After Canadian scientists take a further look at it, an Idaho sport hunter will get back the hide of the big bear he shot in mid-April. If he stuffs it, it will make a unique trophy: A big dirty-blond bear with brown spots and a hump like a grizzly. He paid $50,000 for a polar bear hunting license. He would be in trouble had he shot a grizzly. Looks like he’ll get off on a first-ever hybrid waiver. In a story also circulated by the AP, Canadian Press’s Sara Minogue reports that a DNA test on the animal bagged in a remote area near Sachs Harbor in Canada’s Northwest Territories is the first proof of reports circulated for many years among Inuit hunters that polar bears and grizzly bears occasionally interbreed in the wild (as they have been prompted to do in zoos). CanWest News Services’s Nathan VanderKlippe provides additional proposed names for the cross-bear: pizzly, grolar bear, and polargrizz. This, The Tracker believes, is an opportunity for a science writer to look into the fairly recent speciation that split polar bears from brown bear ancestors and whether this event has any plausible pertinence to the Arctic topique du jour, climate change. Grizzlies, reports have it, are moving north and may have more meetings with paler kinfolk.

Stories:

Canadian Press Sara Minogue; CanWest News Servicces Nathan VanderKlippe; earlier story from CBC News;

Late Addition with superbly apt surnames in the byline: (May 12) AP Beth Duff-Brown

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