ANIMAL XING

THIS PAST SUMMER AN AMBITIOUS WILDLIFE UNDER/OVERPASS SYSTEM BROKE GROUND IN B.C. ON A DEADLY STRETCH OF HIGHWAY JUST WEST OF THE ALBERTA BORDER. HERE’S HOW IT HAPPENED.

- BRIAN BANKS

CLAYTON LAMB DOESN’T KNOW exactly how “Fran” died. A wildlife scientist, he’s seen grizzly bears hit by cars and trucks, a few by trains, and he knows her broken pelvis meant it was one or the other.

What he can reconstruct, based on data gathered when he fit the young female with a radio tracking collar a month earlier, the handful of GPS locations transmitted after her release, and where they found her body, is this.

Fran was one of nearly 60 grizzly bears Lamb has collared for tracking studies in the Elk Valley in southeastern British Columbia in the past five years. Although each bear is given a designated number, Lamb says he can never remember who they are by their four-digit number, “so I always give them a human name.” Fran was three years old and weighed 117 kilograms. Her torso was light tan-grey, her legs near-black.

The valley is a scenic U-shaped corridor with sharp peaks and steep slopes lined with spruce, fir, and pine turning to the mixed forest on the narrow valley floor. There, the winding Elk River shares space with a CP Rail line and the two-lane Highway 3 (known as the Crowsnest Highway), the main highway through southern British Columbia. Fran was collared halfway between the valley’s two biggest towns, Fernie and Sparwood, in early October. GPS signals show that she spent the next two weeks nearby, in and around the hamlet of Hosmer. Her last ping there was October 23. A day later, the signal placed her 10 kilometers up the valley near Sparwood.