Transcript
Speaker: Hello and welcome to today's episode of Red Eye. I'm Jane Williams.
Speaker: On March 6th, MLA Adam Olsen retable the Bear Den Protection Bill in the BC Legislature for the third time. Olsen has been pushing for legal changes since October 2022, but has yet to have his Private Members Bill heard. For decades, environmentalists and First Nations have been advocating for an amendment to the Wildlife Protection Act to include Bear Dens.
Speaker: I'm joined today by Mark Worthing. He is Campaigns and Program Director at the Wheat Nacula Foundation, which is based in coastal British Columbia. Hello, Mark. Hi, how are you? I'm good, thanks. Now, we all know that bears hibernate, but probably many people haven't really thought about where they go to do that. Where do bears spend the winter in a province like BC?
Speaker: Yeah, well, you know, there's 14 biogeoclimatic zones in British Columbia, very biodiverse, most biodiverse and ecologically diverse province in so -called Canada. And so the answer to that is also quite diverse.
Speaker: grizzly bears, black bears, inland grizzly bears, coastal grizzly bears, inland black bears, and coastal black bears often have different types of habitat they look for or need when it comes to adequate den sites. And so I'm most familiar with black bears on the coast. But yeah, like you'll see, so for grizzly bears often in the winter, they'll head up and they'll actually dig their den sites right into the hillside in the sub alpine or the alpine often.
Speaker: And then on the coast typically what you'll see for grizzly bears but more so with black bears is in trees and of course bears are pretty big animals and so they typically need pretty big trees. You'll find black bears will either dig into the root ball of a big cedar tree for example or
Speaker: they'll climb up into an opening, maybe an old branch has rotted or pulled out of an old growth cedar and they'll find a den opening and an arboreal entrance and then climb into the center of a tree essentially. They do the Berenstain Bears maneuver or a Winnie the Pooh right into a tree. And so big old trees is critical then.
Speaker: Absolutely. Yeah, you need a tree with a big enough diameter that a bear could feasibly fit into and comfortably den in and often give birth and raise cubs for the first part of their life, all within the center of a large diameter tree. So
Speaker: typically they're old growth dependent type characteristics. On the coast, often cedar as well, large diameter old growth cedars, one of their growth patterns just naturally is that the core will rot out a little bit and hollow out and it'll be solid partway up the tree. But down at the base, there's typically a hollow in the center of old growth cedar trees, red and yellow alike.
Speaker: And so it's that characteristic that bears are often looking for to create and steward their den sites. And would they be typically using the same den site more than once or different bears would use the same den site? Yeah, that's often the case. And, you know, part of why we're calling for bear den protections, both
Speaker: in terms of indigenous legal orders on the land and also in terms of colonial legislative mechanisms is because in a lot of areas logging and forestry development has reduced the opportunities for den sites for bears. So they're having to use the same dead sites or travel further across the land to find suitable trees for new den sites. So yes, often black bears will use the same
Speaker: den site over and over again for years on end. Sometimes they'll rotate and change. Sometimes the females will have different types of den sites that they look for that are a little more like a proper fortress, a little more defendable. And then the males might have different sites that they habituate and kind of go back to year on year that are different as well. But they will use den sites over and over.
Speaker: Why is it so important for that den site to be a secure site? There are cases of predation even from other bears. Wolves, cougars, I mean cubs are an easy target so it's kind of a more urgent and important case for females with cubs to make sure that that site is defendable.
Speaker: And then also just to have the right characteristics in order to safely be there for the winter. They need a dry enclosure so the tree can't be cracked or allow rain or leakage in or snow. Oftentimes the den entrance will be covered in snow for a large part of the year, especially obviously in northern BC.
Speaker: And so it's pretty critical that the kind of physical attributes of the den are suitable and make sure that it's sort of like a safe comfortable space again, especially for females and pregnant females.
Speaker: They'll do their own carpentry even on the inside, so they'll dig into the hollow of a tree and you'll see lots of claw marks and scraping where they'll scrape the inside of the hollow of the tree and then pull in ferns and salal and basically make a nest. It looks like a really big giant bird nest kind of thing. That's one way you can confirm if it is in fact a bear den. You look at a hollow tree and if someone's brought in a whole bunch of bedding to make a cute little nest in there, then chances are that's probably a bear.
Speaker: And is it possible for bears to den in second growth? Because obviously we have a lot of second growth in BC. Yeah, most of BC is managed second and third growth forests, unfortunately. In some occasions, yes, they can find suitable den sites, but it's much less likely, much harder, and far more insecure.
Speaker: sort of depends on the forestry management practices there's not a lot of places where cedar has grown to be more than two three four hundred years old you need that kind of old growth characteristic in order for good den sites but it's not unheard of for black bears to find opportunities or maybe there's some blow down or a nice cavern can be made and they can get a little more creative with
Speaker: the carpentry and the the build work that they do and so it's not unheard of but this is largely the problem the recruitment of new old growth forest if you want to call it that some some people say there's only one old growth forest you can't.
Speaker: create an old growth ecosystem. But in some places, if you're managing for forest attributes that will come back in 200 years, then ostensibly in 200 years, they could probably find a suitable den site. But that's the problem is this time in between now and 200 years when those big trees hopefully come back.
Speaker: Now, I know that bear dens are protected in Haida Gwaii and also in the Great Bear Rainforest. Why not elsewhere in the province?
Speaker: Yeah, this is our question as well. It's preferential treatment. If a bear deserves healthy habitat in one part of the province, why wouldn't they deserve it in another part of the province? That's one of the reasons why we think it's important to stabilize protection for bear habitat all across the province. And that's one of the reasons why we've focused on the Wildlife Act because on Haida Gwaii and
Speaker: the Great Bear Rainforest Landscape Order. That's a landscape order level of protection. It's based on those regions, but the Wildlife Act would pertain to everywhere in British Columbia, so inclusive of private property and crown, so -called crown land, and mandate it. It would be an offense to disturb, destroy, or harm a bear den much the same way it would be if you
Speaker: logged an eagle nest or a, you know, wrecked a beaver den or something like that. It's essentially making a necessary wildlife feature of the den. And that should be the case in the Kootenays, in the Peace, on Vancouver Island, everywhere. It's a bit of an animal welfare issue. We'd like to see them taken care of and we'd like to uphold our responsibilities to be good neighbors and share the land well with carnivores.
Speaker: Does a logging company right now have any legal responsibility if they find a bear den in an area that they're about to log?
Speaker: No. Well, in the two landscape orders of Haida Gwaii and the Great Bear, yes. But everywhere else in the province, including Vancouver Island and the south coast and northern BC, central interior, there's no legal requirements. Many companies will do their own makeshift voluntary policies, but they're not legal requirements. They're just good practice for any forester or landscape manager to note different features on the landscape.
Speaker: But in our experience, that's not sufficient. It's too much flexibility for the logging company to sort of weasel their way out of having to protect bear dens, and we feel it's long overdue for bears to have the adequate protection they deserve. If bear dens are protected in legislation in the Wildlife Act, what other benefits would flow from that?
Speaker: Well, I mean, bears are pretty far up the food chain and they are a cultural and keystone species. So where we can protect these large animals, charismatic megafauna as often they're referred to, we see knock -on benefits that go down the tropic ecological levels. We'll see not only
Speaker: protections for old growth and Michael Reisel networks and soil carbon and old growth and biodiversity that is all tied up within those same kind of ecological features that bears need. So not only that, but also it will help reduce bear human conflict around a lot of communities. There's been a lot of cases where conservation officers are having to put bears down.
Speaker: because they're getting into garbage or getting habituated around orchards or in town near suburban or urban areas. So our hope is that if we can kind of stabilize their access to their own habitats where they can move freely on the landscape that then they wouldn't have to get pushed out and displaced from their own habitats and have to roam further and you know end up on the highways or near the dump or wherever.
Speaker: And then of course, one of the central pieces here that's the most important for the work we do is restoring some of the responsibilities and cultural protocols that pertain to bears are in Kwokwakiwa territory, Gala or Tla 'i, the grizzly bear and the black bear. There's huge kinship ties. There's a history since time immemorial of
Speaker: cohabitating on the land base with bears. So we very much see this as part of a sacred responsibility to restore good relations with non -human kin and make sure that we're upholding all our relations in the way that we share and coexist on the land. I guess it would also help the province move towards that 30 by 30 target, 30 % protected by 2030.
Speaker: Absolutely. I think we're seeing a lot of kind of 10 ,000 foot level approaches to getting to 30 by 30 when in reality there's a lot of low hanging policy fruit here that can
Speaker: get us there quicker and so we'd like to see the province with the support of the federal government and of course all the nations of whom it's their territory just kind of do this you know like when I talk about bear dance people are surprised it's even an issue they're like wait what that's there's no
Speaker: legal mechanism to protect bear dens and that's how we feel. We think it should just happen swiftly. We shouldn't have to push for this. It should be obvious to anyone that understands ecology and conservation policy. If you protected bear dens today, you could probably add a lot to that 30 % metric overnight. So how can people support Adam Olson's private members bill?
Speaker: You can write to the ministers, so that would be the Forest Minister and also the Lands Minister, so Nathan Cullen. MLA Minister Nathan Cullen would be the one where this wildlife file would fall under. There's a group of people, some specialists, some government workers that coordinate
Speaker: on the Together for Wildlife panel. You can reach out to them and encourage this to be prioritized in terms of the amendments that are being discussed for the Wildlife Act. But fundamentally, I think it's probably something EB needs to hear about, and it's part of the old growth dialogue. The government has been delaying and delaying and delaying, taking action on old growth, sort of nibbling around the edges, doing a little bit here and there, but not actually implementing
Speaker: all of the recommendations of the old growth strategic review and the technical advisory panels, contributions and advice to government. So anything that encourages the province to actually follow through and protect old growth and stop this talk and log politics that we've become all too familiar with in BC. Well, thanks so much for talking with me today, Mark. Okay, I appreciate it.
Speaker: I've been speaking with Mark Worthing. He's Campaigns and Programs Director at the Whitney Kiolaf Foundation. The Red Eye Collective is based in Vancouver. You can check us out at coopradio .org slash redeye.
