But none has ever been known to take a trip like this grizzly, at least 140 miles as the crow might fly, across empty wilderness and through speeding highway traffic into a corner of the world that hadn't seen its kind for 60 years.
“It's absolutely remarkable,” said Chris Servheen. “I was so shocked that I immediately called the geneticist and said there must be some mistake. But there's no mistake. This bear moved more than twice as far as any other we've seen.”
The last Bitterroot grizzly was spotted in the area in 1946; for six decades, the species was thought to be extinct there. Until Sept. 3, when a Tennessee hunter shot a healthy 400-pound male in northern Idaho, near Kelly Creek, some three miles short of the Montana border west of Superior.
Servheen had long predicted bears might roam back into that region, a place he calls “excellent grizzly bear habitat.”
Still, the shooting was a surprise, there in the 250,000-acre roadless area known as the Great Burn.
Servheen figured the bear had roamed out of the Northern Continental Divide Ecosystem - basically the wild spine running from Glacier Park down through the Bob Marshall - or maybe down from the Cabinet Mountains up near Libby.
To pinpoint the bear's original home, he sent tissue samples off for DNA analysis. Turns out, grizzly populations tend to “clump,” genetically speaking, isolated as they are from each other. And no bears clump more than those of the Selkirk Mountains.
Selkirk bears are few and far between, Servheen said, and have been cut off from other grizzly populations for a very long time. That small population size and island existence has resulted in a “very unique, very tight cluster” of DNA.
And the Bitterroot bear, to Servheen's astonishment, fell smack-dab in the middle of that cluster.
“There's no doubt at all that he came from the Selkirks,” Servheen said.
Which means he crossed U.S. Highway 200 and Interstate 90, and traveled at least 140 air miles, who knows how many ground miles.
Bears that really roam are called, by scientists such as Servheen, “great movers.” The greatest of movers move 60 or 70 miles, he said, not half the distance of the Selkirk bear.
The journey points to the importance of protecting corridors between patches of wild, grizzly highways where bears can ramble to get from place to place. Particularly, Servheen said, it points to the need for linkage zones there on the wild western edge of the Bitterroot Mountains - along the Montana-Idaho line between Highway 200 and Lookout Pass, down I-90 from the pass to St. Regis, up the St. Joe River drainage, up north of the Clearwater country where the grizzly was shot.
Servheen doesn't know a lot of things about this bear - doesn't know the precise route it took from the Selkirks, doesn't know why it left that relatively unpopulated home range, doesn't know why it kept on walking straight through so much perfectly habitable habitat in between.
Servheen wishes he'd had a GPS collar on the grizzly, marking the bear's exact location every hour or so.
“It would have been so amazing to see where he went and how he got there,” Servheen said, “how he crossed I-90.”
But he didn't have a GPS collar on that bear.
What he did have, though, is DNA, a powerful new tool for tracking bears and other wildlife across the countryside. Already, some 800 individual bears have left their genetic fingerprints behind for researchers, scientists who “trap” bear hair by stringing barbed wire in the woods.
A bit of fur tells them which bear it is, to whom it's related, even, as in this case, where it was born. Using isotopes, they can even tell what the bears have been eating.
“We can tell the origin of every bear we have and where it came from,” Servheen said, even if that bear has never been physically trapped and handled.
Last month, DNA pegged the suspect in a series of cabin break-ins up near Condon, a grizzly known as the Albino Basin male. Biologists didn't know it at the time, but they were trapping its hair back in 2004, and again in 2006 when it broke into U.S. Forest Service cabins.
That bear is still on the loose, but the DNA analysis did exonerate several innocent bystanders caught in the same neighborhood.
And if DNA now confirms travel between the Selkirks and the northern Bitterroots, Servheen said, then it can help to pinpoint areas of concern for protection and conservation.
Already, he said, with help from the Montana Department of Transportation, he's monitoring the roadway up near Lookout Pass, using cameras to catch wildlife crossing under bridges.
The remote system's snapped three pictures of wolves, but none of bears. Now, thanks to DNA, Servheen knows he's in the right neighborhood - a neighborhood he's long predicted would prove the “most important area for wildlife anywhere along I-90.”
“Wouldn't it be great if we could get a grizzly bear picture up there?” he said. “I mean, maybe he's not the only bear to make that journey.”
These recent findings, surprising as they are, bolster Servheen's case that researchers should begin actively looking for more grizzly bears in the Bitterroot Mountains. In fact, he suspects that hunt will begin next summer, with more barbed wire traps snagging hairs from unsuspecting grizzlies.
The study would supplement work up near the Continental Divide, where DNA and radio collars are used to track bears and their population trends. That work, in fact, got a boost this week when the Forest Service agreed to provide the funds needed to keep it going another five years.
Who knows what those years might reveal?
“When you're learning about bears,” Servheen said, “you're always learning something new.”
Such as how far they'll walk for no apparent reason.
“We should never assume that we know it all,” he said, “or that we have a fix on what really goes on out there. There's always another surprise.”
Reporter Michael Jamison can be reached at 1-800-366-7186 or at mjamison@missoulian.com
|
 |
 |
Add your comment now! Write your comment in the form below.
(Email address is for verification only. If you'd like to email a story, look for the link above)