Jasper National Park: Staying Safe in Bear Country

Two million visitors come to the pretty town of Jasper every year. There is plenty for them to do: winter sports, sightseeing trips up mountains and to lakesides and glaciers. Wildlife lovers come for the elks, moose, and coyote… and the bears, of course. Jasper National Park has many black bears and some grizzly bears. 

How do you identify them? The darker black bears are easier to see along the National Park roads. Grizzlies are usually lighter in colour, have a larger head, short, rounded ears, long claws  and a distinctive shoulder hump. As the top predator here, they are also less afraid of humans and can be unpredictable. 

Conservation and food

Grizzlies only have cubs every four years. In fact, grizzlies have the lowest reproductive rate of any mammal in North America! In contrast to popular imagination, bears don’t go into deep hibernation in winter. They actually give birth in mid-winter, usually to two cubs – but only if they are fat enough! 

So bears spend a lot of their time looking for food. They can eat up to 250,000 berries a day. Bears look for ants and roots too, under rocks. Black bears have a mainly vegetarian diet, while grizzlies are more aggressive predators. The idea is to gain enough fat for the winter. Sometimes bears try to complement their diet with human garbage.  

Bear safety 

We all like to look at bears, but we don’t really want to meet them unprepared. So if you are hiking in bear country, make noise when you’re walking: this way the bears know you’re coming. They don’t see very well. Remain calm if you see one, and back away slowly. Take bear spray with you, just in case. 

Thankfully very few human-bear encounters end badly. According to a local guide in Jasper, the last fatality was in the 1980s. An English couple insisted on camping in a valley with an erratic and aggressive grizzly. The couple went there anyway… but only the woman lived to tell the tale. 

Never feed a bear. They say “a fed bear is a dead bear.” Once bears associate humans with food, they will start to hunt more aggressively close to human habitation and might have to be killed.

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INTERVIEW: HUMAN BEHAVIOUR

Jasper National Park in Alberta is the largest national park in the Canadian Rockies. It is a UNESCO World Heritage site, on account of its outstanding natural beauty and its impressive wildlife. This is bear country and, as the Park’s resource conservation specialist Terry White explains, you need to be careful:

Terry White (Standard Canadian accent): Jasper has over two million visitors coming to it during the course of a year, and the vast majority of those people are coming to see wildlife, so they’ll be driving through the park, and if they see, or are seeing, elk or deer or sheep or, in some cases, bears, along the road, they want to take pictures of them, and occasionally you do get someone that is tempted to,“Well, I’ll get that animal just a little bit closer by putting a bit of food out, and I’ll throw a potato chip out or a piece of bread and attract that animal in, so it’s a little bit closer and I can get that better picture,” but it’s a totally unsafe and a really bad thing to be doing because you now are adapting that bear, that bear is learning to associate humans with a source of food. And now they’re going to start approaching other humans, hoping that they’re going to get a source of food as well. So people that are doing that really are endangering not only themselves, by getting the bear in close to them, but they’re also endangering any other future people that that bear might run into.

grizzlies 

Terry White says that there are two different types of bears in the park and they tend to be smaller than in Alberta’s neighbouring state of British Columbia, or “BC”:

Terry White: Typically, black bears are quite a bit smaller than grizzly bears, they come in all sorts of different colours, they come in black, brown, cinnamon-colour and even come in white. So, they can be in different sizes, basically, black bears sort of have evolved as a species of the forest, so they have claws that are adapted for climbing trees. Generally, they’re a little more shy of people, as a rule. Generally, their thought is, “If you encounter people, run away, climb up a tree, and you’ll be safe up in the tree, the people will go away, then you go away.” 

Grizzly bears sort of evolved as animals from the prairies, and they’re sort of the top predator in the area, they’re not necessarily a bit more aggressive, but just a little bit less frightened of other species, so they tend to be a bit more dominant. And grizzlies in our area, they aren’t all that large, compared to, say, the coastal bears, or areas where they have a better habitat. Here the habitat is not as good, they have to work a lot harder to basically put on weight and grow in size. So, for instance, if you’re out on the coast, or on the other side of the mountains in BC, they have a longer growing season, they have access to salmon, they have richer berries and a lot more food, so the bears in that area are, quite typically, quite a bit larger, probably another third larger than ours. Ours would be, a large grizzly would be probably 5 or 600 pounds here, whereas out on the central areas and the coast it’s not uncommon to get it up into the 1,000 pound range.  

For more information: www.travelalberta.com