Attention: Calling all Assistant Bear Guides!

Have you been wondering how to apply for full guide status? If you can say yes to the following then now is the time to apply.

CBVA Website

Be Wild in BC, the magazine of the BC Wilderness Tourism Association, is now fully digital. On the website, bewildinbc.com, are articles on destinations and activities, issues affecting B.C.'s wildlife and wilderness, and suggestions for how you can get involved and reduce your impact. There's also a handy search feature for finding great destinations that share our dedication to B.C.'s wild places. For updates and more news on wilderness travel in the province check out BeWildinBC.com's blog at bewildinbcblog.blogspot.com

Be a Part of History and Stop the BC Trophy Hunt

Join Andy Wright's “Faltering Light” petition in requesting the British Columbia government stop trophy hunting of bears. Your name will join thousands more and be presented to government printed in a book, along with essays from leading environmentalists, and sepia toned bear photographs. Become part of history and have your name recognized forever as supporting the end of the trophy hunt. Coastal First Nations have all announced they want an end to the hunt.
SIGN THE PETITION NOW

Current CBVA Members

Article in the Victoria Times Colonist Feb 2010

Commercial Bear Viewing Association Spring / Summer 2010 

The President's Report

Now we move our focus towards other goals, the primary one being stopping the trophy hunting of grizzly bears, particularly on the coast.  While appearing to have an obvious solution to all of us, it is a very intractable problem that requires all the effort we can marshal to come up with an effective solution.  At its heart this is a moral question and one that we need your help with on many fronts.  Please read Kevin’s piece in this newsletter on stopping the hunt. 

Another goal is to consolidate our bear sighting data into a form that can be useful to researchers investigating how many grizzly bears there are, whether it be in all of BC, on the coast, or even just a small portion of the coast?  Grizzly bear populations face a lot of threats especially from ecological changes and will need population monitoring for the foreseeable future.  Accurately estimating the populations of a widely ranging carnivore in our environment is extremely difficult to do, close to impossible.  While our sampling techniques are not ideal due to our clustered observations around viewing sites, we can provide a rough index of population trends.  Collectively our annual number of observation hours in prime coastal grizzly habitat is very impressive and dwarfs any other source of observations in the province.   We owe it to the bears and those that will come after us to document our observations.  To create a useable database with meaningful data and that protects our data from abuse is not a trivial exercise.  Of course, it will be an evolutionary project like our earlier project. Again we need your help and especially a key person willing to volunteer to setup that database and find an unbiased home for it.

Our next accomplishments depend upon our collective and individual efforts.  I hope you all, owners and guides, will find the time to join us at our next AGM on March 15, 2010 at 9 AM in the Coast Bastion Inn in Nanaimo.

Tom Rivest

President of CBVA

New Member Profile

Tweedsmuir Park Lodge

At the Tweedsmuir Park Lodge in the Bella Coola Valley, the Coast Mountains, the Chilcotin plateau, and Pacific fjords intersect, creating a bio-diverse and spectacular wilderness second to none. Among these old growth forests, pristine rivers, stunning peaks, soaring eagles, and vast glaciers, there is one animal at the top of the food chain: it is the mighty Grizzly Bear.

Our Grizzly Bear Viewing trips are in the autumn, from start of September to the middle of October. At this time of the year the Grizzly Bears are intent on fishing and are more tolerant of both other bears and people and are therefore much easier to observe.Accompanied by an experienced and knowledgeable guide, our drift trips are the perfect way to see the bears and wildlife of the Bella Coola valley. The McKenzie River boats are non-motorized and therefore do not disturb the bears in their natural habitat. The leisurely pace and silence offer a relaxed and peaceful way to travel the valley, as well as a completely unique opportunity for viewing wildlife. On some occasions, our guests see up to 15 different Grizzly Bears in a single float.

In addition to the river floats you will also be able to walk old growth forests, literally in the footsteps of the Bears. Our guide will show you day beds, claw marks on trees, tufts of bear fur, and of course lots of bear scat.

Guests from all over the world have stated that this is one of the ultimate wildlife viewing opportunities on the planet, and they have the pictures to prove it.
 

Vancouver Sun Ad:
CBVA, Bear Viewing, Trophy Killing

The CVBA took an unusual step for us this month: we supported an ad in the Vancouver Sun about the detriments of continued trophy “hunting” of bears. (See picture) As business owners, we prefer to work with government to address and fix issues that impede an industry’s reasonable development. To that end we are trying to set up a meeting with the Minister to discuss the issue. But we also felt it was important to communicate our position that we support banning the commercial trophy hunt. Here are some reasons for that:
 

Bad for Business

Obviously from a business development perspective, the killing of grizzly bears for sport not only reduces the number of bears our clients can view, but it also creates extreme fear of humans in the bears that have witnessed the killing of others. (This means they hide and run away and experience stress when they sense humans around them ... pretty bad conditions for successful bear viewing.)

This, combined with the fact that bear viewing is a “renewable” industry that generates much more income for BC than commercial trophy hunting, should be reason alone to end the trophy hunt. A 2003 study by Integral Economics and Raincoast Conservation Foundation found that bear viewing generated twice as much revenue as trophy hunting. And our industry has grown tremendously since then.
 

Bad for Safety

Many tour operators include bear viewing in their activities now, as it is an experience guests from all over the world love. But much of this viewing takes place in which the government permits trophy hunters to operate. Imagine the danger this could present if a hunter shot and injured, but didn’t kill, a bear, and a tour operator came along the next day. They could be running into a mad and scared bear.
 

Ethically Indefensible

It is just plain wrong. Commercial trophy hunting is not food hunting. It’s an activity paid for by people, often from other countries, who simply want to kill a big, wild animal. For the thrill of killing it.

British Columbia’s wild bears are intelligent, complicated mammals. Their presence is a sign of the health of the ecosystems they inhabit. I believe killing them for sport is morally wrong. And here’s the thing: likely you do, too. Most of us do – 87% of British Columbians surveyed by Ipsos Reid in 2009 do.

This includes coastal First Nations, most, if not all, of whom never hunted grizzly bears. Despite all of this, the current government overturned a popular moratorim on the commercial sport hunting of grizzly bears almost immediately upon gaining office. For what reason? A hidden one … your guess may be as good as ours as to the political motivation.
 

Individual CVBA Member Efforts

For a long time, CVBA members acting as individuals have spent a great deal of effort and money to educate people about and try to bring an end to this hunt.

Also, the clients of many CVBA members have done the same, from donating money to help Raincoast Conservation Foundation purchase the guide outfitter license for a large territory (thus ending the trophy hunting there de facto), to writing articles and books, to letter writing campaigns, advertising campaigns, slide shows, and more.

This year, the CVBA executive decided that we needed to make our views known. So in addition to trying to work with the government, we supported the Vancouver Sun ad, organized by a cross-section of groups, from First Nations communities to conservation organizations like Pacific Wild and Forest Ethics, to business. As the organization that represents your interests as a bear viewing company, we will continue to do what we can to end hunt.We encourage you to contact us for information about what you can do to help.
 

Some Scenarios

In closing, I will leave you with these three scenarios.

In 1998, as a backcountry park ranger, I arrested and assisted the Conservation officer in writing a report to Crown Council about, and subsequently became an expert witness against, some commercial trophy hunters who shot three bears in an ecological reserve. This reserve was established for the protection of the bears – there was a no hunting zone. As part of the trial preparation, I had to watch the video that the hunters, from Denmark, assisted by a BC guide, had made of their holiday. As I watched the tape, and the ignorant and stupid antics of the hunters who were devoid of any understanding of wild animals, I saw the bears shot. I heard the bears scream with pain, and then, as the life was seeping from them, I heard the bears moaning.                                                                             

       
Fast forward a decade, and I am an ecotourism owner / operator in the Great Bear Rainforest, in one of the rare, special inlets that has been protected from hunting. As my guests and I float in a boat, a grizzly bear sow lies down a few hundred feet in front of us and allows her cub to nurse. She is fully aware that we are there, and she respects us. But she knows we won’t harm her. My guests and I are amazed and joyous to be able to watch the relationship of these two bears as they go about their afternoon.

Colleagues of mine also bring their clients respectfully to this place to watch the bears. Off the top of my head, I can think of six businesses who, year after year, these bears help support just through living their lives.

We bring guests to this spot, and we all feel the same thrill and sense of discovery in watching them.

Then, last year, further south on the coast, I entered a beautiful river system that I knew as a park ranger. My guests and I sat quietly and watched the salmon in the river and hoped to see bears. We did: two sibling grizzly bears, perhaps 4 years old. We watched them catch and share a fish. Then something, the slightest breeze perhaps, informed them of our presence about a hundred and fifty meters down stream. They looked up, left the fish half eaten on the rocks, and rapidly retreated to the bushes. As they went, they were peeing. Peeing is what bears do when they are very afraid. So the viewing ended quickly. And two bears were stressed. All this within a conservancy that still allows bear hunting.

It was so unnecessary. It would be better, economically, for the viewing to have gone on, for me to know I could bring guests there another time. For others to grow their businesses by bringing guests there, too.

It would have been better for the bears to continue to eat that important salmon and grow fat for winter. And it would not just be better. but would also be right, for our leaders to say, it’s not okay to kill these animals simply for the thrill of seeing them die. However you add it up, financially or ethically, these magnificent animals are worth so much more than that.

- Kevin Smith, Maple Leaf Adventures