Kim Titchener remembers her first encounter with a grizzly bear. She’d just travelled from her home province of Ontario to Banff National Park where she had a new job as a wildlife interpreter.

“I show up my first day on the job and they’re like, ‘can you drive to Tunnel Mountain Campground? There’s a grizzly bear eating an elk carcass. Keep your truck on the side of the road. We’re going to flush her out of the campground towards you,’ ” she said.

“And I’m like, ‘what?’ ”

That was Bear 66. In the years that followed, Titchener watched Bear 66 as she grew up, eventually giving birth to three cubs.

But things didn’t go well for Bear 66.

“I got the pleasure of watching her and monitoring her for a couple of years and seeing her have beautiful little baby grizzly bear cubs. I also worked with her through the unfortunate incident of her being killed by a train.”

Her cubs didn’t fare well either. Two died from fatal car collisions. The third was captured and sent to the Saskatoon zoo.

Titchener said it’s an unfortunate reality for bears in Banff.

“There’s certainly been a lot of bears that I’ve known over the years that have moved through this valley and unfortunately, every single one of them that I’ve ever had an experience with or worked with or tried to help keep on the landscape, they’ve all died.”

The more recent death of Bear 148, who was moved from Banff National Park to an area near the border with British Columbia, raises fresh questions about an old problem: why can’t bears and people peacefully exist in large national parks?

Amid the news and disappointment and anger about Bear 148’s death, rumours and suspicion have taken root. Conspiracy theories abound about who made the final call to relocate the grizzly and why.

And yet the story behind the decision to remove Bear 148 from her range actually has a lot to do with mundane human activity in and around Banff: people choosing to walk their dogs off-leash in bear territory, ignoring park closures and generally not abiding by bear-smart rules.

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Featured in this episode:

Kim Titchener, founder of Bear Safety & More, a company that provides industry with bear safety training

Steve Michel, Parks Canada national human-wildlife conflict expert

Bill Hunt, Banff National Park resource conservation manager

 

Undercurrent soundtrack sponsored by Approach Media.