The need for legislation to protect black bear dens

Roy L Hales/ Cortes Currents - Unlike their Mainland cousins, Vancouver Island’s Black Bears make their dens almost exclusively in large-diameter old trees, stumps, logs, or root wads. Dens are normally left dormant for a while after use, due to parasite infestation and the need to escape predators. However a study in the Nimpkish Valley, south of Port McNeill, found that 72% of the dens were reused over a 15 year period. In one case, the den was occupied during four winters.

“Many bear dens are being destroyed. Helen Davis, the scientist that worked on this, did a survey in southwest Vancouver Island. In an area where normally she would have expected numerous bear dens to exist and to be used, there was only one den that was still usable after the logging had gone through. We are losing large numbers of bear dens, and they're not being replaced because the second growth forest that comes back is not being allowed to get big enough as old growth to accommodate bear dens. They need the big trees to have holes that are big enough for the bears to get in and out of,” asserted Calvin Sandborn, Senior Counsel at the University of Victoria’s Environmental Law Centre.

He is also the supervising lawyer of a report detailing what it would take to protect the bear dens in BC’s forests.

Three of Sandborn’s students prepared this submission at the request of Helen Davis and Sierra Club BC.

“The Environmental Law Centre is a class that is offered at the Faculty of Law at UVic where law students are learning to be advocates for the environment and to act for environmental groups and first nations community groups that are concerned about the environment. In this case, we were looking at the question of how the law could be changed to better protect bears,” explained Sandborn.

Mark Worthing, of Sierra Club BC, said, “Part of the reason we decided to take on this project is our field work mostly on Vancouver island, but also in the Great Bear Rainforest to a lesser degree in other places in B.C. Not only were we finding bear dens in at-risk forests that were slated for logging, but we were finding destroyed bear dens or lone single bear dens left in clear cuts and things like that. So we thought, dang, this is a problem.”