Alberta Environment and Parks (AEP) has suspended the placement of orphaned bears with the Cochrane Ecological Institute (CEI) pending the outcome of an investigation into the death of a rehabilitated male bear that was shot dead less than two weeks after his release.

Sixteen-month-old Charlie was killed after wandering near children on private land after travelling about 120 km from its release point, say AEP officials.

The investigation will focus on the department's concern about the perceived habituation of the bear, says AEP press secretary Jess Sinclair. Whether AEP utilizes the services of the ecological institute with be decided after the investigation has been completed.

The death of Charlie confirms the worse fears of Clio Smeeton, of the Cochrane Ecological Institute. Shortly the release of Charlie and the female Maskwa on June 20, she expressed concern over how the release was handled. She also questioned the province's rehabilitation protocol, particularly the window of the release and the separation of the pair.

"You have to ask yourself, how come we did it from 1985 to 2012 without losing a bear or having any human-wildlife conflict?" says Smeeton. "AEP would not let us have any involvement with anything to do with the release whatsoever, except to get them out of the enclosure."

She questions whether Charlie became habituated and believes an incident of him heading towards a Fish and Wildlife official has been misinterpreted. A bear trap had been placed on the four-acre bear enclosure, the first one Charlie had seen in his life, and he came down high from a tree to examine it. She says it wasn't aberrant behaviour.

"He wasn’t going towards him, he was going towards the trap. The trap was a new and novel thing that was in that enclosure that had never been there before. He walked over to the trap to examined it. He walked around it and then he walked away."

She says AEP said it was going to send experts in advance of release to evaluate if the bears were fit for release or if they had become habituated. This never occurred, she says.

Smeeton would have preferred a winter release and says it's a practice preferred in both Pennsylvania and Colorado. A study in Pennsylvania concludes orphaned bears released in the winter have an 80 per cent chance of survival, compared to 55 per cent in the summer, she says. In Colorado, she explains they transport the bears in January to established permanent artificial dens. In both cases, they are relocated with their hibernating boxes so the animals are surrounded by something familiar when they awaken.

She also believes an orphaned bear should be returned to the wild at 24-26 months old, the time they would normally be separated from their mother.

In contrast, the best science illustrates the longer bears are kept the more likely they will become habituated, says AEP.

"The outcome of this case seems to lend support to the notion that the longer a bear is in rehabilitation, the higher likelihood of habituation and future human to wildlife conflict," says Sinclair. "Alberta Environment and Parks stands by our protocols to minimize habituation – these are based on the best available science and recommendations from wildlife experts across North America."

Charlie was one of the first two bears being rehabilitated in Alberta since the practice was resumed in 2018. The other bear cub, a female, was relocated to the Grande Cache area.

Both were returned to the general areas they were recovered as per department protocol.

"Further, these two bears are not siblings," points out Sinclair.

Regardless, Smeeton believes they should have been kept together and released in the Grande Cache area. She wrote to the department in advance to express this opinion and to point out it was a less expensive method of release.

"You don’t know how that affected those two bears and with a bit of luck it would have made no difference, but maybe it did. Maybe Charlie was going because he had never been alone in his life."

She is also curious if other pressures, like a grizzly bear population in southwestern Alberta or the area's popularity in the summer, had an impact on his movement.

"If they put him where they said they put him It could have been outside pressure," she says. "We don’t know what made him move."

Despite the demise of the bear, the department remains committed to bear rehabilitation, provided human and bear safety can be assured, says Sinclair.

"In addition, there is currently a bear in rehabilitation in another facility. We continue to work with them with the goal of a healthy and safe reintroduction into the wild as per our protocols."

From 1985 to 2012, CEI worked closely with Fish and Wildlife officers in gathering data to find appropriate release locations. The orphaned bears were set free in a variety of areas, including the Athabasca basin and the air weapons range in the Cold Lake area (with the assistance of National Defence). She remains grateful to Husky Energy for allowing the release of a bear on one of their leases that backed on to a park. 

She also praises the attention to detail paid by Fish and Wildlife officers over those years.

"I think they put a lot of time and effort into it, but that’s when they hadn’t been cut back and weren’t hugely overworked."

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