Our province is home to awe-inspiring wildlife, including Nakoda, the incredibly rare white grizzly bear famous for her acrobatic skills and appetite for dandelions (see video here).
Nakoda always makes headlines when spotted, but her first appearance this season broke the internet.
For the first time, Nakoda was seen with two newborns, a pair of brown-coloured grizzly cubs.
The cubs didn’t inherit their mom’s dazzling white coat, but they definitely got her appetite.
Last month, the happy family headed to the front country on the Trans Canada Highway in Yoho National Park to feast on dandelions and other greens.
To ensure the safety of Nakoda and her cubs, Parks Canada implemented a no-stopping zone and a 70-kilometre speed limit.
There is also a wildlife fence along the highway to stop wildlife from getting on the busy road.
Wildlife photographer John E. Marriott praised the agency for taking action to protect Nakoda and her cubs but still had concerns.
“I hope they are able to also provide a Parks Canada escort at all times she’s near the road from dawn to dusk and even at night, if at all possible, and I also hope that the RCMP is able to regularly patrol the no-stopping and 70-km/h zones,” Marriott told Western Wheel.
Everyone’s worst nightmare came true last week when Nakoda’s two cubs were struck and killed on the highway.
At 5:15 AM on June 7, Parks Canada responded to a report that two cubs had been struck by a vehicle at the Lake O’Hara turnoff.
When wildlife management staff arrived, the two cubs were dead. Nakoda was also on the highway, but she was unharmed.
Too Smart For Her Own Good
Parks Canada had been monitoring the bear family after receiving a report of a fence intrusion.
Staff promptly patched the fence to prevent Nakoda and her cubs from using it to reach the highway.
How did the grizzly family make it to the highway if the fence was patched? Around this time last year, Nakoda showed off her impressive acrobatics skills.
She easily climbed over wildlife fences along the Trans Canada Highway to feast on delectable dandelions.
Nakoda’s acrobats caused Parks Canada to put up 15 kilometres of electric wiring along the wildlife fence.
Trying to climb the wired fences would give Nakoda a very unpleasant shock. However, Nakoda is just as cunning as she is nimble.
According to the agency, Nakoda found a few spots only one foot wide where the fence wasn’t electrified.
“We think these animals can sense when a wire is electrified, so we don’t know if she’d just gone around and found these little weaknesses,” Saundi Stevens, a wildlife management specialist for Lake Louise, Yoho, and Kootenay field unit, told Rocky Mountain Outlook.
Nakoda and her cubs climbed these dead zones to bypass the fence and reach the highway.
Parks Canada knows how Nakoda and her cubs got past the fence, but the agency still doesn’t know why they wanted to be on the more dangerous side since there are dandelions on both.
There’s No Place Like Home
In 2022, Nakoda was fitted with a GPS collar that tells Parks Canada where she is and when she is too close to the highway.
That year, Nakoda was relocated three times away from the highway, but she kept returning. Since then, Parks Canada has given up on the idea of relocation.
Stevens thinks snow cover in the mountains and food scarcity are pushing Nakoda to return to the area.
Nakoda’s home range is in Yoho National Park, known for its many peaks and beautiful trails. Most of the park’s higher elevation areas remain covered in snow until late June.
Grizzly bears are often found on higher elevation slopes, meaning Nakoda’s range in Yoho National Park is likely still covered in snow.
Snow cover pushes grizzly bears to lower elevations where prey and vegetation are more abundant.
“There’s a lot of energetic demands of feeding cubs, so there probably wasn’t a lot for her to eat up there, and she just came back to what she knows,” explained Stevens.
Mature grizzly bears eat up to 90 pounds of food per day. Nakoda may have been especially stressed trying to feed herself and her cubs. Can you blame her in this economy?
To solve her family’s food woes, Nakoda returned to an area where she knew there was plenty of food: the Trans Canada Highway.
A Streak Of Bad Luck
Less than 12 hours after her cubs were struck and killed near the Lake O’Hara turnoff, Nakoda was also struck by a vehicle around 4 PM on June 6.
Even after losing her cubs, Nakoda climbed the wildlife fence to eat dandelions. Parks Canada officials believe a passing train spooked her, causing her to run into oncoming traffic.
The first vehicle swerved and avoided Nakoda, but the second vehicle was not so lucky. The woman who hit Nakoda was unharmed but very distraught about the collision.
“(Nakoda) was hit quite hard, but she was walking with a bit of a limp. She’s not moving a lot, but she’s alive,” said Stevens.
Thankfully, Parks Canada staff were already on site when Nakoda was struck. The crew was working to fix gaps in the wildlife fence and install fibreglass poles that are harder to climb.
When Nakoda was hit, staff quickly stopped traffic and helped Nakoda get to the safe side of the wildlife fence.
Nakoda was witnessed climbing over the fence and running into the forest, moving with a slight limp.
It was hoped she would recover from her injuries.
She was found dead on Saturday, June 8, two days after being struck by the vehicle in the 90-kilometer-per-hour fenced zone between the Lake O’Hara turnoff and Wapta Lake. It is believed she died the day before, based on a mortality signal from her GPS tracking collar.
One Step Forward, Two Steps Back
According to the Yellowstone to Yukon Conservation Initiative (Y2Y), 22,000 cars use the Trans Canada Highway daily.
The number of vehicles using the highway grows to over 30,000 daily in the summer when tourists start flocking to the Rocky Mountains.
The Trans Canada Highway cuts through important wildlife habitats. More cars using the highway means more wildlife collisions.
In Banff National Park, overpasses, underpasses, and wildlife fencing along the highway have helped reduce wildlife-vehicle collisions by over 80 percent for elk and 90 percent for deer.
The effectiveness of structures like wildlife fencing is offset by the impact climate change is having on animals.
According to the University of Lethbridge, Alberta’s winters are ten days shorter than they were almost 75 years ago.
Shorter winters and longer summers caused by climate change are causing grizzlies to enter their dens later and leave them sooner, resulting in more encounters between humans and grizzlies.
As grizzlies like Nakoda continue to rely on the Trans Canada Highway as a food source, we could see more wildlife-vehicle collisions in the future.
The Alberta government set aside $15 million over three years to go toward projects that reduce wildlife-vehicle collisions.
One of the most recent projects is a wildlife overpass and 12 kilometres of fencing, but the $17.5 million project was delayed due to safety issues.
John Marriott, a prominent Canmore-based wildlife photographer, said Nakoda is now the sixth breeding female grizzly bear to die in the Lake Louise, Yoho, Kootenay area in the past four years.
Marriott told the Rocky Mountain Outlook, “This is supposed to be a grizzly bear stronghold, one of three main sub-populations in Banff National Park,” he said. “Instead, bears can barely stay alive for a few years due to our obsession with having to get from A to B quickly and our insatiable desire to love our parks to death.”
“Do we really need more hotels in Banff and Canmore and Jasper and Whistler and Gardiner and Yosemite, or is what we really need more protected areas, more wildlife, more responsibility and consequences for our actions?” he said.
As the human footprint increases, we need more infrastructure to protect our province’s incredible wildlife. The wildlife-vehicle collision involving Nakoda is a wake-up call.
Marriott summarized “Poor Nakoda and her little cubs were the future of Banff’s grizzly bears, and guess what? That future looks terrible right now. Time for a summit to figure out what we do next, because the status quo is not working.”
