10 YEARS OF BEARING IT
Boo the grizzly, a decade after being placed in a wildlife refuge, is offering insights on the species
GOLDEN, B.C. — For three days in 2010, Boo the bear stayed in the same spot.
He didn’t walk around his 10-hectare enclosure, didn’t go for a swim in one of his many watering holes and didn’t eat any bright yellow dandelions — some of his usual daily activities at Kicking Horse Mountain Resort.
“He wasn’t moving from that area,” recalls Ross Prather, manager of the grizzly bear refuge, during a recent tour. “The next day, he wasn’t moving from that area all day. What’s up? Is Boo sick?”
Boo, who’s now 11 and weighs about 275 kilograms, doesn’t normally sit still for extended periods. In fact, he’s usually quite active — even escaping during mating season several times since he arrived at the refuge.
He arrived in July 2003 — exactly a decade ago — after his mother was shot by a poacher.
“He’s a rescue, a humanitarian effort,” says Steve Paccagnan, president and chief executive at Kicking Horse, which built the enclosure to provide a home for Boo and his now-deceased brother, Cari, so named after the Cariboo Mountains where they were found as orphaned cubs.
It’s considered an education, conservation and research facility — giving staff an opportunity to observe the behaviour and life skill development of a grizzly bear as it grows in a natural setting.
They say the cubs would have died left alone in the wild, but some suggest they don’t like to see any animal behind a fence.
“I hate zoos,” says Charlie Russell, a renowned expert who studied bears in Russia for a decade and has since visited Boo at Kicking Horse. “I just don’t like bears in cages.
“That’s probably as nice a cage as possible.”
Indeed, the enclosure — the largest of any known grizzly bear refuge — provides opportunities for Boo to explore different habitats and forage for food.
In the 2010 case, Boo showed his wild side.
“We had a group up here and we were watching him,” says Prather. “All of a sudden he was digging and what do we see but four moose legs.”
Resort staff immediately thought there was a moosesized hole in the wire fence around Boo’s enclosure. There wasn’t, but the scuff marks on the outside of the electric fence led staff to believe a moose crashed through it trying to avoid being caught by a cougar or a wolf. The fence snapped back into place.
Little did the moose know that another predator was waiting on the other side.
Prather says the moose was likely injured crashing through the fence, and Boo managed to track it down.
“We believe the hunting instinct is that, it’s instinctive, they are born with it,” he says, noting that seeking out other food appears to be a learned behaviour.
Through trial and error, Boo learned which plants he should and shouldn’t eat by foraging in his enclosure.
It’s not enough to sustain him, though, and staff do add to his weekly diet.
“We use the term supplement rather than feeding because we don’t want to feed him,” Prather explains. “We don’t want him to come to think of us as a source of food and start relying on us.
“So we are always doing it in a different location and different times of the day.”
Sometimes food even falls from the sky.
“When the gondola is running during the regular season, we sometimes drop supplements out of the gondola so it’s in the centre of his habitat as well, rather than just on the perimeter,” says Prather, noting it’s usually a roadkill deer scooped up off the highway or a salmon from the nearby fish hatchery.
He also gets lettuce, carrots and yams.
“A high percentage of his supplements are fruits and veggies to match the fact that in the wild, a grizzly bear’s diet is 80 per cent fruits and veggies and only 20 per cent protein,” he says. “The protein component he gets in the habitat are mice and ground squirrels and grouse. I’ve seen him bat grouse out of the air if they fly too close to him.
“And even smaller things — ants and other insects. He’ll rip apart logs to get at those.”
Dr. Ken Macquisten, a veterinarian who checks on Boo regularly, says he’s a healthy bear living a good life.
“The only thing he suffers from is loneliness from time to time,” says Macquisten, pointing to his escapes from the enclosure during mating season as evidence.
Since he came to the enclosure, Boo has escaped several times in two different years.
In June 2006, he tunnelled beneath an electric fence. A grizzly was returned to the enclosure, but resort officials said at the time that they never confirmed it was Boo.
Eighteen days later, the grizzly in the enclosure broke out — this
The only thing he suffers from is loneliness from time to time DR. KEN MACQUISTEN
time smashing his way through a steel door, two electric fences and a 3.6-metre fence reinforced with 60 centimetres of steel sheet beneath the ground.
Boo then came back on his own in early July.
He also escaped twice in 2011 when, despite being neutered, it’s believed he caught the scent of a female grizzly.
Escapes aside, Macquisten says the size of his enclosure gives him every chance at a natural life.
“The area includes waterfalls and creeks and ponds and sloughs and forests and hills,” he says. “It’s got all kinds of natural forest — I don’t think he ever runs out of things to do there.”
Macquisten says the entire team has taken a hands-off approach to Boo’s care. As a result, officials say they’ve learned a lot about grizzly bears by studying Boo — including whether it’s possible to take an orphaned grizzly bear cub and help it develop enough survival skills so it could eventually be released into the wild.
“We believe, yes, they can because we’ve seen Boo develop a lot of skill,” says Prather, while noting it’s too late for Boo to go back into the wild because he’s too habituated by being exposed to humans too often.
Instead, the facility focuses on using Boo to educate the public about grizzly bears through its interpretive tours.
“A lot of people arrive here and they have no idea what a grizzly bear refuge is all about,” says Prather, noting they often ask whether it’s a zoo. “They come up and they have the opportunity to view a grizzly bear that is much closer to being a wild bear than a zoo bear.
“It’s an opportunity for people to view a wild grizzly bear going about his routine just like a wild bear would, but closely and safely.”