[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 can how they move
through the valley you know an example
of that would be many years ago
following a radio called a grizzly bear
into the bull Valley here and I remember
sitting at a at a corner waiting for her
to pop out and to try to keep her from
entering into a development and I
remember her popping out onto the edge
of the forest and going up 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 and I just looked at
her it was like she was thinking oh my
gosh what happened what do I do now
and I think it was a great example of
how wildlife were really struggling at
times to 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 cameroon there was
open pit garbage dumps and bears
routinely wandered through town seeking
out garbage that people left that
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 fall to 747 because it was the
largest bear that we had a record in
Banff are going at night to feed on
garbage from the caboose restaurant
leftover steak bones and steaks and
chickens and chicken bones
they’re 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
were serious injured one person died and
everybody pretty well agreed garbage and
grizzly bears or garbage and black bears
shouldn’t mix
dangerous mist and then Parks Canada
it’s a million or two million to clean
up the food garbage and they did them we
fast forward out to the early 90s
Kenmore had been discovered the town had
gone from four thousand residents to
almost 10,000 residents there was a
group of citizens here in Kenmore that
were really concerned that was trying to
force Town Council to do something about
bears and garbage and camel 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 in the town and
rewarding them once that connection was
clearly made then it was how do we
change what we thought was really
fascinating is it 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 in 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 designed the interest
the collaboration really worked
you know us included figured that once
we got the garbage problem solved but
maybe that was going to be the end of it
and then we had bird feeders and you’ve
got a bird feeder bylaw put in and that
negate the bird feeder issue but eras
are always searching for food and when
one thing becomes unavailable they moved
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 attracted but it’s
right on a busy is a trail there are
certain areas where we’re just not going
to encourage wildlife to be in those
areas they’re they’re residential areas
and 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 ie biking
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 Kenmore was a pretty sleepy little
resource town and then the Winter
Olympics happened here and suddenly
Kenmore became a kind of a destination
and development pressure started to grow
and that was the time when the whole
issue of wildlife corridors started to
get talked about and 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
in and around the town of Cameron are
already taken up by development all
these discussions which we’re just
starting in can work around wildlife
quarters and connectivity
we’re happening at a time when they’re
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 and so if we
kind of zoom out from Canmore and look
at that it’s you know
Kanwar is actually important in that
it’s it’s a potential connection between
BAFF National Park and kananaskis
country it’s also as you zoom out even
more it lights up as a really important
north-south connection and a much
broader reserve network that stretches
over 3,400 kilometers from Yellowstone
National
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 20 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’s
literally been over a hundred thousand
documented wildlife crossings of these
structures they are a key part of the
wildlife quarter network in the bull
Valley this is like the petri dish of
wildlife corridor science because what’s
so good 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 you know
cohabiting in areas where there’s a lot
of human activity is a real real
challenge
[Music]
the town of Kenmore 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 percent of
them are rec reading with a dog and of
those people rec reading with a dog
about 60% of them have the 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 recreative based
on wildlife sensitivities so that people
can go in and look and see what trails
that 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 camera 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 is really that we’re
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
recreation hours and 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 a lights at night at a time that
wildlife feels sick that they should be
secure then you’re having a major impact
it’s 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
where’s 148
throughout can’t ask his country we have
what we call red zones and we have map
so people understand what those are and
we try and make theirs understand what
those are so we just do not tolerate
bears within within those red zones or
no-go zones and right now she’s and
she’s in a good spot other than there’s
a lot of recreationalists around her
our aversive conditioning program works
with individual bears like like 148 here
and and we try and teach her
individually where she can and can’t go
and monitor for her behavior it looks
like he might have moved a little bit
back on front of us this is awesome for
bears but you know I’ve seen bears eat
20 salmon a day and to get the
equivalent varies it would probably do
take them weeks and weeks and weeks of
very feeding they are so focused they’re
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 and 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 don’t they
just want to carry on doing what they’re
doing and all when when they’re
surprised by people it’s that’s not a
good situation for them stay away from
very booking another thing we’ve been
hit by pokeyman going down to the park
so there’s people walking around the
trails with their life with their
smartphones looking for Pokemon for pika
juice not looking for grizzly bears
it’s exciting we can get her through the
next year or two into Norman I’m mature
adult they tend to figure that a little
better but right now she’s that teenager
who’s run away from her mother I know
maybe she’ll cross the line make some
mistakes and that’s why we’re sitting
here honor him 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 berries this is
awesome because this is that habitat
enhancement blocked we did for ungulates
but you can see the berries in here
really nice out-of-the-way spot and the
best part is there’s no people oh yeah
you guys have bear spray this should all
be curry there’s a grizzly bear but uh
50 yards away from me right now and
should be making noise – is she going
yeah yeah so what the smart people do
with the number of sightings and
everything else we’re seeing here
yeah it just we’re getting multiple
sightings absolutely crazy data
conservation officers are working
overtime it’s it’s a great berry crop
and it’s a great great news for the
Bears the responsibility falls on people
to behave accordingly and responsibly
okay so we’re we’re doing a major media
blitz campaign going to social media we
have people at trailhead sense
absolutely crazy there’s I think eight
or nine warnings close to 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 gonna 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 a bear spray it’s worth 30 bucks and
traveling 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
at the end of the day is it really that
hard
here we have this wonderful opportunity
to living amongst wildlife and trying to
find this balance where we can do it
whatever it is we need to do to get
through our daily lives but we also have
the opportunity to to know that there is
these animals in the same Valley as us
where we live in recreation work I
suspect the elk are there one for the
green grass and tooth of the security
that that field is offering isn’t it
sounds like we’ve been in contact with
each school in the valley here and have
developed wildlife protocols for the
school they are probably kind of
surprised and alarmed by the fact that
there’s 60 elk in the school yard but I
bet you by the second or third day it’s
oh there’s the elk it becomes part of
their routine and I suspect the elk are
adapting as well and therein 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 play
on elk
you know there’s potentially really
dangerous situations
[Music]
when I came back to Cameron I was in
charge of policing here and there was a
very tragic event with Isabel to be but
the end result was we had a death as a
result of an interaction with a grizzly
bear and a person and that kind of
crystallized people’s thoughts into how
do we solve this but we had a lot of
really good people who had people with
fire in her belly interested in
conservation people with money for
development people with government for
power we have really the makings of a
very good group of people to solve a
problem and that’s how wild smart
evolved who here has heard of wild smart
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 wild smart in 2016 I’ll probably
have completed 80 to 95 presentations
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 we should 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
you know anything about them and it’s
why we should try to maintain that
current
existence of Wallace 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 throw it on their
cannon bear spray along with their
helmet part of their makeup this is how
they go about living and they’re
creating in the valley and that’s a
culture and that’s that’s the future
[Music]
[Music]
you
[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 can how they move
through the valley you know an example
of that would be many years ago
following a radio called a grizzly bear
into the bull Valley here and I remember
sitting at a at a corner waiting for her
to pop out and to try to keep her from
entering into a development and I
remember her popping out onto the edge
of the forest and going up 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 and I just looked at
her it was like she was thinking oh my
gosh what happened what do I do now
and I think it was a great example of
how wildlife were really struggling at
times to 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 cameroon there was
open pit garbage dumps and bears
routinely wandered through town seeking
out garbage that people left that
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 fall to 747 because it was the
largest bear that we had a record in
Banff are going at night to feed on
garbage from the caboose restaurant
leftover steak bones and steaks and
chickens and chicken bones
they’re 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
were serious injured one person died and
everybody pretty well agreed garbage and
grizzly bears or garbage and black bears
shouldn’t mix
dangerous mist and then Parks Canada
it’s a million or two million to clean
up the food garbage and they did them we
fast forward out to the early 90s
Kenmore had been discovered the town had
gone from four thousand residents to
almost 10,000 residents there was a
group of citizens here in Kenmore that
were really concerned that was trying to
force Town Council to do something about
bears and garbage and camel 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 in the town and
rewarding them once that connection was
clearly made then it was how do we
change what we thought was really
fascinating is it 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 in 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 designed the interest
the collaboration really worked
you know us included figured that once
we got the garbage problem solved but
maybe that was going to be the end of it
and then we had bird feeders and you’ve
got a bird feeder bylaw put in and that
negate the bird feeder issue but eras
are always searching for food and when
one thing becomes unavailable they moved
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 attracted but it’s
right on a busy is a trail there are
certain areas where we’re just not going
to encourage wildlife to be in those
areas they’re they’re residential areas
and 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 ie biking
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 Kenmore was a pretty sleepy little
resource town and then the Winter
Olympics happened here and suddenly
Kenmore became a kind of a destination
and development pressure started to grow
and that was the time when the whole
issue of wildlife corridors started to
get talked about and 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
in and around the town of Cameron are
already taken up by development all
these discussions which we’re just
starting in can work around wildlife
quarters and connectivity
we’re happening at a time when they’re
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 and so if we
kind of zoom out from Canmore and look
at that it’s you know
Kanwar is actually important in that
it’s it’s a potential connection between
BAFF National Park and kananaskis
country it’s also as you zoom out even
more it lights up as a really important
north-south connection and a much
broader reserve network that stretches
over 3,400 kilometers from Yellowstone
National
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 20 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’s
literally been over a hundred thousand
documented wildlife crossings of these
structures they are a key part of the
wildlife quarter network in the bull
Valley this is like the petri dish of
wildlife corridor science because what’s
so good 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 you know
cohabiting in areas where there’s a lot
of human activity is a real real
challenge
[Music]
the town of Kenmore 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 percent of
them are rec reading with a dog and of
those people rec reading with a dog
about 60% of them have the 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 recreative based
on wildlife sensitivities so that people
can go in and look and see what trails
that 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 camera 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 is really that we’re
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
recreation hours and 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 a lights at night at a time that
wildlife feels sick that they should be
secure then you’re having a major impact
it’s 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
where’s 148
throughout can’t ask his country we have
what we call red zones and we have map
so people understand what those are and
we try and make theirs understand what
those are so we just do not tolerate
bears within within those red zones or
no-go zones and right now she’s and
she’s in a good spot other than there’s
a lot of recreationalists around her
our aversive conditioning program works
with individual bears like like 148 here
and and we try and teach her
individually where she can and can’t go
and monitor for her behavior it looks
like he might have moved a little bit
back on front of us this is awesome for
bears but you know I’ve seen bears eat
20 salmon a day and to get the
equivalent varies it would probably do
take them weeks and weeks and weeks of
very feeding they are so focused they’re
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 and 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 don’t they
just want to carry on doing what they’re
doing and all when when they’re
surprised by people it’s that’s not a
good situation for them stay away from
very booking another thing we’ve been
hit by pokeyman going down to the park
so there’s people walking around the
trails with their life with their
smartphones looking for Pokemon for pika
juice not looking for grizzly bears
it’s exciting we can get her through the
next year or two into Norman I’m mature
adult they tend to figure that a little
better but right now she’s that teenager
who’s run away from her mother I know
maybe she’ll cross the line make some
mistakes and that’s why we’re sitting
here honor him 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 berries this is
awesome because this is that habitat
enhancement blocked we did for ungulates
but you can see the berries in here
really nice out-of-the-way spot and the
best part is there’s no people oh yeah
you guys have bear spray this should all
be curry there’s a grizzly bear but uh
50 yards away from me right now and
should be making noise – is she going
yeah yeah so what the smart people do
with the number of sightings and
everything else we’re seeing here
yeah it just we’re getting multiple
sightings absolutely crazy data
conservation officers are working
overtime it’s it’s a great berry crop
and it’s a great great news for the
Bears the responsibility falls on people
to behave accordingly and responsibly
okay so we’re we’re doing a major media
blitz campaign going to social media we
have people at trailhead sense
absolutely crazy there’s I think eight
or nine warnings close to 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 gonna 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 a bear spray it’s worth 30 bucks and
traveling 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
at the end of the day is it really that
hard
here we have this wonderful opportunity
to living amongst wildlife and trying to
find this balance where we can do it
whatever it is we need to do to get
through our daily lives but we also have
the opportunity to to know that there is
these animals in the same Valley as us
where we live in recreation work I
suspect the elk are there one for the
green grass and tooth of the security
that that field is offering isn’t it
sounds like we’ve been in contact with
each school in the valley here and have
developed wildlife protocols for the
school they are probably kind of
surprised and alarmed by the fact that
there’s 60 elk in the school yard but I
bet you by the second or third day it’s
oh there’s the elk it becomes part of
their routine and I suspect the elk are
adapting as well and therein 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 play
on elk
you know there’s potentially really
dangerous situations
[Music]
when I came back to Cameron I was in
charge of policing here and there was a
very tragic event with Isabel to be but
the end result was we had a death as a
result of an interaction with a grizzly
bear and a person and that kind of
crystallized people’s thoughts into how
do we solve this but we had a lot of
really good people who had people with
fire in her belly interested in
conservation people with money for
development people with government for
power we have really the makings of a
very good group of people to solve a
problem and that’s how wild smart
evolved who here has heard of wild smart
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 wild smart in 2016 I’ll probably
have completed 80 to 95 presentations
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 we should 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
you know anything about them and it’s
why we should try to maintain that
current
existence of Wallace 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 throw it on their
cannon bear spray along with their
helmet part of their makeup this is how
they go about living and they’re
creating in the valley and that’s a
culture and that’s that’s the future
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you
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