THE BEAR THAT DISAPPEARS
Searching for the legendary and mysterious glacier bears of northwestern Canada
SSOARING MOUNTAINS festooned with glaciers. Hillsides blanketed with wildflowers. A lake filled with blue-white icebergs. River edges tattooed with the tracks of bear, moose, wolf and wolverine. Of all the very good reasons to take a trip down the Tatshenshini and Alsek rivers, which run from Yukon through British Columbia and Alaska to the Pacific Coast, surely the most compelling is the chance to see one of the rarest animals on Earth. It’s a bear so uncommon, and about which so little scientific knowledge exists, that researchers are only now unravelling the mysteries surrounding it. Glacier bears, also known as blue bears, are a rare colour phase of black bear. The bear’s striking pelage ranges in colour from silvery blue-grey to charcoal-grey to black with silvery tips. Even the colour of an individual glacier bear can vary, with lighter tones on the bear’s back and shoulders and dark hair on the legs and belly. They live in a remote patch of wilderness that includes the extreme northwestern tip of British Columbia, southwestern Yukon and the southeastern coast of Alaska from Juneau to Yakutat. Within this exceptionally rugged terrain of icefields, fiords and the towering St. Elias Mountains, the Tatshenshini and Alsek rivers cut important corridors through the coastal mountain ranges, allowing plant and animal migration from coast to interior. Some bear experts believe that glacier bears, most commonly observed in Alaska, use the Tatshenshini-alsek river valley to range inland from the coast. Canadian River Expeditions runs rafting trips through much of the region, 255 kilometres down the Tatshenshini River from Dalton Post, Yukon, through British Columbia’s Tatshenshini-alsek Provincial Park to Dry Bay, Alaska. But,
Ann Britton Campbell (@Dearanntravels) has written for Western Living, onboard and Westjet magazines, The Georgia Straight newspaper and fodors.com.
admits t he company’s owner Neil Hartling, “I’ve not seen a glacier bear in my 25 years on the river.” Nor have four other experienced area guides. YUKON-BASED guide-outfitter Lance Goodwin is one of the fortunate ones. He recounts his most memorable sighting — almost two decades ago — like it was yesterday. “I was out on a river bar later in the evening. It was lightly raining and I was listening to the birds singing. Out of the bush walked a glacier bear. It was an older male, and he was all scarred up. He came within metres of me.” Goodwin first became interested in the bears in 1971 when his father, also a guide-outfitter, guided a client who shot one. “At that time, it was legal in B.C. to shoot them because no one knew anything about them,” says Goodwin. “It was just another black bear.” There is still no evidence, beyond their unusual colour, that the physical characteristics or behaviours of the gla- cier bear differ from their black-coloured cousins, but based on colour alone, it’s now illegal to kill a glacier bear in British Columbia. It remains legal in Yukon and in Alaska, except in Glacier Bay National Park. The decision to protect glacier bears in B.C. was made with scant data. There are only two official records of the bears in the province — a skull kept in a provincial Ministry of Environment and Climate Change office in Victoria and a bear that, due to a conflict with people, was shot in Tatshenshini-alsek Provincial Park and then mounted in Atlin, B.C. While Environment Yukon mentions the glacier pelage in the territory in materials on black bears and navigating bear country, government officials don’t have any formal record of the bears, although the 1965 book Mammals of British Columbia reports that two specimens “taken in the Yukon at Bennett Lake and Teslin Lake within 10 miles of the British Columbia boundary are catalogued at the National Museum of Canada.” THE EARLIEST KNOWN written reference to glacier bears appears in a July 1882 article titled “Among the Thlinkits [ sic] in Alaska,” in The Century magazine, a turn of the 20th-century-era American history publication. Author C.E.S. Wood describes an expedition into the “Mount St. Elias alps” with Tlingit goat-hunters.
I’ve not seen a glacier bear in my 25 years on the river.’ Nor have four other local guides.
“We found a bear that, so far as I know, is peculiar in this country. It is a beautiful bluish under colour, with the tips of the long hairs silvery white. The traders call it ‘Saint Elias’s silver bear.’ The skins are not common.” The traditional Tlingit name for glacier bears is s’iknóon. Tlingit Elder George Ramos of Yakutat, Alaska, says the word means “a bear that disappears,” in reference to the bear’s small size, elusiveness and ability to blend in with snowfields. In 2010, before ill health affected Ramos’s ability to share his traditional knowledge, he spoke with Tania Lewis, a wildlife biologist leading a glacier bear research project. Ramos told Lewis that, traditionally, Indigenous hunters didn’t hunt the bears and they rarely encountered them. When they did, Elders advised the hunters to “look at them and leave them go,” according to Ramos. Such traditional knowledge is seemingly as scarce as glacier bears themselves. And even where there are stories to tell, it’s common for people to keep mum to help protect the bear. When Yukonbased photographer Sue Thomas happened upon a silver-grey bear feeding on carrion beside the highway between Whitehorse and Haines Junction in 2012, she kept the exact location secret, and didn’t publish her photographs for months. “I was concerned,” she says, “people might come and hunt it.” LEWIS SHARES that protective spirit. In 20 years working in Alaska’s Glacier Bay National Park and Preserve, she has seen five or six glacier bears. “They’re just startling,” she says. “So beautiful.” Lewis is leading the first genetic research project on the glacier bear. She and her collaborators hope to discover the genetic basis for the glacier colouring and its frequency, and determine whether it’s necessary to manage this rare colour phase in order to conserve its genetic diversity. Lewis and colleagues with the Alaska Department of Fish and Game along with a University of Calgary affiliate gathered 284 black bear DNA samples from skin and hair retrieved from trees bears had rubbed against and pieces of footpads from bears killed by hunters and poachers, as well as some nuisance bears shot by park rangers within the glacier bear range. Of those samples, 22 were identified as glacier bear. The preliminary results indicate 10 distinct populations of black bears in southeastern coastal Alaska, four of which contain glacier bears. The location of those four populations, separated from each other by several other black bear populations and icefields adjacent to two fiords, intrigues Lewis. “One possible explanation is an association between glacier bears and large icefields,” she says. “This would suggest a selective advantage for glacier bears in glacial environments.” To take her genetic sleuthing to the next level, Lewis teamed up with geneticist Greg Barsh, a faculty investigator at the Hudsonalpha I nsti t ut e f or
Biotechnology in Huntsville, Ala., and a professor emeritus at Stanford University. “The glacier phenotype really is unusual and not something scientists have seen in other animals,” says Barsh. “It’s not like you see mice that have that glacier phenotype — or humans or dogs or cats.” Without an obvious “candidate gene,” Barsh’s team had to map the entire black bear genome of area bears, and they are now sequencing DNA from glacier bear samples so they can compare the two. They’ve already examined and excluded dozen of genes known to cause albinism or hair colour differences in other species, including the gene responsible for another colour morph of the black bear, the white Kermode or spirit bear of the central British Columbia coast. While the search for the glacier bear gene continues — Lewis and Barsh believe they are close — the duo travelled to an area of Glacier Bay where the bears have traditionally been seen in the summer of 2018 so Barsh could see one of the mysterious bears firsthand. How did they fare? “No luck,” Lewis reports. “But it really is like trying to find a needle in a haystack.” Sometimes not even the world’s most knowledgeable expert can find the bear that disappears.
The glacier phenotype really is unusual and not something scientists have seen in other animals.’
Watch a video of glacier bears in action at cangeo.ca/jf19/glacierbear.