Have a grizzly Christmas

After a hard year, most grizzly bears have decided to pack it in and find a den for the winter. If the females are fat enough, the blastocycsts (fertilized eggs) that have been waiting around all summer will fasten to the uterus wall and voila, one to three cubs will be born in the den. These tiny, blind babes will nurse until spring, when they will be big enough to exit the den and scour the landscape for food with their mothers: winter-killed elk, leftover berries, roadkill, and hedysarum roots.

But don't count on a bumper crop of bear cubs next year. A berry crop failure through most of the Rocky Mountain West left bears starving. This drove them into communities and backyards in search of whatever they could find, which led to record numbers of human-bear conflicts and grizzly bear deaths in the Yellowstone and Glacier areas of the U.S. While the numbers aren't available in Alberta yet (democracy works a might slower north of The Border), we'll likely see a similar pattern here. (Hopefully, this will be somewhat compensated by fewer bears killed in the hunt, which was cut-back this year.) In any event, less food means skinnier bears which inevitably means fewer cubs, which is not what the struggling Alberta population needs.

In other news, the process to develop a recovery plan for a species the government has so far refused to recognize as threatened continues. A draft version of Alberta's Grizzly Bear Recovery Plan is sitting on Dave Coutts's, the new SRD minister, desk as I type this. Coutts is a vast improvement over Mike Cardinal, the former SRD minister who didn't have much time for grizzly bears in Alberta. Coutt's will have to decide what to do with the draft recovery plan (approve it or ditch it) before the bears come out of their dens in the spring.