Winston the Legendary Grizzly
Winston was a real bear whose desperate plight briefly touched the lives of folk in the Chilliwack Valley and even wider further afield some twenty years ago. While his passage though this valley was transitory, his odyssey was the stuff of legends but more than that it epitomised our tragic relationship with the Grizzly Bear that has been played out over the millennia since the first human arrived in North America.
Nothing is known of his early life but it’s thought he was born in the mid 1970’s some forty kilometres north of Pemberton in the Upper Lillooet Valley. It wasn’t until early in 1991 that he and a couple of other Grizzlies started to be noticed by farmers in the area. Large and easily distinguished, he was at first given the affectionate moniker Winston. However, later that year, tensions between farmer and bear intensified and Winston was trapped, tranquilized and relocated a hundred kilometres to the west.
Undeterred, Winston soon made his way home over the ice-fields in time to hibernate and was again disturbing the peace in the Fall of 1992. By then, there was a program to relocate Grizzly Bears to the North Cascades in an attempt to bolster the small number of bears still there. It wasn’t appreciated back then that Grizzlies, a subspecies of the Brown Bear (Ursus arctos horibilis), and other bears have an innate homing capability so that most adults are capable of finding their way home over a couple of hundred kilometres of mountainous terrain.
Anyway, Winston was trapped again and driven to a new home on the far side of Manning Park to be released near the Washington border in the hope he would head south and reinvigorate the couple of dozen Grizzlies thought to still survive in the Northern Cascades. Meanwhile, Washington State authorities were facing difficult decisions of their own over the future of the threatened Grizzly population; by 1995 they had passed a state law preventing the relocation of Grizzlies to their side of the northern Cascades. It seemed the State was resigned to a future without the Grizzly in their Cascades
Winston, oblivious to such conservation politics, had ideas of his own and headed west instead of south. Somehow he sensed his home drainage flowed into the Fraser and not the Columbus River. Before the salmon season was done he had travelled over a hundred kilometres to the Chilliwack River and was gorging on fish and attracting the attention of fishermen. While he never showed signs of aggression to sportsmen, he was now branded a “Problem Bear” which meant the kill order was out on him.
Ever resourceful, Winston eluded his pursuers with their guns and dogs, even though he was fitted with a radio tracking collar. Over the Christmas Holidays when he should have been denned in for the winter he climbed over the Cheam-Elk ridge, perhaps past this cache location, and then dropped down through new snow and in bitter temperatures to Bridal Falls. We know this from a radio signal received on December 30th from his collar.
Unstoppable, he next crossed the TransCanada Highway, a rail line, the Fraser River a second rail line and Highway 7 before bypassing Agassiz and Harrison Springs and forging a route up the east side of Harrison Lake. Much of this was not confirmed until the following spring when signals were picked up at Big Silver Creek, sixty kilometres north of the Chilliwack Valley. It’s likely he did den up somewhere on the east side of Harrison Lake when he would have sensed he was in his home drainage and had only to keep trekking upstream to get home.
By June 1993, Winston was indeed home in the upper Lillooet Valley, having completed the last leg of an epic three hundred kilometre journey. After all the fuss the previous year, he stayed out of trouble and wasn’t seriously tracked and eventually all trace was lost until the following summer when a signal was received from the same location as in 1993. The signal suggested that Winston was deceased or had had shed his collar but there was no money to head into that remote location and investigate. Winston was never seen again.
His legend lived on however, because some five years later another large Grizzly was harassing animals and farmers in the Lillooet Valley. He was trapped and relocated to Boston Bar, two hundred kilometres to the east, only to return within a few weeks and cause more problems. This time it was realized relocation wouldn’t succeed and there was no option but to shoot him. Some folk speculated that this was the aging Winston returned but that assertion is difficult to believe as Winston had been ear tagged and his tag identity would have been known.
Whatever happened to Winston, his incredible story highlights issues even more relevant today for the survival of the Grizzly Bear in our Canadian Cascades; issues that were reiterated in September 2013 by release of the Coast to Cascades Grizzly Bear Initiative. This initiative acknowledged that populations in Winston’s home domain and in our Cascades are in a parlous state of decline and that ways of restoring the link between the two regions must be sought so that bear populations can recover to a viable level but one that is still acceptable to the public with their growing need for recreation, housing and roads. Sadly, the official BC Government Recovery Plan for Grizzly Bears in the North Cascades of British Columbia published in 2004 has, like that of Washington State, fallen by the wayside.
Moreover, relocation, according to the Bear Smart Society of Whistler, “is a reactive, public appeasement strategy and does not address the root cause of human-bear conflicts. As such, another bear frequently takes the place of the one that has been removed. Often residents are either unwilling to change their own behaviour by removing attractants or are unaware of the need to do so because they believe that trapping and translocating a bear is a viable resolution”. Just how unviable the strategy is for most adult bears was discovered by researcher Lynn Landriault, in Sudbury, Ontario. She cited the extreme example of a female Black Bear that was relocated in a total of six different directions over distances of forty to three hundred and eight-nine kilometres but always found her way home within a matter of weeks.
Currently the Grizzly is designated a species of Special Concern in BC and is on the so-called Blue List because of loss of habitat and interaction with humans, but the attitude of neighboring American states has to be considered too. On the one hand organisations like the North Cascades Conservation Council based in Seattle see the threatened Grizzly as an iconic but disappearing symbol of the wilderness but Washington State will have nothing to do with augmenting populations.
Whether Grizzlies still roam the Chilliwack Valley is open to speculation but most observers believe not. There is lively discussion on this subject at the Clubtread hikers’ website. It is possible a Grizzly wanders along the border areas south of Chilliwack and Radium Lake but the only evidence is anecdotal - large footprints in the snow and claw rakes high up tree trunks –clear photographic evidence or DNA from fur samples that would provide conclusive proof is ever elusive. The last known sighting in the Chilliwack Valley was most likely Winston over twenty years ago. ),
Acknowledgments to:
Pemberton Wildlife Association: Winston the Legendary Bear Hugh Naylor http://www.pembertonwildlifeassociation.com/news/2012/2/1/winston-the-legendary-bear/
Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife - 2012 Annual Report
BC Government - Recovery Plan for Grizzly Bears in the North Cascades of British Columbia – Jun 2004
Bear Smart - http://www.bearsmart.com/
Nuisance Black Bear Behaviour in Central Ontario – Lynn Landriault, Laurentian University 1998
Clubtread Discussion: http://www.clubtread.com/sforum/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=40018&whichpage=4