikers are going by, it’s a bit of an annoyance.

I think that's what's happening now. We’re seeing quite a few cases of bears huffing at people, chasing people, because they don’t want to be disturbed from eating. They just want to carry on doing what they're doing, and when they're surprised by people, it's not a good situation for them.

The other thing we've been hit by is Pokemon, going down to the park. So there are people walking around the trails with their smartphones looking for Pokemon, for Pikachus—not looking for grizzly bears.

It's exciting; we can get her through the next year or two into more mature adulthood; they tend to figure that a little better. But right now, she's a teenager who's one away from her mother, or maybe she'll cross the line, make some mistakes, and that's why we're sitting here, monitoring her to make sure she doesn't really cross any of those lines.

She's still moving around a bit; probably found a nice juicy patch of berries. This is awesome because this is that habitat enhancement block we did for ungulates, but you can see the berries in here—really nice over the way spot, and the best part is there are no people.

Oh yeah, you guys have bear spray? Yes, you should, all because there's a grizzly bear about 50 yards away from me right now, and you should be making noise. Is she going? Yeah, yeah. So the smart people do with the number of sightings and everything else we're seeing here, yeah, it's just, we're getting multiple sightings. Absolutely crazy; data conservation officers are working overtime.

It's a great berry crop, and it's great news for the bears. The responsibility falls on people to behave accordingly and responsibly. Okay, so we're doing a major media blitz campaign going for social media; we have people at trailhead since absolutely crazy.

I think there are eight or nine warnings posted, seven or eight closures right now of trails. It's absolutely overwhelming. These few weeks that are right in the middle of our prime vacation time are super formative for those bears, and some people are coming here from farther afield, and they came here for a specific reason—I'm going to see a bear.

But we all know that when humans and wildlife come too close together, we could find ourselves on a slippery slope. That's smart; you know, let's avoid confrontation, get bear spray—it's worth 30 bucks—and travel in groups, make some noise, and if you kind of feel uneasy, turn around, go with your gut.

It's important for us as people to step back and go home. Okay, what would life be like if we weren't the center of the universe? How can we live differently? And at the end of the day, is it really that hard? Here we have this wonderful opportunity to live amongst wildlife and trying to find this balance where we can do whatever it is we need to do to get through our daily lives, but we also have the opportunity to know that there are these animals in the same valley as us where we live and recreate.

I suspect the elk are there, one for the green grass and two for the security that that field is offering. It sounds like we've been in contact with each school in the valley here and have developed wildlife protocols for the schools. They are probably kind of surprised and alarmed by the fact that there are 60 elk in the schoolyard, but I bet you by the second or third day, it’s all theirs.

The elk become part of their routine, and I suspect the elk are adapting as well. In there lies a bit of the problem of this whole people-wildlife interaction thing; everybody just starts getting used to it. But the concern also is that we do have cougars and wolves in the valley, and they prey on elk. You know, they're potentially really dangerous situations.

[Music] When I came back to Canmore, I was in charge of policing here, and there was a very tragic event with a fatality, but the end result was we had a death as a result of an interaction with a grizzly bear and a person. That kind of crystallized people's thoughts into how do we solve this, but we had a lot of really good people—good people with fire in their belly, interested in conservation, people with money for development, people with government power.

We really have the makings of a very good group of people to solve a problem, and that's how WildSmart evolved. Who here has heard of WildSmart? Big kids included? Yeah, just to get a recap, what are some of the animals that live around here? You can just call them out; that's okay.

With WildSmart, in 2016, I’ll probably have completed 80 to 95 presentations to the kids in this valley that they're on it, and they’re so interested in the local wildlife. But they also just have a wonder still, and they want to explore, and they want to be out, which I think is really the important part. You know, we have to stay wild; we just want to be smart about it. That’s really the main goal.

I think the valley is unique in the sense that we still have these animals living amongst us or near us, and a large part of the global population is living in urban areas. They don’t know wildlife; they don’t know anything about them, and it’s why we should try to maintain that current existence of wildlife so that other people can come and get a sense for what that is all about because they’re few and far between these days.

We need to not rest on our laurels, and we need to stay hungry, and we need to try to stay ahead of the curve because the challenges are not going to go away. But I just think of my kids going down to the soccer pitch and throwing on a can of bear spray along with their helmet—part of their makeup is how they go about living, and they're creating it in the valley, and that's a culture, and that's the future.

[Music] [Music]