Features

Why fear the bear?

Myth and misinformation have sullied the bruin’s reputation.  In truth, the big mammal evolved as a prey species that learned to survive through caution and stealth.

By Conor Mihell

 

Jim Johnston’s efforts to redeem the reputation of black bears began with a close encounter in 1982 that left him stunned. The president of the Friends of Algoma East (a member group of Ontario Nature), based in the northern Ontario town of Elliot Lake, was napping at his campsite while on a moose hunting trip north of Sault Ste. Marie when he was startled by a shove. “I opened my eyes and there was a bear,” he recalls. At the time, Johnston was an avid hunter but had never hunted Ursus americanus. “I believed in a lot of the myths and misinformation, the stuff you learn from hunting magazines,” he says. “I thought that encounters equalled attack. I bought into the attitude of hysteria and fear. And I just couldn’t believe it when that bear didn’t eat me.”

That encounter changed Johnston’s attitude. He went from fearing bears to educating the public about their behaviour and ecology in hopes of ending the persecution of this species that has been going on since European settlers arrived in North America. Since Ontario cancelled its spring bear hunt in 1999, Johnston’s former colleagues at the Ontario Federation of Anglers and Hunters (OFAH) have lobbied hard for its reinstatement, arguing that early-season hunting is a “vital bear management tool.” In a 2008 press release, OFAH president Jack Hedman claimed that the ban on bear hunting was causing Ontario’s black bear population to spike out of control, endangering “the welfare of our children, the safety of our workers in the bush and people simply enjoying their camp or backyard.” Newspapers such as The Sault Star reinforce the fears with sensationalist accounts of “bold” black bears that have “multiplied over the years” and are “too big for other animals to cull.”

Johnston is eager to set the record straight. The fact is that the roughly 6,200 bears killed by hunters in Ontario in 2007 (the most recent statistic available) is only 9 percent fewer than the average number taken in the decade leading up to the cancellation of the spring hunt. Research also shows that Ontario’s black bear population is stable at around 100,000 animals. The species has the second-lowest reproduction rate of any mammal in North America, so OFAH’s claim that Ontario’s bear population has increased by at least 30 percent in the past 10 years is remarkably inaccurate. Furthermore, statistics show that black bears are rarely aggressive toward humans: only 61 black bear-related fatalities have occurred across the continent since 1900; humans are about 250 times more likely to be killed by lightning than by a bear.

Humans have much less to fear from bears than bears do from us. Development increasingly shrinks black bear habitat, which historically covered most of the province, including all of southern Ontario. “We need to recognize that we’re the problem,” says Ainslie Willock, the president and director of outreach of the Get Bear Smart Society, a nongovernmental organization, based in Whistler, B.C., that created Canada’s first program to reduce conflict between humans and black bears in an urban area. “If we’re going to be petrified of them, then there’s no future for black bears,” warns Willock. “The reality is, they’re quite easy to live with once you understand them.”

At the end of a 90-minute telephone interview, Dr. Lynn Rogers, an international authority on black bear behaviour and ecology, says he has told me all that he has learned about black bears in 43 years of research. The affable 70-year-old is the founder of the North American Bear Center, an educational facility in Ely, Minn. Proof that Rogers is not exaggerating when he says that he is still just “scratching the surface” in understanding his subject is that I catch up with him while he is driving across the state to deliver a deceased female for the first-ever autopsy of a black bear that has died of old age. The procedure on the 30-plus-year-old bear at the University of Minnesota will give Rogers his first opportunity to study a mature bear that died of natural causes. “Almost every [black bear] death is human caused,” explains Sue Mansfield, Rogers’s research assistant. “Bears are killed by automobiles and legally and illegally by hunters.” The average age of bears taken in the state’s fall hunt is just two for males and three for females. “These bears aren’t even having the chance to reproduce,” says Mansfield. By analyzing the aged bear’s heart, muscles and joints, Rogers and Mansfield hope to learn more about the physiology of older bears.

The pair’s research focuses on Minnesota’s Superior National Forest, a 16,000-square-kilometre stretch of wilderness and rural land south of northwestern Ontario’s Quetico Provincial Park. The habitat, climate and geography of the area are similar to those of central Ontario, making it a good analogy for the circumstances in which Ontario bears live. Rogers, who is often called the “Jane Goodall of black bears,” has gleaned most of his findings by “walking with the bears” – observing at close range and documenting, over 24-hour periods, their social and environmental interactions and dietary preferences. Each summer, he offers popular workshops during which ordinary citizens can learn more about black bear behaviour through first-hand experience, including attaching radio collars to nontranquillized bears and interacting closely with mothers and cubs. “One of the biggest myths is that mother black bears are dangerous,” says Rogers. “But nobody’s ever been killed by a mother bear defending her cubs.” He often crawls inside dens to inspect bear cubs – and has always emerged unharmed. Out of the den, juvenile black bears are able to escape danger by climbing trees, Rogers explains.

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Tree huggers

Better air quality. Pollution control. Habitat for wildlife. These are just some of the reasons why a band of dedicated volunteers is determined to save the urban forest.

By Susan Grimbly

 

The condition of the Manitoba maple was woeful. Covered in scars, it struggled up through the cement, slouching over the beer drinkers. Standing on either side of the fence surrounding the patio of a Toronto pub, my teammates and I were animatedly assessing the condition of the tree and trying to measure its height when one rough fellow shouted, “You’re not cutting down that tree, are you?” Patrons’ heads shot around as if, like a village mob, they would lynch anyone who tried. “No, no,” we said hurriedly, “we’re not from the city. We’re volunteers with the Harbord tree committee,” and we launched into our spiel about trees, urban health and NeighbourWoods.

Developed by the Faculty of Forestry at the University of Toronto (U of T), NeighbourWoods is a community-based program that, usually with volunteer labour, surveys city trees. On the basis of these inventories, forestry experts try to figure out how to enhance and protect the urban tree canopy.

The issue is an increasingly urgent one. Urban forests improve air quality, offer shade, function as a windbreak, reduce stormwater runoff and smog, and provide wildlife habitat, but they are in trouble. For one thing, the city tree canopy is aging. Trees on boulevards and in residential yards tend to be one of a few predominant species, such as Norway maple, and many of them are reaching the end of their lifespans. Street salt, soil compaction, overcrowding and drought weaken them further.

In creating NeighbourWoods, Andy Kenney and Danijela Puric-Mladenovic wanted to tap into the public’s enthusiasm for tree planting and extend it to stewardship, because maintaining a healthy tree population requires long-term commitment. “Remember, if you stick a 60-millimetre burlap ball into the ground and mulch it carefully and sprinkle with holy water and hope for the best, it still won’t make a significant contribution to the canopy for many, many years,” says Kenney.

NeighbourWoods grew out of a project Kenney led in Ottawa in 1995. A lecturer in community and urban forestry at U of T, he fell in love with trees while growing up in western Quebec, where his father ran a small pulpwoodcontracting business. He has followed the interactions of people and forests for most of his career, but for the last 16 years has been directly involved with urban forestry. So, together with Puric-Mladenovic, then a U of T grad student, he conducted a tree inventory in the city of Elora that recorded the size, species and health of each tree. The idea was to increase public awareness of trees in their community. “We thought maybe if we got a little information from it, that would be a bonus,” says Kenney, an engaging man in his fifties with a deep, winning laugh. “Very quickly into the project, though, we realized the data was very valuable” as a starting point for a long-term stewardship plan.

The following year, the project, which became the NeighbourWoods program, undertook a similar inventory of the U of T’s St. George campus. Over the subsequent 14 years, NeighbourWoods refined its assessment protocol, rating the condition of trees on the basis of such factors as defoliation, reduced height, unbalanced crown, weak or yellowing foliage and dead or broken branches.  Afterwards, Puric-Mladenovic, an adjunct professor now in the forestry faculty at U of T who also works as a senior analyst at the Ministry of Natural Resources, graphs the results, showing such data as the species composition, height classes (to indicate age) and condition of trees on public and private land in an area.

Since NeighbourWoods started, about 12 groups in Ontario, from Hamilton to Sarnia, have used its tree-assessment protocol. The town of Mitchell, northwest of Stratford, mapped each of its roughly 13,500 trees. Students in Kenney’s urban forest conservation course then developed a 20-year strategic plan for Mitchell (and six other communities), setting out recommendations for an urban forest stewardship based on the tree inventory. Then came the tough part: persuading the residents to put the recommendations into action.

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City Lights

Disoriented by glare and reflective surfaces, millions of birds crash into office buildings every year. Now, conservationists and city planners are teaming up to create a safer urban environment for avian travellers.

By Brian Banks

 

Evening comes, the sun sets and a brown-and-white wood thrush rises from a clump of trees beside a farmer’s field in upper New York State. As it climbs, it joins a gathering storm of migratory songbirds moving across the region. This nightly event in a three-month spring procession includes tens of thousands of birds, each making the flight across Lake Ontario en route to summer breeding grounds farther north.

The wood thrush, which weighs about as much as a golf ball, has already been travelling for about two weeks. It left its wintering grounds in Honduras and flew across the Gulf of Mexico and up the Mississippi Valley before making this pit stop in New York State. Two nights later it will reach its nesting area in central Ontario.

Clouds cover the lake, obscuring the stars by which the thrush usually navigates. After a few hours, the bird is heading toward the misty glow of the Toronto skyline. City lights become a powerful distraction. The thrush grows disoriented and smashes into the window of an office tower. The bird’s 3,000-kilometre journey, the same that innumerable generations before it have flown, has come to an abrupt and violent end.

Welcome to an urgent new battlefront in bird conservation: the city. Urban areas are filled with obstacles and threats to migratory birds, and, as such areas grow up, out and ever denser, so do the problems they cause. The dead wood thrush is one of an estimated one to 10 million birds killed in Toronto every year due to collisions with buildings and other structures. According to one expert, an average of 10 birds a year hit each Toronto building.

Collisions with buildings are only part of the issue. Destruction of natural habitat and the loss of food and shelter that urban expansion causes may be taking an even bigger toll, according to Bridget Stutchbury, a biologist at York University who studies migratory songbirds. The eastern half of North America is an “urban obstacle course,” she says, with fewer and fewer places where birds can refuel quickly enough to get to their summer grounds in time to reproduce. Add rapid habitat loss in the birds’ wintering grounds, and it’s not surprising that migratory bird populations are “crashing,” says Stutchbury.

That’s the bad news. The good news is that there is fresh optimism among bird conservationists about reducing the urban toll. In January, Toronto became the first major city in North America to require most new buildings to meet “bird-friendly” construction standards. And two months earlier, more than 100 bird experts gathered in the city for its first-ever international Symposium on Bird Conservation in Urban Areas. “We suddenly find ourselves leaders in this area,” says Kelly Snow, the planner who coordinates Toronto’s bird-friendly initiatives. “It’s an interesting and exciting step.”

Toronto may be garnering attention and credit for taking up the cause of migratory birds, but a small, mostly volunteer-run organization – Fatal Light Awareness Program (FLAP) – got things rolling.

Michael Mesure founded FLAP in 1993. A former artist and gallery operator, the bird enthusiast started by simply picking up dead and injured birds around downtown buildings. Within a few years, he made bird rehabilitation and conservation in cities his life’s work, aiming, according to FLAP’s website, to create “a 24-hour, collision-free urban environment for migratory birds.” Similar organizations or programs now exist in Montreal, Halifax and several U.S. cities. Two of them – Project Safe Flight in New York and the Chicago Bird Collision Monitors – got start-up help from FLAP. The group has also been working with communities around Toronto, including in Markham and Mississauga.

FLAP volunteers patrol the bases of downtown and suburban office buildings throughout the day, looking for fallen birds. (Although lights at night attract birds, more collisions actually occur in the daytime, when birds are fooled by deceptive reflections in the glass.) Volunteers take any injured birds to the Toronto Wildlife Centre for care and rehabilitation. About 40 percent of the birds the volunteers find alive survive, says Susan Krajnc, FLAP’s program assistant and volunteer coordinator.

Of course, preventing the injuries and deaths by reducing collisions is the ultimate goal. To that end, Mesure has been lobbying municipal officials and encouraging building owners to make their structures safer for birds. Initially, this meant turning out the lights at night. Then FLAP increased its emphasis on averting daytime collisions through the use of visible window treatments, shading and screening, as well as grills, artwork, awnings, overhangs or even angled walls and glass to minimize reflection. The city became an active participant in the cause, and now most new buildings must incorporate such features up to a height of 12 metres above ground.

Over the last decade, more than 100 buildings in Toronto have adopted FLAP’s recommendations. Now, FLAP expects this number to grow as the city takes on a bigger role educating builders and property owners. FLAP plans to spend more time working in other cities as well as the Great Lakes. “It’s a huge flyway area for so many birds,” says Krajnc.

Few people can appreciate Krajnc’s point more than Stutchbury. In 2007, the York University professor headed a research team that attached tiny geolocators to the backs of wood thrushes and other songbirds to track their movement and location during migration – the first time the technology was used on such tiny fliers. Birds were caught on their summer grounds, fitted with the “backpacks,” released and then netted again the following spring when they returned to Canada. The researchers then downloaded and plotted the data.

“Each one of these tracks is an individual bird,” explains Stutchbury, pointing at a computer screen in her office. On the monitor is a map of North and Central America with several sets of lines, each representing the outbound and inbound journeys of a bird between the breeding area in northern Pennsylvania (the focus of Stutchbury’s study) and its winter range in Central America. The data also tell her how far they flew each day and in what direction. “We’ve never been able to capture this before,” she says.

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