How cougars and grizzlies are reintroducing themselves in Manitoba
Unraveling the mystery of how cougars and grizzlies are re-colonizing Manitoba
When it comes to species being driven to the brink, there tend to be more unhappy endings than not.
That's why what's going on with cougars and grizzlies in Manitoba right now is refreshing — if puzzling.
Both carnivores seem to be gradually clawing their way back after settlers eliminated them from the province more than a hundred years ago.
"They were persecuted by humans," says conservation zoologist Bill Watkins, who has been studying the slow cougar re-emergence for two decades, primarily in southwestern and western Manitoba.
Watkins attributes the persecution to the perceived threat of the big cats to livestock. "[Cougars are] a large, scary animal that occasionally will take a domestic animal like a sheep or a calf."
Douglas Clark has been focused on grizzly bears in Manitoba's far north. He says it's only a matter of time before baby grizzlies are spotted in Manitoba's northeast.
"I'd be stunned if they're not breeding in Manitoba by now, given how far into the province and how spread over a very, very large geographic area these observations are," says Clark, who studies human-wildlife interactions at the University of Saskatchewan.
Archeological remains suggest grizzlies lived in southern Manitoba possibly for thousands of years before Europeans arrived.
Kevin Brownlee, former archeology curator at the Manitoba Museum, writes about the evidence for this in Stories of the Old Ones: Hunter and Fisher from Sheltered Water.
He says grizzly claws have been found associated with 4,000-year-old human remains in southeastern Manitoba.
Explorers in the early 1700s also documented signs of grizzlies and cougars in Manitoba's south.
Fur trader and explorer Alexander Henry The Elder wrote in 1776 about seeing skins from "a small number of panthers" in Manitoba, which experts say were likely cougar skins.
WATCH | Manitoba conservation officer captures footage of elusive cougar in 2013:
As the settler population grew through the 19th century, cougar populations shrunk or disappeared in much of their traditional North American ranges.
By the early 1900s, cougars and grizzlies were nearly absent from Canada's Prairies. In the ensuing decades, confirmed sightings in Manitoba were considered rare anomalies.
New moves
Though sightings are still rare, they are increasing.
In the early 2000s, Watkins says Manitoba would get one confirmed cougar sighting every few years. By 2010, there were confirmed reports annually — sometimes through photo or video evidence, or other physical proof like feces, hair or an accidental catch by a fur trapper.
And 2020 was a banner year, with nine confirmed cougar sightings, followed by six in 2021.
"It certainly looks like something is happening on the landscape," said Watkins, who recently retired from Manitoba's wildlife and fisheries branch.
The vast majority of the 46 confirmed cougar sightings in the province up to 2021 occurred in an arc within western Manitoba.
Grizzlies, on the other hand, aren't recolonizing their traditional territory in the south. They're emerging in the north, for the most part within about a kilometre of the Hudson Bay coastline, in a transition zone where the boreal forest meets the open tundra in Wapusk National Park.
The Wapusk region is now the only place in the world scientists confirm that black, polar and grizzly bears co-exist. Of more than 130 confirmed sightings in the north in the past four decades, more than three quarters have happened since about 2010.
Why grizzlies are moving into the north isn't entirely clear yet.
"This is kind of the heart of the mystery for me," said Clark. "My suspicion is that it is not a simple story."
Climate change could be part of that story. Clark says the proliferation of blueberries, one of several grizzly dietary staples, has occurred with warmer temperatures. But the animals also appear to be traveling south into the province from established populations in Nunavut.
"Is there a climate change fingerprint? Maybe," he said. "Typically, with a direct effect, you think of animals in the northern hemisphere moving north as conditions shift. But this is not what's going on."
Clark and others are working on a local traditional knowledge study alongside local Indigenous communities to get a better understanding of what's going on.
"What we're hearing is they were always in northern Manitoba, just really, really rarely," he said. "What we're seeing now is new."
Indigenous scholar Myrle Ballard said a collaborative research model — blending western science with Indigenous oral histories — is necessary to more deeply examine what's happening with the apex predators.
"With those that cannot speak for themselves, the way I was taught is they're smarter than us, they have instincts," said Ballard, who was recently appointed as Director of the new Indigenous Science Division (ISD) at Environment and Climate Change Canada.
"There's a lot of things that are going on that we don't know about. They know, but we don't know yet."
Produced and written by Bryce Hoye