Eco-tourism did not make these B.C. grizzly bears more prone to human conflict, study finds

Originally published by Vancouver is Awesome on January 14, 2025

By Stefan Labbé

How do you track grizzly bears in the dense forests of British Columbia’s Coast Mountains? Move slowly. Be vigilant. Listen. 

“Usually, it’s the smell,” added Kate Field. “Wet fur. Salmon carcasses on the bank.”

A PhD candidate at the University of Victoria’s Applied Conservation Science Laboratory, between 2019 and 2021, Field lived out of camper van surrounded by electric fencing high up in the Bella Coola Valley. 

Here lush forests and rivers dense with spawning salmon offer rich fishing grounds for grizzlies — so rich, it has become popular among eco-tourism operators. 

But move 40 kilometres downstream and you start running into a number of settlements. The situation has led to a collision between humans and grizzlies in a conflict that outranks any other region in the province, according to one study.

“The biggest hot spot by far is the Bella Coola Valley,” said Chris Darimont, a UVic researcher who oversaw the 2016 research. “It kind of glows red.” 

'Some people don't make space for bears'

Field first arrived in the valley with the intention of completing a multi-year study investigating how eco-tourism was affecting the bears. But the more she heard from local residents, the more she realized some people believed eco-tourism had conditioned bears to become more tolerant of people. 

Residents wanted to know if eco-tourism was pushing bears into conflict with humans downstream of the viewing areas, said Darimont, who supervised Field’s work as UVic’s Raincoast research chair in Applied Conservation Science. 

“It’s a great place to live if you're a grizzly bear, but it's packed with people on the valley bottom and some people don't make space for bears,” he said.

Field answered those concerns by teaming up with experts from Nuxult First Nation, Raincoast Conservation Foundation and other researchers at UVic to figure out which bears were clashing with people.

​For months on end, she lived in the bush working with her Nuxult collaborators to set up trail cams and barbed-wire snags on trails frequented by grizzlies near the Atnarko River — a popular bear-viewing area. 

When a bear lumbered down one of the trails, the barbed wire would snag a tuft of fur — something that happened often enough to collect more than 1,800 DNA samples. Field said she and her colleagues ultimately identified 34 grizzlies in an area with the highest eco-tour activity.

The scientist, who is also affiliated with Raincoast, said the 36 kilometres of riverbank ended up becoming a kind of DNA library cataloguing the travelling and fishing habits of local bears. 

“Each strand of fur,” she said, “is like a bread crumb on a bear trail.”

Eco-tourism bears saw lower than average conflict with humans

Back in the laboratory, the scientists compared the hair samples collected in the wild with dozens of DNA specimens taken by B.C. Conservation officers from grizzly bears involved in nearby conflicts with humans.

Of the 30 bears involved in conflict down in the valley, only one was found to match a bear that frequented the eco-tourism hot spots — a number so small the researchers described it in a paper published Tuesday in the Canadian Journal of Zoology as “less likely than predicted by chance.”

“It's far lower than the average bear in the entire population,” Darimont said.

Click here to read the full article: Eco-tourism did not make these B.C. grizzly bears more prone to human conflict, study finds, Vancouver is Awesome

Research Reference: Kate A. Field, Jason E. Moody, Taal Levi, and Chris T. Darimont, "Grizzly bears detected at ecotourism sites are less likely than predicted by chance to encounter conflict" Canadian Journal of Zoology, 14 January 2025. https://doi.org/10.1139/cjz-2024-0102