Finding a better way to monitor wild bears

The traditional way to study grizzly bears is to catch them in traps, put a radio collar on them and then follow their movements and their offspring as they roam the landscape.

But U.S. Geological Survey biologist Kate Kendall wanted a better way, a way to study bears that didn’t involve all the handling and stress on bears — and researchers.

So for more than a decade, Kendall, a research biologist with Glacier National Park at the time, and a host of college graduates working under her gathered bear data in the Park without trapping the bears. They looked at scat and rub trees, tracks and trails.

“I was looking for a non-invasive way to monitor bears,” she said last week.

In 1992, Kendall explored ways to use thin-layer chromatography to distinguish grizzly bear hair from black bear hair. Both species use rub trees, and hair left behind can be analyzed. But it didn’t work, at least not for bears.

Then in 1995, David Paetkau, a doctorate student at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, developed a way to extract DNA from bear hairs. Eureka.

Canadian researchers did the first bear DNA analysis using bear hair in Mount Revelstoke National Park. A year and a half later, Kendall was busy writing a grant proposal for Glacier Park. That led to studying the Park’s grizzly bear population using just hair gathered from bears from 1998 to 2000.

Her study attracted attention, and Kendall found herself writing a much larger grant proposal, this time to study grizzlies across the entire Northern Continental Divide Ecosystem — a study that covered 8 million acres from Glacier Park nearly to Missoula that employed 240 people in the summer of 2004.

It was the first study to determine a population estimate of 765 bears in the NCDE. And not a single bear was caught in a trap or collared.

That study and the subsequent research paper, published in the Journal of Wildlife Management, received the outstanding world wildlife article award from the Wildlife Society in 2010, and Kendall’s name became synonymous with grizzly bears and DNA.

Kendall will call it career at the end of the week. She’s retiring after living most of her adult life studying bears.

Getting started

Kendall grew up in northern Virginia. As a child she always had an affinity for the woods. The family home was only 15 minutes outside of Washington, D.C., but it was on an acre of woods with a creek.

“We’d make tents out of blankets and shower curtains in the backyard,” she said.

Kendall did her undergraduate studies at the University of Virginia. In the course of her studies, she worked for a professor who was looking at the dynamics of the Barrier Islands under a contract for the National Park Service. NPS owned several lighthouses on the islands that were in danger of falling into the ocean.

Through the connection with that professor, Kendall landed a job with the chief scientist at NPS. At the time, he was dealing with Yellowstone National Park’s dumps and the bears that fed in them. He set up the Interagency Grizzly Bear Committee, and as she worked under him, Kendall became involved with grizzly research.

After a few years working in the NPS offices in Washington, D.C., she started work on her postgraduate degree at Montana State University-Bozeman studying the relationship between squirrels, whitebark pine trees and black and grizzly bears. A career was born.

Looking back

Over the years, there have been many memorable moments and hikes. If Kendall had to pick a single day hike, it would be to Falling Leaf and Snow Moon lakes, an off-trail excursion in the Many Glacier area. A backpack trip? It’s tough to beat a trip through the Belly River over Stoney Indian Pass to Waterton.

Her husband, George Scherman, has been on many outings with her. Scherman is a fine woodworker and taught for years at Columbia Falls High School in the shop program or as a substitute teacher. He still volunteers today. They have two grown sons, Jack and Sam.

Kendall’s DNA studies didn’t end with the NCDE work. She recently completed a similar study in the Cabinet-Yaak region of Northwest Montana. She said she’ll volunteer her time to finish that work this summer. She also wants to complete a study that tracks bears solely through rub-tree hair.

The future for bears is mixed. On one hand, she sees hope for the species.

“They’re capable of totally nailing people,” she said. “Yet they show incredible restraint. There are bears that are in close proximity to people, and the people rarely know they’re there.”

If humans properly manage their garbage and give bears room to roam, they can co-exist, she said. But there are troubling issues as well — while the human population continues to expand into grizzly bear habitat, the grizzly bear population in Northwest Montana is also growing. According to current population estimates, nearly 1,000 bears inhabit the NCDE.

“On the other hand, 1,000 bears over 8 million acres isn’t very many,” Kendall said.

There also could be problems with climate change. Bears in the NCDE rely heavily on a healthy berry crop to put on fat for the winter.

“We don’t know what climate change will do to berry production,” Kendall said.