Hunting and Biology

(AP Photo/Canadian Wildlife Service)

I like to hunt, and for all the grief hunters catch from the animal "rights" crowd, you think we'd get credit when credit is due. Credit, for example, when through hunting, someone discovers a new type of animal. Or perhaps validates a legend. Both applied to the exciting discovery of a polar bear-grizzly bear hybrid.

Now, I believe in dropping what I am hunting in one shot - but I'd be especially careful to do it if I was shooting at either a polar bear or grizzly bear. But a hybrid? Good thing Idaho big-game hunter Jim Martell was a fine shot. It is also good he's loaded - a license to hunt polar bears set him back $45,450. Dang, I was upset when Michigan raised my resident white tail deer tag to $15. Forty-five G's for a polar bear? And that's before the taxidermist submits his bill. At least Jimmy's trophy made history.

Roger Kuptana, an Inuit tracker from the Northwest Territories, suspected the American hunter he was guiding had shot a hybrid bear after noticing its white fur was spotted brown and it had the long claws and slightly humped back of a grizzly.

Territorial officials seized the bear's body and a DNA test from Wildlife Genetics International, a lab in British Columbia, confirmed the hybrid was born of a polar bear mother and grizzly father...

"It's something we've all known was theoretically possible because their habitats overlap a little bit and their breeding seasons overlap a little bit," said Ian Stirling, a biologist with the Canadian Wildlife Service in Edmonton, Alberta. "It's the first time it's known to have happened in the wild..." Stirling said polar bears and grizzlies have been successfully paired in zoos and that their offspring are fertile, but there had been no documented case in the wild.

While that polar bear tag cost three times more than my car, Jim Martell was facing a possible $909 fine and up to a year in jail for shooting a grizzly. Oops. (I wonder if then he'd be re-arrested for using a gun to commit a crime in Canada?)

The DNA results saved him the jailtime and the fine. The Northwest Territories Environment and Natural Resources Department even intends to return the bear to him soon.

Tags: hunting , polar bear , grizzly bear