The sample size was small — four bears. But the pattern was unmistakable. Why were so many bears missing so many toes?
Author of the article:
Clayton Lamb didn’t think much of the missing toe at first.
The B.C. biologist was moving a snoozing bear with conservation officers in Fernie. A tourist from Australia stood nearby, snapping photos of the hulking grizzly.
Start your day with a roundup of B.C.-focused news and opinion delivered straight to your inbox at 7 a.m., Monday to Friday.
A welcome email is on its way. If you don’t see it, please check your junk folder.
The next issue of Sunrise presented by Vancouver Sun will soon be in your inbox.
We encountered an issue signing you up. Please try again
The team had tranquilized the animal to haul it away from a manicured lawn when Lamb saw it: A piece of its paw was gone.
Grizzlies lead rough lives, brawling and biting one another.
“So the missing toe of one bear wasn’t necessarily a red flag for us,” Lamb said.
But while doing field work for his PhD at the University of Alberta, he later saw another bear without all its digits, in B.C.’s Elk Valley region. Then another. Then another.
The sample size was small — four bears. But the pattern was unmistakable. Why were so many bears missing so many toes?
“We had absolutely no idea,” said Lamb, now a post-doctoral fellow at the University of British Columbia. “And we had, at the time, essentially no leads as to what it could be.”
The discovery sent Lamb on a half-decade quest to unravel the mystery of the missing bear toes. The pursuit would not only divert him from his PhD work on grizzly reproduction and survival but would lead him to press for public policy changes.
“Part of what makes a grizzly bear a grizzly bear is their very long claws,” he said. “It’s just something essential.”
From their muscular shoulders to their huge paws, grizzlies are built for digging.
The bears tunnel underground to build dens and to search for roots, rodents and other morsels to eat. A grizzly without intact paws simply can’t eat or hibernate as well.
The first question for Lamb’s team: Are some grizzlies simply born this way? Veterinarians who reviewed the paws quickly ruled out any birth defects. X-ray images showed bone fragments, a sign of a wound that had healed.
So something had torn them off. The fractures were too straight and clean for the toes to have been bitten or ripped off by another animal. The linear breaks suggested a human cause.
Lamb’s team turned to traps. Every winter in B.C., trappers set hundreds of devices to capture and kill bushy-tailed, weasel-like animals called martens for their fur.
To see if bears were too inquisitive for their own good, Lamb installed motion-sensor cameras near four traps that were rigged to remain open, to prevent any further grizzly injuries.
Within two weeks, grizzlies visited all four traps, tripping two of them. Asking around, Lamb heard reports from hunters and trappers from as far as Wyoming and Finland of brown bears getting their feet caught in traps meant for smaller mammals.
But could a trap meant for such a tiny creature really hurt a grizzly? Lamb’s team hooked up a dead bear’s paw to a trap attached to his pickup truck to see how much force it would take to break a toe.
“I did a number of things that I never thought I was going to do as a scientist,” he said.
The traps weren’t strong enough to sever a bear toe right away, Lamb and his team wrote in a paper published in August in the Wildlife Society Bulletin. But Lamb’s team showed the devices could cut off the circulation of blood, causing tissue to die and drop off — eventually.
“It’s fair to assume that there’s quite a bit of suffering over the weeks or months that these toes are actually falling off,” Lamb said. “It’s not an instant thing.”
The missing toes aren’t a big enough issue to cause a population decline, according to Luke Vander Vennen, a wildlife biologist for the province who collaborated with Lamb in the grizzly research.
But the lost digits are “certainly not the kind of outcome that we’re comfortable accepting as the regular course of business.”
Amputated toes aren’t just bad for bears. They could have consequences for people living in bear country, too.
One of the four bears Lamb found without all its digits was later captured by conservation officers after wandering onto a farm. Another was killed after breaking into a calf pen on a ranch. And a third is suspected of attacking a human.
Bears that get caught in traps may just be more curious to begin with. Or, Lamb said, injured bears without the full use of their paws to dig for meals may take more risks in pursuit of food.
One solution would be to ban trapping in November, when many grizzlies are still active. But some in the fur business worried that delaying trapping until the deep winter would be dangerous because of the risk of avalanche in bear country.
“That would be a fairly blunt instrument to a problem that we can likely solve with a bit more of a nuanced approach,” said Doug Chiasson, executive director of the Fur Institute of Canada, which represents and set standards for trappers.
Another idea for keeping bear claws intact is to place a plate on the traps with an opening big enough for a marten to squeeze through but too small for a grizzly’s foot.
Based on Lamb’s work, trapping licences in southeast British Columbia started requiring these constraints in recent years. The measure, he said, is “a stopgap as we work on a few more options.”
For Tim Killey, a trapper who leads the British Columbia Trappers Association, another trade group, preventing bears from being ensnared is important for the industry to keep its “social licence” in the face of anti-fur sentiment.
“It’s the ethical thing to do,” he added.
Right now, it’s tough to know whether the requirements are working, said Vander Vennen, who used donated lumber to build about 100 boxes himself.
“They’re not hard to build. Once you get set up to do them, then they can go pretty quick.”
So far, he added, no new bears have come in with missing toes.
Support our journalism: Our in-depth journalism is possible thanks to the support of our subscribers. For just $3.50 per week, you can get unlimited, ad-lite access to The Vancouver Sun, The Province, National Post and 13 other Canadian news sites. Support us by subscribing today: The Vancouver Sun | The Province.
Minimum temperatures between minus six and minus 10 Celsius expected in Metro Vancouver, with clear skies
The officers were backcountry skiing near Kaslo, in a mountain pass 60 kilometres north of Nelson, when they were swept down the mountain in a large avalanche.
Dubbed “Toadzilla,” the cane toad, an invasive species that poses a threat to Australia’s ecosystem, was spotted by “shocked” park ranger Kylee Gray during a patrol in Conway National Park in Queensland state on Jan. 12.
The agreement carries strong criteria to protect ecosystems, wildlife habitat and old forests, says Chief Judy Desjarlais, Blueberry River First Nations.
Chief Heidi Gravelle of the Tobacco Plains First Nation in southeast B.C. says the agreement with NWP Coal sets the band up as both regulator and reviewer of the project, with the right to turn it down.
Postmedia is committed to maintaining a lively but civil forum for discussion and encourage all readers to share their views on our articles. Comments may take up to an hour for moderation before appearing on the site. We ask you to keep your comments relevant and respectful. We have enabled email notifications—you will now receive an email if you receive a reply to your comment, there is an update to a comment thread you follow or if a user you follow comments. Visit our Community Guidelines for more information and details on how to adjust your email settings.
365 Bloor Street East, Toronto, Ontario, M4W 3L4
© 2023 Vancouver Sun, a division of Postmedia Network Inc. All rights reserved. Unauthorized distribution, transmission or republication strictly prohibited.
This website uses cookies to personalize your content (including ads), and allows us to analyze our traffic. Read more about cookies here. By continuing to use our site, you agree to our Terms of Service and Privacy Policy.