Road to Recovery

A scientist finds that closing roads helps grizzly bears make a comeback.

KAR PHOTOGRAPHY/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO  


Mighty grizzly bears weigh up to 800 pounds. When they stand on their hind legs, they tower nearly 10 feet tall. The massive mammals once roamed most of the western half of North America (see Grizzly Bear Range map). It would seem that nothing could harm these powerful animals. But as people began settling in these regions in the mid-1800s, grizzlies were driven out.

Today scientists are helping grizzly populations bounce back. Clayton Lamb is a scientist at the University of Alberta in Canada. He’s studying  grizzly bears in the Monashee Mountains in British Columbia.

In 1997, conservationists shut roads that were no longer being used by logging companies in the area. They hoped it would help grizzlies thrive.

Nearly 20 years later, Lamb and his team decided to find out if that work paid off. They followed these steps of the scientific process to find out.

1. Identify the Problem

Bears are often scared off from areas where people make a lot of noise—especially from roads with noisy vehicles that could hit and kill the bears. People closed some of the roads, hoping that bears would move back to their habitat once people weren’t around to bother them.

Lamb wondered: Are more bears living in the areas where roads had been shut down? He started designing a plan to find out.

2. Design a Study

Clayton Lamb

IDENTIFYING BEARS: Scientists collected and tested samples of fur to find out how many bears live in a region of Canada.

To answer his question, Lamb had to get creative. It’s not easy to identify individual bears. To count the bears, he and his team hiked into the forest. At different sites, they created a fence made of barbed wire. Behind the fence, they dumped rotten cow blood. Since bears often eat dead animals, Lamb hoped they would come to investigate. “It was nasty, but it worked!” says Lamb.

As the bears ducked under the barbed wire, tufts of hair would get caught. The scientists collected the hair and sent the samples to a lab. The lab checked the DNA of each sample to find out how many individual bears had visited.

3. Draw Conclusions

Lamb identified about 90 grizzly bears in the region. In places where roads had been shut, there were about 27 percent more bears than in areas with open roads. That answered Lamb’s question! Closing roads appears to help grizzlies.

4. Apply the Science

Lamb communicated the results of his study. Now conservationists are working to close more roads in the Monashee Mountains. Lamb says this doesn’t mean people need to stop hiking and camping. The region still has a lot of roads.

“It’s a compromise,” says Lamb. “Taking back a little space for the bears can make a big difference.”

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