This week, I take a deep look at the Alberta and British Columbia governments misdirection when it comes to conserving caribou populations. Instead of reducing habitat fragmentation, their policy is to kill wolves. I also explore ancient human footprints discovered on the coast of British Columbia. This new trackway lends credence to the new theory that the continent’s first immigrants travelled along the coast, rather than through an ice-free corridor….and with that said, let’s get to it.
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Stop the Wolf Cull in Alberta
Carnivores have never had an easy time in the so-called civilized world. They’ve always been cast in the role of villain. They have been perceived as a direct danger to people or their livestock, or as competition with hunters for game animals.
As long as humans have shared the landscape with carnivores, we’ve hunted them. In vast areas of their traditional range, wolves, cougars, and many other carnivores have been hunted to the point where they disappeared from landscapes they’d hunted for thousands of years.
Unfortunately, as carnivores vanished, land managers seemed to forget the simple fact that predator and prey populations are intricately tied to each other. Ecosystems aren’t just places where stuff lives! They\re delicately balanced communities where each species has a specific role in keeping that ecosystem healthy.
Just like a human community, ecosystems contain numerous roles that need to be filled.
In any food chain, the producers, algae and plants that take their nutrients from the sun form the foundation.
Next up are animals that feed on the producers – herbivores. When scientists talk about food chains, they refer to trophic levels. Producers represent the lowest trophic level, and herbivores make up the next, taking advantage of plentiful supplies of plants to grow, reproduce, and disperse to new habitats.
Carnivores, in turn, feed on the herbivores, regulating their population so they don’t reproduce to a point where they exceed the landscapes ability to support them.
In an ecosystem with just plants and herbivores like elk, the elk population grows and grows, until the plant community begins to collapse under their unsustainable feeding pressure.
This is the situation Yellowstone suffered through after decades of predator control. Without wolves, elk had a devastating impact on the ecosystem. They hoovered up new vegetation as fast as it could grow, and all the other dominos in the food web began to fall apart.
In the Yellowstone example, as elk reproduced without check, they turned into ecological locusts, eating everything in their path. Unfortunately, when we look at the food web, much of the food they ate, other herbivores also relied upon. With little aspen left to eat, beaver disappeared, and with them, the wetlands they maintained.
The loss of wolves and cougar in Yellowstone allowed elk to reproduce to a point that the entire food web collapsed. In episode 45, I look at how the Yellowstone ecosystem was largely restored by reintroducing wolves from Jasper National Park.
Despite lessons from places like Yellowstone showing incontrovertible evidence of the importance of healthy predator populations, predator control still takes place in many areas of North America, including parts of Alberta.
Under the guise of a caribou recovery plan, in 2005 the Alberta government decided to wage an all-out war on wolves. Between 2005 and 2016, they killed more than 1,200 wolves through a sustained program of aerial hunting and strychnine poisoning, but this program was built on an entirely false premise.
Caribou thrive in wild, undisturbed old-growth forests. Ancient trees provide plenty of hanging lichens that offer food for the winter months. Unfortunately, in much of their range throughout Alberta and British Columbia, timber, along with oil and gas, have had a much more pressing economic benefit to governments limited by 4-year time spans and endless cycles of re-election worries.
At the same time, caribou need wild places. They avoid roads and trails, and if there is too much development it fragments the old growth forest they need and also begins to attract other hoofed animals better adapted to things like clearcuts, seismic lines, and roads.
If you cut down the trees for logging, roads, or oil and gas exploration, you create good habitat for deer and moose. As they move into the area, it attracts carnivores looking to take advantage of a new food source.
For caribou, habitat protection has been the most important component in their protection. The wild places in which the woodland caribou wandered were not conducive to predators like wolves. Deep unpacked snows were also not easy for wolves to travel in and so caribou thrived. Like moose, caribou are ice-age remnants. They thrive in deep snowscapes.
Unfortunately, Alberta and British Columbia viewed caribou habitat as an economic engine, slowly dissecting it; a seismic line here, an oil well there, “hey here’s a good bit of old growth forest for logging”.
It has been a death by a thousand cutlines. Critical old-growth forest has been destroyed by one development after another. As their habitat was destroyed, their population plummetted. To hear the provincial governments describe it, the drop in population has nothing to do with the simple fact that their home range has become a labyrinth of cutlines, seismic lines, roads, ATV trails, pipeline routes, and clearcuts. Ninety-five percent of their previously intact habitat has been dissected by development.
To the government, the real problem is wolves. Wolves moved into their habitat and they’re killing all the caribou. This ignores the fact that the hard-packed linear features that these developments created provided superhighways for wolves to move into formerly remote landscapes. It also created habitat attractive to moose and deer, both of which moved into these areas in large numbers.
If you provide a hoofed meatfest for wolves, they’ll move into the territory to hunt. It’s their job. Moose and deer are food and they are there to help regulate their populations. Unfortunately, this movement into previously remote landscapes, also means that caribou end up as accidental prey.
As caribou populations dropped due to over-development in their range, it was convenient for governments to blame wolves to divert attention from all the ways they sliced and diced the critical caribou habitat. Forget the fact they created highways to funnel moose and deer, an in turn wolves, into the region. They then sold the fiction that it’s those pesky wolves that are the real problem.
The solution has been to wage a war on wolves. Officials use two lethal techniques to kill as many wolves as possible; aerial hunting and strychnine poisoning.
When we talk about aerial hunting, it’s not simply flying a plane or helicopter and shooting wolves – no it’s much more insidious than that. On their first helicopter flight, they dart a single wolf, often the alpha male, and radio collar him. Then they let it go, and use the signal on the collar to track it back to the rest of the pack. Then they systematically pursue and shoot each wolf, and when they’ve killed its packmates, they save the last bullet for the collared wolf.
They can then retrieve the collar and use it for the next pack.
The use of strychnine poisoned bait stations killed not only a huge number of wolves, but many other animals as well, including grizzly bears, cougars, magpies, and ravens. Not only did it kill many untargeted animals, but death from strychnine poisoning is also a horrible way to die.
As John E. Marriott, a well-known Canmore wildlife photographer and wildlife advocate states in his his web series, Exposed:
“So imagine you’re getting ready for bed, and you lay down and get one of those leg cramps. Everyone’s had them. They last for 30 seconds and you go ‘ohh ohh ohh ohh’, and the next thing you know it’s over and you have a little laugh about it.
Well imagine if that leg cramped happened to you, and at the exact same time you had another leg cramp, on the other side. One of your forearm muscles started twinging, and then maybe your cheek, and then something in your stomach, and everything started getting worse and worse.
The whole time your mind is crystal clear, and you just start convulsing and twisting, and it’s torturous and it’s painful, and it gets so bad that your body simply cannot keep fighting, you cannot keep taking breaths, and your lungs shut down in the end…an agonizing, painful, slow death that might take anywhere from 20 minutes to an hour to three hours. That’s what dying from strychnine poisoning is like. “
I’ve embedded this important video in the show notes to this episode at www.MountainNaturePodcast.com/ep080.
The indiscriminate use of strychnine means that in the area today,manym of the areas native animals and birds are simply absent from the landscape.
Add to that the fact the Alberta government drastically increased hunting limits on moose to make the area less attractive to wolves.
What we have is a complete ecological collapse. First, destroy the caribou’s habitat, then when the changes to the habitat benefit more adaptable species like moose, deer, and in turn wolves. Wage a war against them under the false flag of conservation.
By 2016, the government had killed some 1,200 wolves, all to save less than 200 caribou between two herds known as the A La Peche and Little Smoky herds. Caribou are an iconic species in western Canada, but killing wolves will NOT help in the recovery of these herds. Stable habitat is what they need.
If there is any hope of protecting the herds, it is the responsibility of biologists to hold the government accountable
In Alberta and British Columbia, it’s now clear that our caribou herds are most likely doomed to disappear completely. The governments talk about how much they tried to protect them, but they made absolutely no effort to protect their habitat.
As Marriott puts it:
“It’s easy to blame industry for what’s gone on in the Little Smoky and the A La Peche, but that’s like blaming a kid for bad parenting. The hard truth is that our government doesn’t have a caribou recovery plan, and they most certainly have not taken any action on caribou recovery. They’ve tried to stick a bandaid over a gaping wound; managing by not really managing at all, managing as if they’re waiting until there are just 5 caribou left, at which point they’ll say: ‘oh that’s too bad…well, we tried!’
This is yet another glaring example of where we need, and expect, our governments to be stewards of our environment instead of letting industry buy those rights from all of us. This is a time when we need leadership, and we need the government to start taking responsibility for these issues.”
Several recent research papers have examined wolf populations in and adjacent to these caribou herds in order to see how human development impacts the movement of wolves, and also if there are ways that governments can reduce the attractiveness of the habitat to wolves.
In the first study, published in the Journal of Applied Ecology in June of 2016, researchers looked to see if they could confirm that the long linear features built-in caribou country were an attraction to wolves.
In order to prove that wolves benefitted from the building of roads, pipeline right-of-ways, seismic lines, and clearcuts, they needed to look at some specific aspects of wolf behaviour. Basically, did these linear features increase their rate of predation and the efficiency of their hunting.
Like many research projects, this is not as simple to show as it may seem. There are many things that have to happen in order for wolves to successfully make a kill. Two aspects in particular were of interest to researchers. First, they looked at the wolves foraging efficiency.
How efficient wolves are at exploiting territory for hunting is largely affected by two things, the amount of time they spend dealing with prey once captured, and their search rate which combines the distance they need to travel to find prey, the time they spend actually hunting, and the proportion of encounters that lead to a successful kill.
If linear features like roads were attractive to wolves, it may enable them to cover much larger distances in a shorter time than would be possible in more natural landscapes.
If linear features improve their search rate, then the rate at which they are able to successfully hunt caribou would also increase. While caribou prefer more remote landscapes, as their habitat becomes more and more fragmented by man-made features, it may become more difficult for them to avoid them, and thus allow wolves more opportunities to hunt them.
The researchers in this study were looking to see if wolves preferentially select linear features for movement, and whether their rate of movement, for instance, the distance travelled in a given time, was greater when travelling on linear features. This, in turn, would have an impact on their search rate.
It didn’t try to determine whether more caribou were taken on these linear features. According to their report:
“Specifically, we ask: (i) do wolves select linear features? (ii) Do wolves travel faster on linear features? and (iii) Is increased use of linear features related to increased daily movements?”
When they looked at the various changes that humans have made to the caribou habitat, it was clear there was a huge variety of different man-made features. Seismic lines represented one of the most pervasive landscape alterations.
Standard seismic lines are arrow-straight 10-metre wide cutlines used for oil and gas exploration. More recently, narrower, less linear seismic lines are beginning to be built, but they are still in the minority.
Other features include pipelines, trails for off-highway vehicles and snowmobiles, roads, power lines, and railways all cutting through once pristine forests.
The researchers placed satellite collars on 22 wolves from six different packs to gather GPS location data at regular intervals. This allowed them to determine how much time the wolves spent using man-made travel corridors.
They defined selections as: “features used more than their availability on the landscape, and avoidance as used less than their availability.”
The GPS location data also gave them the ability to determine how fast wolves moved across different landscape features, both on and off of man-made corridors.
Just because wolves may be able to travel faster on man-made features, it doesn’t mean they will travel farther. They could use the travel efficiency to allow them more time to rest or engage in social behaviour. For this reason, they also looked to see if wolves actually travelled farther when using seismic lines, roads, or trails.
In the end, they concluded that wolves do prefer man-made movement corridors, and they also used them to travel faster and farther than they would if they were in more natural landscapes.
They preferred long, straight features like railways, conventional seismic lines, and pipelines rather than narrow, sinuous routes like the newer low impact seismic lines and trails provided.
They preferred straight pathways with few obstacles and good sightlines, as long as there wasn’t too much human use while they were in the area. They avoided busier roads during the time that the traffic was the highest.
In winter, if the linear features are covered in deep snow, their benefit to wolves was reduced as the snow made it more difficult to take advantage of the routes. If the snow was packed by vehicles or snowmobiles then their movement was improved during the winter months as well, and those trails that were regularly packed down were preferentially selected.
As Kurt Illerbrun stated in an article in the Alberta Biodiversity Monitoring Institute Blog:
“Travelling from Edmonton to Calgary, most people take a four-lane highway instead of a maze of back roads. After all, a direct route to their destination leaves more time for actually doing whatever it was they set out to do. The same principle applies to animals—the less time they have to spend just getting around, the more they can devote to important stuff like finding food.”
Essentially, when it comes to wolves, as the old adage goes: “If you build it, they will come!”
While this study didn’t specifically look into whether the selection of linear features resulted in more caribou mortality, there is a pretty good chance that it would have.
Since linear features increase the travel distance, it should also increase the search rate, allowing more interaction with and opportunities to hunt caribou, even if they are not the wolves preferred prey.
Other studies have shown that kill rates of moose were impacted by the movement rates of wolves so it is safe to infer that it would be similar in areas where caribou are a potential prey animal for wolves.
While overdevelopment in caribou country is the root cause for plummetting caribou numbers across western Canada, even if the development was stopped today, it would take decades for the linear travel corridors to naturally regenerate.
On the short-term, there is no way to turn back the clock. As long as the corridors exist, it allows moose, deer, and wolves easy access to formerly remote caribou habitat.
What if there was a short-term solution to help reduce the attractiveness of the landscape to wolves? In a study published just this month in the Journal of Animal Ecology, researchers looked to see if there were ways that decommissioned roads and seismic lines could be rendered unacceptable for wandering wolves.
While it’s now clear that wolves take full advantage of linear corridors, what if the corridors were somehow roughened up to make travel more difficult? Could various restoration methods help to prevent the easy penetration of wolves into already heavily dissected wilderness areas?
They began by selecting locations that were already frequented by white-tail deer and wolves. The focussed on linear developments that wolves already were using regularly. Then they set up automated cameras at intersections, in locations where there was a high likelihood of capturing images of wolves. By using intersections, wolves could be captured from multiple directions depending on which linear route they were travelling.
They established 7 monitoring stations on permanent roads, both with and without above-ground pipelines.
In addition, they selected five locations where they were going to spread log debris across the trail for approximately 200 metres in an attempt to reduce the attractiveness of the trail to wolves.
In all, they set up a total of 64 motion-sensing cameras between August 8, 2011, and October 13, 2014. They analyzed a total of 520,630 images. They identified 37,599 human, 2,233 wolf, 8,046 white-tail deer, 1,618 black bear, 1,038 moose, and 960 woodland caribou events.
They found that the wolves used the linear pathways in varying ways depending on the time of year. Usage peaked in December and January and was lowest during June and July. Snow conditions played an important role in impacting how and when they used particular routes. When vehicles and snowmobiles packed the surface of linear features, wolves were twice as likely to utilize corridors in the winter months.
They were also pleased to learn that the treatment of seismic lines and other linear features with logging debris resulted in a 70% drop in usage by wolves. This is an important result. If treating linear features can reduce the attractiveness of those routes to wolves, it can be an important management tool in caribou recovery.
Way back in episode 43 I looked at caribou recovery efforts in southern British Columbia and how logging had attracted high numbers of moose into caribou country, which in turn, attracted wolves. One of the challenges with any caribou habitat that has been fragmented by human development is related to the simple fact that ending development does not solve the problem over the short term.
Getting rid of loggers doesn’t make trees grow back any faster. Abandoning old seismic lines still leaves behind linear corridors for decades before the forest can reclaim the landscape.
What this study does is to help offer some hope for solutions in the interim. It shows that while the damage has been done, there might be a way to reduce the area’s attractiveness to predators like wolves. This may help to reduce the influx of wolves as other prey species are attracted to disturbed landscapes.
By impeding the ability of wolves to travel on linear features, you also reduce the likelihood of them encountering caribou. Just like blocking trails can reduce off-highway vehicle and snowmobile use, it can also be a helpful tool in reducing the number of wolves moving into caribou habitat.
In the long run, the only thing that will save caribou is to protect all undisturbed habitat permanently. Caribou, unlike deer and moose, don’t do well in human-altered habitats. They are an animal of deep snowpacks and old-growth forests. Every new road, seismic line, clear-cut, and pipeline right-of-way is another slice at the heart of habitat.
The last mountain caribou in Banff National Park disappeared in 2009 when the last 3 individuals were killed in a single avalanche on Mount Hector. There were discussions about reintroducing them to the park, but they never amounted to anything. After all, there was a reason there were only 3 left in the first place.
Unfortunately, time has not been kind to the caribou of Jasper National Park either. Caribou numbers have also plummeted. Of the three Jasper populations, the Brazeau and Maligne herds both have less than 10 individuals. The Brazeau herd is now considered functionally extirpated, or locally extinct. The few animals left are simply too few to sustain a viable population into the future.
As for the Maligne herd, also with less than 10 individuals, it’s either close to, or also functionally extirpated. The Tonquin herd has 31 animals and is not far behind. If the numbers of the a la Peche herd continue to drop, it may be just a few years behind these more threatened herds.
Killing carnivores to protect caribou is not working. What needs to happen is for governments to protect habitats while they’re still intact. For our mountain caribou, it’s too late to protect the habitat, but with some government effort towards solving the real problem, habitat fragmentation and the associated linear features that bring deer, moose, and wolves into caribou habitat, there may still be hope.
These new studies have also given conservationists some tools to reduce the effectiveness of linear corridors and to discourage wolves from moving into critical caribou habitat.
Ancient Footsteps discovered on the British Columbia coast
For decades it was believed that the earliest humans to come to the new world arrived from Asia across a land bridge that connected present-day Russia to Alaska across the Bering Strait. They then travelled south, through an ice-free corridor between the mountain glaciers and the huge continental ice sheet.
It was an awesome theory until current science busted it out of the water. Good science has to be constantly challenged and what was once considered to be true can be suddenly exiled to the dust bins of science. In Episode 6 I look at the most recent studies that finally put the last nails in the coffin of the ice-free corridor theory. You can check it out at www.MountainNaturePodcast.com/ep006.
As one scientific reality is disproven, researchers need to look for alternate theories. In this case, there was a revival of a previously ridiculed chain of thought – a coastal migration. This had long been poo-pooed by serious scientists because there wasn’t a shred of evidence to support a coastal migration.
That’s the funny thing about science. Discoveries rarely occur when nobodies looking for them. In Episode 37, I detail one of the first discoveries to support the coastal migration theory. It occurred when archaeologists discovered a 14,000-year old site on Triquet Island on the west coast.
Archaeologists found fish hooks, spears, and fire making materials. Charcoal left from a cooking fire allowed them to get an accurate carbon date.
More recently, a study in the Journal PLOS One details the discovery of human footprints 11,000 to 14,000 years old on Calvert Island on the west coast of British Columbia.
It’s important to remember that sea levels were much lower during the ice age as vast amounts of water were locked up as glacial ice. In the area of Calvert Island, the current coastline would have been 2-3 metres lower than present beaches.
There is nothing like a walk along a coastal beach. Your nose is filled with the smell of salt water. The sounds of the surf sooth your senses. Why would it have been any different for families thousands of years ago?
Sure, the next wave washes all evidence of your passing away, but what if it didn’t? What if your footprint somehow persisted as water levels dropped and other sediments filled in the depressions left by your feet. If more and more sediments deposit over these first with the passage of time, your footprints might, if all of the stars align, persist!
That’s basically how many fossils survive. Every fossil is a miracle. As animals live and die, rarely do their bodies persist long enough to experience the miracle of fossilization. Footprints are even rarer, but they do persist, much to the delight of paleontologists.
In this particular study, a total of 29 human footprints from three different individuals has left an ancient record of what might have been a simple walk on the beach.
The tracks are old, and they’re also somewhat distorted so researchers had to be sure they could definitively identify them as human. Thankfully, few animal tracks are similar to human tracks: with one exception — bears. Bears, like humans, walk on their entire back foot. This creates a footprint that could on casual examination make a bear print look like a human print. On close examination though, they are nothing alike.
As this study states:
“The tracks excavated on Calvert Island have a clearly defined arch, lack characteristic claw marks, are not triangular in overall shape (rather the heels are offset to either the left or right), lack a long third phalanx (rather the first or second phalanx is longest), and they are overall narrower than bear tracks.|
Basically, this translates to “they ain’t no bear tracks”. As the tracks were digitally enhanced, it was clear they were made by humans and not any animal that might have existed in this area at the time the tracks were made.
The three sets of tracks represented a child’s size 8, a woman’s size 3 and a woman’s size 8-9, or a man’s size 7-8.
The tracks don’t actually form a nice pathway along the beach, but rather look like a place where three individuals stood together as a group.
These tracks are incredibly special. There are more dinosaur track sites than there are human trackways. In fact, there are only three other human trackways found to date in the new world:
- a set of 14,000-year-old human tracks found at the Pehuen Co site in the Buenos Aires Province of Argentina,
- a single footprint was found at Monte Verde in Chile which dates to 14,600 years ago and
- a set of two human trackways in Cuatrociénegas, Mexico dated at 10,700 and 7,200 years ago
As more and more research adds to the body of evidence supporting a coastal migration as opposed to the previously believed ice-free corridor migration, we’ll see more and more research focused on this newly revived, and previously ridiculed idea.
The researchers in this study based their results on a small excavation, just 4 x 2 metres in size, They purposely avoided disturbing a wider swath of sediments to leave the area untouched for future researchers.
This is what I love about science; it’s a fraternity and not a competition. Sure, each researcher wants to be the first to discover something new, like this ancient collection of human tracks, but it’s equally important to leave additional sediments undisturbed for future scientists to test their results.
and with that, it’s time to wrap this episode up. Don’t forget that Ward Cameron Enterprises is your source for expert guides to help you explore the mountain west, whether you’re organizing a bus tour, photography tour, or looking to explore the local landscape via trails or roads. We are here to help you get the most out of your mountain experience whether you’re looking for guides, or guidance, to help you create the memories you’re looking for. If you’d like to reach out to me directly, you can drop me a line at info@wardcameron.com, or hit me up on Twitter @wardcameron…and with that said, the sun’s out and it’s time to go hiking. I’ll talk to you next week.