Grizzly bear (Ursus arctos) fishing for salmon

The grizzly bear, still shrouded in mysteries and often misunderstood, does not have a very certain future. It is powerful enough to kill an adult 800 kilo moose with one blow of its mighty paws, but is no match for the millions of people entering and changing its habitat. Only 2% remains of the historic habitat of the grizzly in the United States and much of the remaining space is threatened. In Canada considerably more of the original range remains, but in many places extinction is close at hand. Not only habitat loss, traffic accidents and hunting (both illegal and legal) threaten the bear, but climate change is already having a huge effect on the availability of food and is likely to become an ever more important factor for the future chances of bears. No matter how strong bears are, they are at our mercy and depend on our decissions concerning what is left of their habitat and the climate. With the right decissions, they may still fulfill their important role in the natural systems where they occur for a long time. Without these decissions, that role may become vacant rather soon...

Articles on this website about the grizzly bears at fish creek:

Bears, cuddly or evil?-- There are two extremes to how people think about grizzly bears. One, amazingly enough, is that they are cuddly animals that you can pet and the other is that they are bloodthirsty monsters that kill for fun. Watching even just one bear at Fish Creek near Hyder in Alaska dispels both extremes... (Read more)

Bear hunting-- Bears are hardly ever killed for sustenance. Those hunting for bears almost always do so to get a nice trophy and for the thrill of killing something that is physically stronger than they are...(Read more)

Image number: 2007_ASP8236AWMC