Saving Salmons for the Bears

Twenty-two years after at least 15 salmon-starved grizzlies were shot to protect residents of a small Indigenous village on British Columbia’s central coast, that same First Nation is preparing to prioritize the bears’ claim to the fish. The Wuikinuxv Nation is willing to reduce its own catch of wild Pacific sockeye from Rivers Inlet to provide more for grizzlies during an age of reduced spawning returns. “In this era of low fish abundance, how do we take care of bears? ” says Megan Adams, a Raincoast Conservation Foundation researcher and lead author of a new study, supported in part by the Hakai Institute, * designed to determine how to achieve peaceful coexistence with bears by sharing the salmon harvest. “If people can compromise their catch by 10 percent … bear population density can increase by 10 percent, ” she says. The fjord of Rivers Inlet boasted annual returns of up to 3. 1 million sockeyes from 1948 to 1992. It was the third-largest run in the province, with more than enough fish to support commercial and Indigenous food/ceremonial fisheries and to see grizzly bears through their winter hibernation. Squeezed by factors such as historical overfishing, myriad changes in the ocean, diminished spawning habitat due to logging, and receding glaciers—which result in warmer temperatures in spawning tributaries—salmon returns dropped off dramatically starting in 1993. They hit rock bottom in the fall of 1999 when fewer than 10, 000 sockeyes showed up at the Wuikinuxv village of ‘Kìtit about 400 kilometers northwest of Vancouver along the Waanukv River.