GPS Tracking Used to Learn About Hunters and Grizzly Bear Interactions
4 Dec 2014By using GPS tracking technology, researchers hope to find out more about the motivations and behaviors of grizzly bears when hunters are in the vicinity.
In lieu of the annual fall hunting season, researchers want to know more about grizzly bears in relation to hunters. They have performed a GPS study that looks at the interactions and movements of grizzly bears when they are out in the wild. The study will last a total of two years and is primarily being done with grizzly bears located at the Grand Teton National Park in Wyoming.
The head researcher of the study is Mike Ebinger of the Interagency Grizzly Bear Study Team (IGBST) that is located in Montana. There are multiple objectives that the scientists are hoping to find resolutions for during the study.
The first is to find out if the population of grizzly bears changes based on hunting activity. For example, if there are hunting shots fired, will other bears in the area disperse, thus reducing the population in that area. They are using cameras in various spots in the park where the bears frequent to look at their population before and after shots have been fired.
Another objective of the scientists is to examine how the killing of local wildlife affects the bear population. During the beginning of the study, researchers found that the grizzly bears would enter the hunting area if an elk carcass was left behind. They seemed to put their own lives at risk in order to find this food resource. For this reason, part of the study is looking for the carcasses of elk and other wildlife in order to see how the bears respond to them.
The last part of the study will look at how the grizzly bears and hunters react toward each other when they are in the vicinity. They want to see if hunters influence the bear population, and vice versa. They are doing this by using the GPS trackers that are placed in collars and on grizzly bears in the park. This will track the activity and movements of the bears to enable the researchers to later compare this data to the locations of the hunters at that time.
A total of eight bears have GPS tracking collars attached to them. The researchers also asked for volunteer elk hunters that they could track with their own GPS units. The hunters were asked to carry the GPS tracking device every time they went on their route, and to go on their normal hunting route as they would if they weren’t being tracked. Researchers gathered data from both sets of GPS tracking units daily to compare the two and see if there were any correlations between hunters, elk carcasses and movement of the grizzly bears.
Scientists have already seen that the grizzly bears move around lakes in order to search for elk, and will definitely enter hunter territory and get close to hunters if they smell elk carcasses. One bear was as close as 100 yards to a hunter. The study is still being conducted, but they have found hunter behavior to be related to the grizzly bear behavior.
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