Over the past few weeks, the news has been flooded with stories of countless graves of indigenous children, forgotten victims of Canada’s Residential School system.

This has brought into clear focus the horrible indignities done to our first nations over the span of more than a century and has forced many of us to open our eyes and recognize the horrible legacy of colonization and cultural genocide. 

As someone lucky enough to born into a life of privilege, I’ve always known about residential schools, but like many of us, I had no idea of the depth of abuse and sadness that was connected to these schools. This past week has hopefully opened the door for these forgotten voices to finally be heard and the process of true reconciliation to begin. 

Calls to Action of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada
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It struck me that I haven’t even read the 94 Calls to Action of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and so today, I’m going to use my voice to share them with you.

If you’d like a copy of the Calls to Action to read on your own, here is a link to download it: http://trc.ca/assets/pdf/Calls_to_Action_English2.pdf. If the link doesn’t open in your browser, simply right-click and select download and you’ll get a local copy of the Calls to Action.

For a copy of the Summary of the Full Report of the Commission, click here: https://publications.gc.ca/site/eng/9.800288/publication.html. While it is called a summary, it is a detailed 388-page breakdown of the findings’ work and conclusions.

If you are indigenous and would like someone to talk to, the Indian Residential School Survivors Society has a 24-hour toll-free support line at 1-866-925-4419.

Clearly, this is a very different episode than my previous ones. As a site that celebrates culture and history, it’s critical that we look at all sides and this is a story that really needs to be heard. It’s OK to love Canada but to also hold the nation to task for past atrocities. After all, taking responsibility is what love is really about anyway.

I’ll be back on a regular basis now to post new stories. After a lengthy pandemic hiatus, it’s time to get back in the studio and offer you more stories on the natural and human history of the mountain west.

Thanks for sticking with the show during the break.

The post 089 Calls to Action of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada appeared first on The Mountain Nature and Culture Podcast.

This is a special episode. I wanted to help those of you that are stuck indoors at one of the most wonderful times of the year to be playing outside. The birds are returning from their southern migrations with the first robins leading the way. The snow is melting and before you know it, the first crocuses will be thrusting their fuzzy-purple heads through the snow. Bears like Banff’s true harbinger of spring, The Boss, are now up and actively foraging.

South-facing slopes are quickly shedding their winter snowpack, and the valley bottom is melting and adding moisture to the thirsty soil of the Montane forests and meadowlands.

At this time, I want to add my condolences to any families that have been touched by this terrible disease. I’m saddened by your loss. As a nation, we are thankfully faring better than many other countries, but it will be years before we fully recover from the legacy of this disease.

I also want to extend my gratitude to all of the first responders, medical staff, grocery workers, truck drivers, and everyone else who is working so hard to try to keep goods flowing and our friends and family safe. You are all heroes.

I know it’s tough being told to stay home and stay inside so you can help us all stay safe. That got me to thinking of what we could all be doing to take advantage of this downtime. What can we do together so that when the day comes that we can slowly begin emerging from our unplanned homestays, we emerge from our dens with new knowledge, skills, and appreciation for the mountain landscape?

I’d like to create a dialogue so we can all help each other learn, grow, and maybe, enjoy having the time to hone our knowledge and skills.

How many episodes of this Podcast remain unlistened to? By the way, that’s an easy win. Hunker down in your easy chair and let the stories wash over you. Immerse into tales of ice battleships, insect apocalypses, reintroduced wolves, and locally filmed blockbusters.

You can follow ancient footprints leading archaeologists to entirely new theories as to how humans first migrated to the new world. Have you ever wondered how Calypso orchids fool bumblebees, check out episode 79? These are just a few of the 88 episodes, 240 stories and more than 44 hours of content. If all you do is binge listen to past episodes, you’ll emerge from isolation with a much greater knowledge of the mountains, their ecology and culture.

At this time, we’re limited to walking within a few kilometres of our front doors which means we’re walking the same routes over and over and over. It’s been one of the most difficult times for people like us that love the outdoors. Being limited to neighbourhood walks close to home can feel like being a bird in a cage.

As an educator, I look around me and I see stories. I see the story of a flower blooming in the spring. I see the story of the seasonal journey of a robin. I see long-dormant trees feeling the heat of the spring sun and responding with awakening roots and new leaves.

How are you doing right now? This pandemic has thrown all of our lives and our futures into limbo. In some ways right now, one day can simply flow into another day of isolation and frustration.

If it’s any consolation, we’re all bummed. The Coronavirus has trapped us all inside, while the natural world keeps on keepin’ on. At the same time, while we worry about today, history still hides stories waiting for us to discover them.

This unplanned pause made me think about what I should be doing to emerge from this isolation both energized and educated. What can I do every day that will make a better naturalist, guide, storyteller, photographer, and mentor?

As I looked inwardly on how I could use this time to grow, I suddenly realized that I wasn’t alone. It was clear that everyone who loves the outdoors is in the same boat. What if we created a community of lovers of nature and culture and built a way to collaborate to help us all see this as an opportunity for growth?

As I did a personal inventory of individual growth projects, I started thinking of ways that I might be able to share ideas with you. How can I help YOU take this time, time you never planned for or wanted, but take it anyway and leverage it to improve your knowledge of the landscape around you, the stories of the people that came before you, and the daily changes that are always happening if you take the time to notice them.

As a business, I tell clients that my job is simple, “I sell wow”, but sometimes it’s hard to feel that at the moment. I’m hoping to help you see your time trapped within walking distance of your driveway and help make it transformational.

Redefining your Neighbourhood walk

Are you going for neighbourhood walks? Are there any trails you can wander where you live? When you do your next walk, in addition to your awareness of physical distancing, why not throw a few additional things into your bag? For example, you could add:

• A pair of Binoculars
• A flower or bird Identification book
• A Journal to keep track of what you discover, new impressions, and maybe even a few sketches.
• What about a magnifying glass?

I know a lot of us are using our walks as our sole source of exercise and that’s important. The gyms and pools are closed. The golf courses are not likely to open and the famous spring hikes like Lady Macdonald, Mount Yamnusca, and Heart Mountain are all closed.

So do your walk. Get your exercise…and then do something else: do it again…differently. Walk slowly and along the way take the time to truly see the things you race past most days.

Stop and try to notice everything around you.

Listen to every sound. So often, our ears are tuned to urban sounds, but with a little practice, you begin to notice an entirely new soundscape – nature’s orchestra.

Wait for things to happen. By slowing your pace, you have the time to be truly present and aware of your surroundings. Before you realize it, you’ll notice a flash of feathers, or the chatter of a squirrel, or even the distant drumming of a pileated woodpecker.

When this happens, stop and look. While this sounds obvious, so much of what happens in nature happens in our peripheral vision. How often have you simply ignored that flurry of feathers or the distant sound of a woodpecker? Once you tune your peripheral vision, you’ll suddenly see a dark-eyed junco hoping through the leaf litter on the side of the trail. You’ll spot a red squirrel scramble up a spruce tree and then seemingly disappear, only to surprise you by chattering at you from a totally different tree.

Spending time simply watching these natural events helps you to become much more familiar with the familiar, those common animals and birds we often don’t even notice. Just because something is common, doesn’t make it uninteresting. I’m just as guilty of this as you. As a photographer, my files are full of images of exciting and dramatic things – even photographs of a female grizzly nursing her young. Do you know what my library is extremely lacking? I need photographs of ravens, red squirrels, dark-eyed juncos, all manner of chickadees. Too often, we dismiss the common and hunt for the extraordinary.

We need to embrace the common. Those animals, birds, and plants that we see every day are the foundation of our neighbourhood. The spectacular and exotic are exciting, but just like we need to spend the time to get to know our closest human neighbours, our most prominent ecological neighbours can teach us all manner of things.

Each local bird has a different role in the ecosystem. Its role is often referred to as its niche. Pay attention to how they interact with their environment. Where do they stop to feed? What foods do they prefer? Are they a specific feeder like a swallow catching insects on the wing or are they a more general feeder like a jay, willing to down just about any tasty morsel? Do they have any rivals for their territory? Just like in business, nature is full of competition and with warming climates, new competitors are moving into the territories of established species.

Around you, nature’s annual events are happening. Birds are returning from their southern migrations. There is no better time to begin to learn birds than during the spring and fall migration. Cold Canadian winters have taught birds with any lick of sense to get the heck out, and so many of our familiar friends head south for the winter months.

Those hardy birds that stick around, are truly northern specialists. Birds like the Canada jay, black-capped chickadee, red-breasted nuthatch, and the ever-present raven have learned to thrive in frigid Canadian winters. In fact, while we’re still shivering indoors, the Canada jay builds its nest in mid-winter. In another episode, I’ll go into great detail about their amazingly well-insulated nests and how they build the perfect winter nursery.

More importantly though is that during the summer months, jays collect all manner of tasty bits of food and store them in thousands of secret stashes – and it can remember where they are hidden. Heck, I can’t even find the yogurt in my fridge. Honey…where’s the yogurt? This larder disconnects them from the need to wait until warm summer temperatures make enough food available for them to be able to nourish their chicks. Instead, they, like us, wander over to their pantry and dinner is served. Suffice it to say, this common local is also one of the most interesting birds around us and well worth paying close attention to.

Watch for new arrivals

Are you noticing birds returning that you haven’t seen since last summer? Take note of who the arrivals are, and when you first notice them. Remember that nature has an annual cycle that repeats year after year. When did you see your first robin this year? I saw mine about two weeks ago. Have you heard its song yet? I haven’t. They’re back in the mountains but they’re not ready to serenade potential mates just yet. Do you live in Calgary or Edmonton? Are they singing there yet? Remember that different ecologies will have different annual patterns. The prairies are lower in elevation and often well ahead of the mountains in terms of their seasonal changes.

Are you heading west? Well dropping off of the Kicking Horse Pass you very quickly descend to the same elevation as Calgary by the time you arrive at Emerald Lake. Expect to see things there before you see them here. Next time you cross the divide though, how fast do you see plants that simply don’t exist on the east side of the Continental Divide. The change happens much faster than you might think.

Once the birds begin to arrive, watch for the changes. Pay attention to the trends as early arrivals are joined by those birds that migrate later. Who came first? When did you see your first warbler? osprey? or kingfisher?

Look for strangers. People that live in the city know where they should go and where they shouldn’t. They develop an innate ability to see something that just seems wrong. We develop urban survival skills by paying attention to the subtle signs that are always around us. Well, on your daily excursions, look for something that doesn’t belong. As you first begin this new adventure of observation, it might just be a bird, animal, or plant that you’ve not yet become familiar with.

As you’re observational skills progress though, you may be amazed the first time you see a bird that simply doesn’t belong here. Occasionally, during migrations birds can be blown off course. This is the time of year where you can encounter some exciting new visitors, but only if you’re looking for them.

We’re also on the cusp of seeing our first flowers of the season. Our garden has just emerged from beneath this winters snow, and already there are a few tiny flowers blooming. Any day now, the first crocus flowers will be spotted on sunny hillsides (if they’re not already there). Have you seen any crocuses yet? This begins a cascade of colour as more and more flowers begin to bloom.

While you’re walking look for plants that aren’t blooming but are showing signs that their flowers are imminent. It’s worth making a note in the notebook that you should start carrying around with you. Once you notice buds, you know where to look for flowers on tomorrow’s walk…or maybe the day after.

As a photographer, that’s my strategy for seasonal plant photography outings. Try to do a trail that traverses numerous habitats, and do it once a week. Buds that I see this week, with be next week’s flowers. I learn the seasonal procession of plants and each flutter that flushes from my periphery helps me to learn how other members of the community connect to those blooming flowers.

The first pussy willows are already out. Before we know it the poplar and aspen trees will be bursting into flower. Yes, you heard that right…flower. No they don’t get fancy flowers like a rose or orchid, but they flower just the same. Before the first leave comes out, male trees will produce long pollen-producing catkins and the female trees will respond with cotton-like seed bunches. Before you know it, the air is alive with floating poplar and aspen fluff…and it all begins before the first leave emerges. If you’re going to use the wind to spread your pollen, why let a bunch of leaves get in the way, flower first, and then the leaves can take over.

As you walk, look at each piece of green growing along the trail. When it flowers, see if you can recognize it. Did you know that many of our trails are lined with wild strawberry flowers? You do now. Look for them as they first appear. Try to learn as many new friends as you can, and learn them as they bloom. Once again, you become attuned to the spring succession of blooming. Next year, you’ll anticipate the first crocus, calypso orchid, and arnica.

As you walk, always look for the changes that are taking place. Every day, try to find a new surprise. Take your time until you find the hidden gems. Ask yourself why are they here? Understanding what draws plants to a particular habitat can help you unravel their true story. Are there certain nutrients in the soil that they need? Do they, like the paintbrush, parasitize the roots of other plants. What insects might be buzzing around and perhaps pollinating the flower?

As you walk, try to focus on what’s new today? What’s that sound?…try to learn the common ones.
If you see an animal…again, ask yourself “why is it here?” the answer matters. If you remember bear 148 a few years ago. It kept getting into trouble because it was drawn to a critical late summer food source, buffaloberries. Understanding what draws an animal to a particular location can help you gain a much better understanding of their seasonal habits, foods, and life history.

Learn your habitats…each habitat represents nature’s neighbourhoods.

Every habitat is a reflection of the amount of moisture, average temperature, growing season, soil, exposure to sunlight, availability of food, and risk to predators. A short walk can take you through many unique habitats. For the birds and animals that call a particular habitat home, it’s because it provides food, availability of mates, protection, or shelter. Many animals are drawn to specific habitats at different times of the year. This is why, in the case of grizzly bears, the riches available in particular habitats at specific times of the year, such as buffaloberries in mid-July, keep them moving seasonally through numerous habitats rich in nutritious plants, and in some cases, important animal foods like elk, deer, and moose calves.

Nature has a rhythm and by learning that rhythm, you can better understand the landscape around you. You’ll begin to look at the landscape like an old friend. As the seasonal rhythm progresses, you’ll look forward to the changes you know are coming and the shifting bird and animal populations that reflect those changes.

There’s no better time to study that rhythm then to do it when you are limited to walking the same route day in and day out. Drink it all in, study it, watch for the subtle changes. Why do calypso, or yellow lady-slipper orchids grow in one habitat, but not in an area adjacent? What is unique about where you see those beautiful flowers. Learn the pattern, and you’ll know what to look for next season…and when to hunt for it.

Get to know your neighbours

Walk with awareness. It’s too easy to walk with fear and resentment. As you walk, hone in on each sound and every flash of movement. Take time to ferret out the source so you can really learn the other members of your neighbourhood. Don’t know that bird, watch it closely. Does it have any distinguishing features? Unique markings? Where is it? Is it hopping around the leaf litter like a junco, perched along the trunk of the tree like a nuthatch or woodpecker, perching like a robin, or soaring like a hawk?

Does it remind you of a bird you know? For instance, you may not know the varied thrush if you see it, but you will notice that its body is very similar to a bird you do know – the American robin.
Listen to the sounds it makes. If you can, sing-along, memorize the sounds. Later, you can use a variety of low-cost apps to help you identify the bird, often by its song or call alone.

Follow your nose. What does your neighbourhood smell like – what is YOUR smell of home? For me, the most distinctive smell of my mountain home occurs early-June when the wolf willow blooms. While the flowers of this tall shrub are small and easily missed if you don’t look for them, the scent simply cannot be ignored.

If you find yourself walking along a river and are overcome by an incredibly sweet, yet pungent smell, stop and find the cause. You’ll see a tall shrub with silvery, willow-style leaves and, if you look carefully, small yellow bell-like flowers. These small flowers punch way out of their weight class when it comes to scent. That strong scent brings in bees which are essential for pollinating the flowers.

What does your neighbourhood sound like? Do you notice different smells at different times of the year? Depending on where you’re wandering, the soothing smell of a spruce and pine forest will contrast with the pitchy smell of a forest attacked by the mountain pine beetle.

Smell is the sense most tied to memory. My father was a pipe smoker. Although few people smoke a pipe today, whenever someone lights one up, I’m instantly reminded of my father and my mind wanders to fond memories of times spent with my dad. Smell connects us like no other sense.

Meet your elders

If you know an elder, sit down and talk with them if you can. If you can’t risk sitting down with them, see if you can use Zoom, Skype, or even just a phone call to connect with them. Our elders are the keepers of our history. We live in a valley that is rich in history. The mountains have a history resplendent with stories of exploration, coal mining, alpinism, and tourism, and those are just the new stories. While European settlers can boast 150 years or so of exploration, our indigenous neighbours have been here for at least 10 times as long. Their connection with the landscape, its ecology, and history is exceedingly rich and vital to our understanding of the mountain ecology.

If you have an opportunity to talk to an elder, don’t waste it. Let them teach you a story, and if you can, record the story (with their permission) and share it. Our ability to hear the stories from the people that lived them has an expiry date. Last year I was lucky enough to take a tour of the mining history of Canmore with Gerry Stephenson. For years, Gerry was the head mine engineer for the Canmore Mines. He built Quarry Lake, Canmore’s most important summer swimming hole from an old open pit mine.

Gerry’s stories taught me things I never ever knew about Canmore – and I’ve lived here for 35 years. Unfortunately, Gerry passed away this past year. I’m so thankful that I had the chance to learn from his many decades of knowledge, and his amazing stories. Remember, stories live as long as the people that lived them live…or as long as the people that loved them share them. I have a feeling that Gerry will be with us for a very long time because of the many people who continue to share his stories.

What is YOUR isolation story?

The conditions placed upon us during this pandemic haven’t happened since the 1919 Spanish flu pandemic more than 100 years ago. A month ago, your world changed and instead of waking up, showering, brushing your teeth, and sallying forth to the salt mines, you were told to stay home and binge-watch Netflix to keep us all safe. I know you didn’t settle into 15 seasons of Glee, but rather you’re going to use this episode as a rallying cry of careful exploration.

At the same time, nobody will have the same experience that you’re having. What is YOUR isolation story? I’m hoping that some of you will be able to share something that happened during your isolation that became transformational. When every day is the same as the next, only you can decide to seize the day and make this experience meaningful. If you have found new meaning, new understanding, or an expanding sense of place, I want to hear from you.

Our time in isolation can be transformational, or something else. The choice is up to you. Let me help you find the way to a new understanding. Your explorations will also help me to grow as well. Simply writing this episode has been immensely motivating to me. You see, I’m on the same journey as you. Just like you, I’ve been seduced by the ability to pick a new trail every day. I’ve been hamstrung by schedules so that I’ve had to race along a trail towards some distant destination. Once I got there, I’ve mowed down a sandwich, rang the bell, and raced back to the car.

What I’m proposing here is an entirely new type of exploring. As a guide, my favourite product is a two-hour nature walk I do for Australian clients. We go out for two to two-and-a-half hours and don’t even walk two kilometres. It’s about immersion. There is no particular destination. It’s a lovely loop trail, but the focus is not on getting anywhere, it’s on being where we are. It’s about exploring several neighbourhoods and helping guests understand the unique landscape we have here.

I’m now doing the same as you. Exploring more intimately, listening more carefully, documenting more meaningfully, and loving where I live more deeply.

What have you learned about your neighbourhood, culture, or ecological self because of this unplanned opportunity for reflection? None of us planned this, but I want to know that some of us are emerging with a renewed understanding of everything that grows, tweets or twitters, bugles, sings, parasitizes, migrates, predates, and…whatever I’ve missed.

What’s happening in your yard? While mine still has a deep snowpack, it won’t be long before I see green grass and yellow dandelion heads popping up. If truth be told, in my yard, it’s mostly clover and dandelions, with the occasional blade of grass. Have you ever really looked at a dandelion? What is it? Is a dandelion a flower or is it a colony of flowers? Our yard and garden can be our safari.

Mountain Nature and Culture Book Club

How many books have you bought that remain unread? Why don’t we read a few of them together? What books have you been waiting to read? I have two in particular that have been patiently waiting for me to read them:

• Firestorm: How Wildfire Will Shape Our Future by Edward Struzik. This book explores the changing landscape of fire across western North America. Fire regimes have changed over the past two decades due partly to changing climates, but much more as a result of a century of fire suppression. This book looks at the latest science and offers a prescription for creating a new future where we embrace the natural role of fire and no longer fight natural processes vital to ecological integrity.
• The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate – Discoveries from a Secret World,  by Peter Wohlleben. New research has shown that trees form a community with parent trees nurturing the community by sharing nutrients with those trees that may be sick and helping to reduce the impacts of extremes of temperature, and the impacts of drought. Wohllenben shows that forests are indeed alive and they are also helping each other.

I’ve just created the Mountain Nature and Culture Book Club. If you’d like to join, pop over to Facebook and simply type the group name into the search bar. What’s that? You don’t do Facebook. In that case, go to the website for this podcast and subscribe to the newsletter. You can connect with the show at MountainNaturePodcast.com. While there’s a group on FaceBook, I’ll have a mailing list that will allow everyone to connect. Once a week, we’ll do an online video meeting where you can join with your computer, smartphone, or just your landline if you’re into nature and culture but not the tech.

Maybe collectively we can spur each other to turn the pages and power through procrastination.

New Tools

At the same time, I’ve been thinking how I can use this time to brush up on knowledge that sometimes fades during a long winter, and also learn new skills in preparation for the day we all venture out again.

Years ago, when I was in university, I used flashcards to study for exams. Each card would have a question on one side and the answer on the other. By repeatedly reviewing the cards, I gradually absorbed the material.

I’ve been developing a system of flashcards to refresh my memory of locally flowering plants. Every spring, I head out and while most of the wildflowers are old friends, there are always those that I encounter on a more occasional basis. I’m building a huge set of flashcards that will help you and me to focus on which plants we individually need to either learn or, as the case may be, reacquaint ourselves with.

I’m also looking to expand my birding skills. As a naturalist, I’ve always been a generalist and as such, I’m merely a mediocre birder. Not only am I developing a series of flashcards for learning visual identification, but also audio. How many times have you been out and heard a very distinctive bird song or alarm call? I’m comfortable with the most common birds, but I have a great deal to learn.

This is why I’m developing a series of audio flashcards, but instead of an image, it will play a mystery song or call of a bird found in the Rockies. Like all flashcards, repetition will (hopefully) help train my ear to better recognize the soundscape that surrounds me as I wander the mountain landscape.

I’m going to make these flashcards available to anyone that is interested in having a copy. If we’re all stuck inside together, then why not learn together. They use an open-source application called Anki that is available on desktop, Mac, Android, and iOS. If you use any of the major platforms, you should be able to take advantage of these learning tools.

Would you like to get your hands on these tools? Simply visit MountainNaturePodcast.com and click the subscribe link. You’ll get an email with a link to download the cards as well as instructions on how to set things up for your iPhone, Android, or desktop computer.

It’s going to take a week or so for me to get them ready so please be patient. The reason I’m working on a subscription basis is that the decks will be an evolving and growing thing. I’ll add new cards, improve cards as I get new photographs, and I’ll incorporate the feedback from people that are using them.

Are there tools you would like to see? Let me know in the comments about this episode. If I don’t know your interest, I won’t be able to see how I can help.

Nature and Culture have a new home

I’ve just created the Mountain Nature and Culture Facebook group. It’s a place where we can share our learning adventures, important educational material, new discoveries, and relevant media stories.

If you learned something new today that you think other members would benefit from, then this is the place to share it. We’re all in this together and this is our opportunity to build a new community of nature lovers, cultural explorers, and ecological observers. Are you in? You know what to do if you’d like to participate. Just visit MountainNaturePodcast.com and join the adventure. Let’s all grow together.

This episode has altered so many of the plans that I had for this podcast. It’s altered them because my focus is now shifted to offering new skills and ideas so we can grow and learn together. Over the next few weeks, I’ll be doing shows focussed on how we can implement some of the ideas I’ve put forward this week.

I’ll also see if I can collaborate with people that can bring unique perspectives to the conversation. If you know of someone I should talk to, please drop me a line at info@wardcameron.com and if it fits our new path, I’m happy to reach out.

You can also reach out personally on Twitter @wardcameron. Don’t forget that when this all begins to change, that Ward Cameron Enterprises is here to help you to explore the mountains around you. Let me guide your exploration, learning, and if I can help lead you on a personal journey towards becoming more intimate with your mountain landscape. Just because, we can’t go out in person, doesn’t mean we can’t work together. I’m available for personal consulting and training. All you need to do is reach out and we’ll create a personal route to exploration.

I really want to thank you for taking time out of your day to share it with me. We’re all on a pandemic enforced journey and I hope to be a positive part of yours. Stay safe, explore with purpose, observe, record, and reconnect with your sense of wonder. I look forward to talking with you again soon.

The post 088 Bringing Nature Closer When You Can’t Go Far appeared first on The Mountain Nature and Culture Podcast.

To listen to this episode, click the play button above

As I start this story, I have a confession to make. When I was a kid in high school, of all the subjects I was required to study, I hated history the most. Like many kids, I saw history as nothing but wars and dead people, and a list of dates to be memorized and forgotten as soon as the test was over.

Unfortunately, like many students, it turned out it wasn’t history I disliked, it was the passionless way that it was taught to me. As a kid, it wasn’t relevant to my life and I couldn’t touch it or emotionally connect to it.

In the early 1990s, when I first began my career as a Park Naturalist there were two groups, the history folks and the nature folks, and I was a nature guy. Surprisingly though, I later had one of those eureka moments that often change things. One day, I suddenly realized that if I wanted to understand nature, I also had to understand people’s interaction with it. The story of the building of the Canadian Pacific Railway would be pretty dull, were it not for the physical obstacles that had to be overcome in order to complete the line.

I realized that history wasn’t just wars and dead people, history was all about stories, and people who once lived, dreamed, suffered, adventured, and left behind a rich legacy of experiences and knowledge. I became a ravenous consumer of history and to this day, my love of nature is enhanced by my love of history.

If you have teenagers in your life that are bored with history, stop teaching it to them, instead, tell them a story that took place at another time. Touch their imagination. Help them see themselves in other places, times, and stories. You may see their eyes open just like mine did. Unfortunately, it took many years before I realized how much the past could teach us and how much it influences our lives every day.

This week, I’m reaching back to the darkest days of the second world war, a time when the Allied forces were on the brink of defeat, and German submarines ruled the north Atlantic.

Historians often say that those who ignore the lessons of history are doomed to repeat them, and in some ways, that leads us into our story.

To understand our story, we need to look much further back, to the very first submarines.

The Earliest Submarines

The predecessors of today’s submarines date back to 1578 when William Bourne built a prototype in England. It was a crude affair, but in 1596 a Scottish mathematician and theologian, John Napier pondered their future. He wrote:

These inventions besides devises of sayling under water with divers, other devises and strategems for harming of the enemyes by the Grace of God and worke of expert Craftsmen I hope to perform.

History of Submarines, Wikipedia

In 1648, Bishop John Wilkins of Chester, England pondered the potential of submarines when he described these 5 advantages of underwater boats:

1. 1. Tis private: a man may thus go to any coast in the world invisibly, without discovery or prevented in his journey.
   2. Tis safe, from the uncertainty of Tides, and the violence of Tempests, which do never move the sea above five or six paces deep. From Pirates and Robbers which do so infest other voyages; from ice and great frost, which do so much endanger the passages towards the Poles.
   3. It may be of great advantages against a Navy of enemies, who by this may be undermined in the water and blown up.
   4. It may be of special use for the relief of any place besieged by water, to convey unto them invisible supplies; and so likewise for the surprisal of any place that is accessible by water.
   5. It may be of unspeakable benefit for submarine experiments.

History of Submarines, Wikipedia

The first submarine to operate like modern subs, being able to submerge and travel underwater, while later surfacing, was built by a German-American engineer named Julius Kroehl in 1866. It could dive as deeply as 31 metres or 103 feet.

Robert Whitehead invented the first self-propelled torpedo in 1866. With torpedos, submarines could finally take their role as a terrifying weapon of war. Whitehead’s torpedo could travel at 13 km/hr and hit a ship more than 600 metres distant.

Torpedo equipped submarines first debuted in the Russo-Turkish War when Russian submariners sunk the Turkish ship Intibah.

By the early 1900s, the modern submarine began to take shape. They were equipped with combination diesel-electric engines allowing them to run on diesel when surfaced and electric batteries while submerged. The scene was now set for World War I.

Submarine Warfare during World War I

Entering the war, the Royal Navy had the biggest submarine fleet in the world with 74, while Germany only had 20.

By the time war broke out, torpedos had become effective up to 975 metres. While the Germans had fewer subs, they sent them out into the North Sea where they sunk the HMS Pathfinder and Formidable.

When British forces chose to keep their large battleships closer to shore and away from the German subs, the Germans aimed their torpedos at merchant ships ferrying supplies between North America and Britain. As an Island, England relied heavily on imported munitions, weapons, food, and other necessities from Canada and the U. S.

On May 7, 1915 the passenger liner Lusitania was torpedoed and 1,198 passengers and crew lost their lives. As the submarine war intensified, the Allies used mines, a fleet of almost 10,000 ships and almost as many planes to hunt down the German subs. While the Germans lost 178 U-boats, their subs managed to sink 5,000 ships.

Towards the end of the first world war, Canadian Robert Boyle led a team that developed the first active sonar that detects hidden submarines by bouncing sound waves off of their hulls and listening to the echo. Since sonar operators know the speed sound waves travel underwater, they can determine the distance of the sub by measuring the amount of time it takes for the sound waves to reflect.

Boyle moved to Alberta in 1919 and became Dean of the Faculty of Applied Science at the University of Alberta. Later he joined the National Research Council of Canada as the director of physics and supervised additional research into radar during the Second World War.

U-boats and the Battle of the Atlantic

When World War II broke out, the Battle of the Atlantic became the longest continuous battle of the war. It was also one that had Canadians right in the middle. The first salvos began when war was declared in September of 1939 and didn’t end until the Germans surrendered in May of 1945.

Like the first world war, Britain absolutely depended on supply ships bringing food, munitions, and other needed goods to England. Without these vital supply lines, allied forces could never have defeated the Germans.

The German Unterseeboots, or U-boats as they became known operated virtually unrestricted across the Atlantic all the way to the shores of Canada and even within the confines of the St. Lawrence River.

Coastal ports in Halifax, Sydney, and St. Johns were staging points for huge convoys of ships destined to sail across the Atlantic for Britain. The Germans resumed their unrestricted torpedoing of military and merchant ships, just as they had done in World War I, but with a renewed vigour.

The German U-boat fleet grew from 30 to some 300 subs and they began hunting in groups referred to as wolfpacks. Between January and July of 1942, they sunk 400 Allied ships. Each ship was precious as it took far longer to build a new ship than it was taking the German’s to sink them.

The use of sonar helped Allied ships better detect subs, and innovations like depth charges helped them to destroy more of them.

According to a story on Canada’s veteran’s affairs website:

The growth of Canada’s navy was remarkable. At the beginning of the Second World War, the RCN had only six ocean-going ships and 3,500 personnel. By the end of the war, Canada had one of the largest navies in the world with 434 commissioned vessels and 95,000 men and women in uniform. Canada’s industry also played an important role in the growth of our military and merchant navies. From 1941 to 1945, Canadian shipyards produced approximately 403 merchant ships, 281 fighting ships, 206 minesweepers, 254 tugs, and 3,302 landing craft.

The Battle of the Atlantic, Veteran’s Affairs Canada

Canada played an integral role in the Battle of the Atlantic, and in 1943 Canadian Rear Admiral Leonard Murray took command of all the naval and air forces in the North Atlantic. This was the only theatre of war commanded by a Canadian.

The Veterans Affair story continues:

Helping the Allies triumph in the Battle of the Atlantic came at a high price. More than 1,600 Merchant Navy personnel from Canada and Newfoundland were killed. Indeed, percentage-wise, their casualty rate was higher than those of any of Canada’s fighting services during the Second World War—one out of every seven Merchant Navy sailors who served was killed or wounded.

The RCN and RCAF also paid a high toll in the Battle of the Atlantic. Most of the 2,000 RCN officers and men who died during the war were killed during the Battle of the Atlantic, as were 752 members of the RCAF. There were also civilian casualties. On October 14, 1942, 136 people died when the ferry SS Caribou was sunk as it crossed from Nova Scotia to Newfoundland.

The Battle of the Atlantic, Veteran’s Affairs Canada

The North Atlantic was the perfect hunting ground for German U-boats. It covered a vast area, much of it so far from land that it was too far for air patrols to protect the ships in the Allied convoys. While the ships travelled in huge convoys to ensure submarines couldn’t sink them all, this lack of air cover left the entire fleet vulnerable.

By the end of 1941, the British Admiralty was getting desperate. As U-boats sent ship after ship to the bottom, the lack of a place for planes to land and refuel continued to leave the convoys vulnerable.

In his memoirs, Sir Winston Churchill confessed that the only thing that really frightened him in the war was the u-boat peril. He wrote:

…our life-line, even across the broad oceans, and especially in the entrances to the Island, was endangered. I was even more anxious about this battle than I had been about the glorious air fight called the Battle of Britain.

Wit and Wisdom, Finest Hour 154, Spring 2012

Plans for an Ice Aircraft Carrier

Around this time, just about any idea, no matter how strange, had to be taken into consideration. In 1942, Geoffrey Pyke, an eccentric advisor to Lord Louis Mountbatten had an idea. He recalled British military ships testing artillery on icebergs in the Atlantic but, try as they might, they did little to damage these unstoppable mountains of ice.

The sinking of the Titanic after hitting an iceberg in 1912 also attested to the invincibility of ice. What if the navy could harness the power of ice to create an invincible airstrip for allied planes to land and refuel to protect convoys in U-boat alley? At first, Pyke considered the possibility of dragging large sections of the northern icecap south so they could be harnessed for airstrips.

Mountbatten pitched the idea to the Prime Minister, and Churchill put his support behind the idea. According to a historical report by Susan Langley in the Canadian Journal of the History of Science:

On 4 December 1942, Churchill dictated a ‘Most Secret’ memo detailing how these ice airfields should be constructed. He admitted and demonstrated an absence of knowledge about the physical properties of ice and observed that the concept was only possible if the materials and labour in the form of seawater and low temperatures were provided by nature.

Operation Habbakuk: A World War II Vessel Prototype, Susan B.M. Langley

There were some lofty specks required as well. It would need to rise at least 15 metres above the waterline to accommodate rough seas. Clearly, it would be impossible to just excise a large ice flow for this project. In addition, since the visible portion of any iceberg represents only around 10% of its size, a 15-metre deck height would extend 150 m below the surface. This would simply be too huge to tow around the ice.

It became clear that any ice aircraft platform would need to be constructed rather than excavated. There were many challenges, including the fact that once you build an ice ship, you may lose the invincibility of icebergs; and that was the main attraction of the project.

Nevertheless, plans were made to move forward with a prototype. The actual ship would be enormous, stretching 610 m long, by 91 m wide and 61 m depth to ensure that 15 metres would be above the waterline.

A total of 20 electric motors were to be installed to power refrigeration and propulsion. When the project was approved, the British Admiralty came to the one nation that really knows ice – Canada, in particular, the National Research Council, and Dr. C.J. Mackenzie.

The code name for the project was to be Habbakuk. This term, coined by Geoffrey Pyke was a mis-spelling of the Old Testament book of the prophet Habakkuk which stated:

Look at the nations and watch and be utterly amazed. For I am going to do something in your days that you would not believe, even if you were told. (Habakkuk 1:5).

If you want to build an ice battleship, then you better learn everything you can about the properties of ice, and so research projects were undertaken at the Universities of Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and Alberta. Researchers at Lake Louise in Banff National Park as well as Montreal, New York, and London tested the properties of ice.

In the end, they chose a tiny lake in Jasper National Park known as Patricia Lake as the site to build a scale model of the ship. The decision to select Patricia Lake was related to the town of Jasper having good railroad connections as well as the proximity of a camp of conscientious objectors, mostly of Mennonite and Doukhobor faiths nearby.

During the war, conscientious objectors refusing to do military service were required to make themselves available for alternative services as and when required. These conchies, as they were often described, provided the labour to build the Patricia Lake prototype, although they had no idea they were actually working on a wartime project.

While Dr. Mackenzie originally believed the idea of an ice ship to be “another of those mad wild schemes (that started) with a couple of crazy men in England”, he took his task seriously.

For their prototype, they used lake ice, despite the fact that any operating ships would need to be built in place as they were going to be too immense to transport from a shipyard to any seaport. Mackenzie wrote:

At the present time I am being led to believe that the use of material cut from lakes is completely out of the question but we must manufacture the material either in place or in blocks. I think the welding would present no difficulty were it not for the coefficient of expansion and I think some form of porous macro reinforcement is absolutely essential.

Operation Habbakuk: A World War II Vessel Prototype, Susan B.M. Langley

Once again, Geoffrey Pike had a solution. Pyke learned of research being done in Brooklyn by Dr. Herman Mark where they discovered that adding wood fibres to water helped to create a much stronger form of ice. Pyke handed a report penned by Mark to molecular biologist (and future Nobel Laureate) Max Perutz. Perutz, who once a student of Dr Mark, realized that adding fibre to add structure to ice was very similar to adding metal wires to concrete to increase strength and stability.

When Perutz tested the process, he discovered that by adding as little as four percent wood pulp, the resulting ice was a strong as concrete. In one experiment, they made a block 60 x 60 x 30 cm and when they fired a bullet at it, the bullet simply shattered. He then coined the term Pykrete by melding Pyke’s name with the word concrete.

It seemed like the perfect material for a ship of ice while reducing the brittle character of pure ice.

Apparently, Lord Mountbatten was so excited about Pykrete that he just had to demonstrate its value to Churchill himself. According to Mountbatten’s biographer, David Lampe:

What happened next was explained several years after the war by Lord Mountbatten in a widely-quoted after-dinner speech. “I was sent to Chequers (Britain’s Prime Ministerial country house) to see the Prime Minister and was told he was in his bath. I said, ‘Good, that’s exactly where I want him to be.’ I nipped up the stairs and called out to him, ‘I have a block of a new material which I would like to put in your bath.’ After that, he suggested that I should take it to the Quebec onference.” The demonstration in Churchill’s steaming bath had been most dramatic. After the outer film of ice on the small pykrete cube had melted, the freshly exposed wood pulp kept the remainder of the block from thawing.

Pyke, the Unknown Genius, Lampe, David

Not only was Pykrete strong, but it was buoyant, light, moldable, it and could even be turned on a lathe. Unfortunately, it also meant that ice couldn’t simply be harvested, it had to be purpose manufactured and that was going to dramatically raise the cost of building one of these ships.

Patricia Lake was far too small to build a full-size version of the planned ice aircraft carrier, so a 1:10 scale model was planned. In the end, though, while the depth and width fit the 1:10 scale measurement, the model’s 18 m length was far less than the 61 m necessary to be fully at scale. All this time, though, u-boats continued to hammer supply convoys crossing the Atlantic, but things were beginning to change on that front.

By the middle of February, 1943 work was underway on the shores of the lake. The construction was supervised by Dr. C. Niven, and the prototype was finished by April 10th.

According to Susan Langleys article:

In the meantime work progressed on the model under the auspices of Dr C. Niven. Although the model was ostensibly under construction between 1 February and 31 March 1943, in fact work did not begin until the middle of February. Most of the delay was caused by the late arrival of materials and the interval wsa (sic) spent experimenting with various means of bonding ice blocks. Electricity was brought in by means of lines to a small generating station at the prestigious Jasper Park Lodge and an area was cleared on the frozen surface of the lake, the wooden flooring laid and wall framing erected. Pitch caulking took place from 15-21 February, followed by asphalt covering for the floor and walls  (22-27 February) while tinsmiths worked on the ducts. The first layer of ice was laid on the flooring between 1-6 March, but piping problems began to appear. A brine coolant had originally been chose; however, many joints arrived damaged and leaked badly, leading to the decision to use cold air instead. About this time Mackenzie began to express doubts as to the project’s viability. Also, the weight of the ice and insulation rising to eight feet up the walls was causing the floor to bow up ward. By 13 March the floor piping was completed and sealed with pitch. The ducts had been packed round with sand and then covered over with crushed ice and water. By 20 March, the wall piping was in place as was the second 2 7-inch thick layer of ice. The structure wsa (sic) cut loose from the surface ice of the lake, partly to test how it floated and partly to relieve the weight strain on the floor. It sank to the level of the surface of the ice flooring inside and remained stable. In the following week the third layer of ice was installed and a channel cut in it for a longitudinal duct to run beneath the refrigeration chamber. By 10 April the machinery was in place and functioning. A roof was built over the model to protect the machinery and open surface insulation from the elements. This gave it the appearance of a ‘boathouse’

Operation Habbakuk: A World War II Vessel Prototype, Susan B.M. Langley

As the prototype was completed and further testing took place, project manager Mackenzie recommended that it be discontinued. By June, the refrigeration equipment was turned off, and slowly, slowly, by late autumn, the remaining portions of the model sunk into the depths of the lake. It’s twisted hulk still sits on the bottom of Patricia Lake and attracts the occasional adventurous scuba diver who wants to explore this unique piece of Canadian history.

The cost of building a full-size Habbakuk was estimated to be as high as £17 million which was still less than half the cost of a conventional aircraft carrier. Unfortunately, conditions were changing in the North Atlantic.

After the allies invaded Iceland in 1940, the island nation offered a convenient location for planes to take off and land in order to offer protection for convoys as they traversed u-boat alley. At the same time, new plane designs allowed them to fly much further and stay over the convoys for longer as well.

Finally, advancements in centimetric radar allowed ships and planes to identify smaller and smaller targets and this was helping to turn the tide in the submarine wars as more German u-boats were sent to the bottom.

All-in-all, Habbakuk was obsolete before she was even built. However, their research proved that ice aircraft carriers could be built and that the technology was viable. Unfortunately, in this case, it would take too long and cost too much money to put a fleet of these ships into operation in the timeline needed.

As a nation, the Battle for the Atlantic helped show how valuable Canada could be to the war effort. Without the victory at sea, there was no way the Allies could have won the war. The massive supply convoys travelling between Canada’s east coast and England were Europe’s lifeline.

During the war, 59 Canadian-registered merchant ships were sunk, but our fleet made 25,343 transits of the Atlantic hauling almost 165 million tonnes of essential supplies to Allied Europe.

Despite the vital role that Canada’s merchant seamen made to the war effort, they were not recognized as veterans and were not given either veteran’s benefits or pensions. It took until 1992, almost 50 years after the end of World War II before they were finally, formally, recognized.

This finally made them eligible to receive disability pensions, allowances and health care benefits available to other veterans, but they never received any retroactive compensation for the almost five decades they were denied benefits.

After four Merchant Navy veterans began a hunger strike on Parliament Hill in 1998, the government finally agreed to award cash payments to make up for so many years of withheld benefits. Payments began in 2000, 55-years after the end of the war and in 2003, Parliament designated September 3 as Merchant Navy Veteran’s Day.

Today, Patricia Lake is a beautiful place to relax, swim, canoe, and even fish – as long as you have a valid National Park Fishing license. If you’re lucky, you may spot a great blue heron or loon plying the emerald green waters of the lake.

A 4.8 km loop trail follows the shoreline of the lake and offers opportunities to spot local wildlife like elk and mule deer. Jasper Dive Adventures also offers guided tours for qualified divers to descend into the lake to visit the remains of the ice boat.

On the shore of the lake is a plaque dedicated by the Alberta Underwater Archaeological Association telling the story of Project Habbakuk. If you’d like to explore the history of Alberta’s Rocky Mountain Region, why not visit WardCameron.ca and book your custom guided experience now.

The post 087 Ice Battleships and Alberta’s Connection to WWII’s Battle of the Atlantic appeared first on The Mountain Nature and Culture Podcast.

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If you’re a regular listener to this podcast, then you understand the need for wildlife conservation. Every day, we see news story after news story detailing the plights of some of our more charismatic species at risk; animals like the American badger, burrowing owl, grizzly bear, and woodland caribou.

Unfortunately, these headline stealing species often hide a much more imminent problem; the disappearance of immense numbers of the world’s insect populations. Scientists are only beginning to get an understanding of the enormity of the problem because quite simply, most of the species disappearing aren’t even known to science.

It’s estimated the planet is home to some 5.5 million insect species, but only one-fifth have ever been described or identified. This means that any estimate of the number of insect species at risk is merely speculation due to a lack of understanding of the number of undescribed species. In the February, 2020 issue of Biological Conservation, there is an amazing article titled: Scientists’ warning to humanity on insect extinctions. 

Without insects, most of the world’s ecosystems would simply collapse. They form the foundation upon which an almost infinite number of species interact. Without insects humanity, along with countless other species would struggle to survive. The article states:

“With insect extinctions, we lose much more than species. We lose abundance and biomass of insects, diversity across space and time with consequent homogenization, large parts of the tree of life, unique ecological functions and traits, and fundamental parts of extensive networks of biotic interactions. Such losses lead to the decline of key ecosystem services on which humanity depends. From pollination and decomposition, to being resources for new medicines, habitat quality indication and many others, insects provide essential and irreplaceable services.”

Insects are critical to our everyday lives. For instance, if just one group of insects, bees disappeared, the impacts would ripple through global ecosystems. Bees are one of the planets most important pollinators. In fact, the bee was recently declared the planet’s most important living being because of the dependence all ecosystems have on the pollination services provided by these often overlooked insects.

Many of the world’s flowers co-evolved with specific bee species making them not only reliant on bees for pollination but often of just a single bee species. In the Canadian Rockies, the beautiful Calypso orchid (Calypso bulbosa), is pollinated only by bumblebees, and more specifically, only by Queen bumblebees. Globally, bumblebee populations have plummeted and this puts both the bees and the orchids that rely on them, at risk. If you’d like to learn more about bumblebees and Calypso orchids, check out the story at Episode 60.

Calypsos are only one of many orchids and other plants that have evolved so intimately that they can only be pollinated by one or a few species of bees. With drops in bee populations, even plants pollinated by numerous bee species will still suffer from fewer bees pollinating fewer flowers. Seed production will be reduced and the ability of the plant to survive competition from other plants is also limited.

Hundreds of species of birds and animals also rely on bees as a food supply. Without bees, these species are also at risk. Bees also host their own ecosystem of smaller insects like mites, and are in turn the prey of many types of parasitic insects. These species are also placed at risk as bee numbers plummet.

When it comes to agriculture, a loss of bees would be catastrophic. While most of the world’s calories come from crops like wheat, rice, barley, and other wind-pollinated grains, there are still many species in your grocery’s produce aisle that rely on bees partially, or in whole for their pollination.

Here is just a small list of plant crops pollinated by bees:

• tree fruits like apples, pears, plums, grapes, cherries, apricots, avocado, Kiwifruit, papaya, and mango,
• strawberries, blueberries, blackberries
• melons like cantaloupe, honeydew, and watermelon
• oranges and other citrus fruits like lemons and limes
• nuts including brazil nuts, cashews, almonds
• root vegetables like potato, onion, carrots, and beets
• leafy greens like lettuce and cabbage
• green vegetables like broccoli, cauliflower, celery, and Brussels sprouts
• most squashes, pumpkins, cucumber, and zucchini
• bell peppers
• kidney and other bean species
• sunflowers
• coffee
• forage crops like alfalfa and clover
• Oil crops like Canola and all of the related mustards
• fiber plants like cotton, and finally, and in many ways most importantly
• honey. While not a plant, it’s a product of the pollination of all of the above plants. When bees pollinate, they trade nectar for their service in spreading pollen. The byproduct is one of the most widely traded products in the world.

Without bees, most of the produce aisle at your local grocery would be as empty as your backyard garden. As much as I wished this was merely a hypothetical situation though, globally it’s estimated that bee populations have dropped by almost 90% with the percentage varying by region.

Across North America, colony collapse disorder has destroyed countless commercial beekeeper’s hives, hives that are hired by commercial farms to enhance pollination of important food crops. Globally, 70 of 100 food crops are pollinated wholly or partially by bees.

While there are many theories surrounding the disappearance of bees around the world, one of the most current trends in research is around the use of neonicotinoid pesticides. These nicotine-like chemicals are the most widely used insecticides worldwide. According to a Cornell University study, neonics, as they are often called, were developed in response to the challenge of insect pests becoming resistant to other commercial insecticides. They are also general enough to be able to target a diversity of insects such as aphids, beetles, caterpillars, and butterflies.

Neonics are popular because they don’t have the same toxic impacts on mammals that may come into contact with sprayed plants.

Unfortunately, they’re persistent in the environment and can leach into the soils and water supplies. They also have dangerous implications for pollinators like bees.

Neonics are used in over 120 countries and sprayed on some 140 different crops. While they are sprayed on crops, the vast majority are used as seed treatments, meaning the pesticide is taken up in the plant tissues, nectar, and pollen as the plant grows. It can also spread to neighbouring non-treated plants. Because they persist in the soil, they can be absorbed by non-targeted species.

Some types of neonics are more toxic to bees than others, and some species, such as bumblebees are particularly susceptible to neonicotinoids. There is still some controversy in the research, with some studies showing the following impacts on bumblebees.

• increased mortality
• reduced colony growth
• reduced brood production
• reduced nest construction
• impaired feeding
• contradictory evidence for impacts on movement and lifespan.

Anything that impacts colony growth and brood production is particularly challenging for bumblebees because every colony has to start from scratch, with a single queen, every spring. At the end of the summer, every bumblebee with the exception of some newly hatched queens dies. The queens burrow into the ground to avoid the cold and emerge in the spring to start their own colony.

Honey bee colonies have exhibited the following:

• impaired foraging
• reduced immunity

While some studies disagree, the following effects have been described in addition

• increased mortality
• impaired feeding
• impaired movement

Strangely, bumblebees and honey bees preferentially drink sugar solutions spiked with neonics as opposed to those without. Perhaps like people, they crave a little nicotine fix.

In April of 2018, the European Union banned the use of all neonicotinoids, although Canada and the U.S. still use them extensively. While Canada has proposed a ban, they keep dragging their feet under the guise of examining new research and have postponed their decision on a ban now until the fall of 2020. I’ve linked to their most recent update in the show notes for this episode.

As we look beyond bees to the wider collapse of insect populations, the recent study published in the Journal Biological Conservation determined that 40% of the insect species globally are at risk of extinction.

Insects serve so many different functions that they’ve become, in a way, the blood flowing through the veins of most ecosystems. The services they provide to ecosystems are often the foundation holding those ecosystems together.

According to an article in SciTech Europa:

“Human survival and well-being depend on ecosystems for provisioning services (such as food, fiber and fresh water), cultural services (such as recreation and spiritual retreat) and supporting services necessary for resource production (such as primary production, pollination, decomposition, soil formation and biological control of ‘pests’). These services are provided at no cost, but their value is difficult to assess because only provisioning and some cultural and supporting services have market values. However, global value of ecosystem services has been estimated at US$33 trillion annually.”

Unfortunately, we usually ignore the daily contributions insects make to our lives until those benefactions are threatened, as in the current dangers of the loss of bee populations.

On the one hand, we absolutely need insects to help all aspects of ecosystem survival. On the other, we attack them to maximize today’s crop even though that may compromise tomorrow’s.

Now here’s a thought that most people in the new world have never considered. Insects are made of protein. They are nutritious and form critical parts of the diets of more than 3,000 ethnic groups in 113 countries. More than 1,500 different species are on the menu and these insects are critical trade products in many parts of the world.

I know, protein is protein…give me my burger. Well, not all protein is created equally. Insects don’t require nearly as much energy for metabolism as a cow, so they produce protein 300 times more efficiently. If you want to reduce your contribution to greenhouse gas emissions, then replacing beef with insect protein would not only reduce emissions, but would also reduce the amount of grain fed to cattle, and thus make it available for human use.

Insects also play an important role in modern medicine. Surprisingly, when it comes to medicine, what’s old can often become new again. When you watch old medieval movies with doctors applying leeches and maggots to wounds to help them heal, it turns out they may have been on the right track.

Both leeches and the maggots of blowflies are still used in medicine today. Blowfly maggots are well known for feeding selectively on dead tissue, making them effective at cleaning infected wounds while leaving the healthy tissue intact. Using maggots is much more selective, and much less intrusive than using scalpels and surgical interventions. In addition, according to the SciTech Europa article:

“Insects also provide several important pharmaceutical compounds, such as cantharidin (from blister beetles) for wart removal, alloferon (from blowfly larvae), a powerful antimicrobial compound, and promising anti-cancer compounds from wasp venom. Insects are also a source of several important industrial products, especially silk and cochineal (red) dye. Silkworms are the only source of commercial silk, still among the most valued and widely-traded commercial products.”

For commercial crops like Canola, insect pollinators increase the seed weight by 18% and add 20% to the market value of each plant. This helps to put a financial price on the value of insects in their unpaid role as pollinators. It’s one of the crazy realities of farming, use chemicals to try to kill one insect that may damage a crop while trying to protect those that are critical to the same crop’s production and yield.

One of the realities of life is that all things live and eventually die. Once they die, they provide food for many organisms whose role it is to break down dead material and release the nutrients to other species. It also helps remove disease organisms from carcasses. In addition to dead materials, excrement also needs to be dealt with, and like dead items, insects are integral to all of these tasks.

Commercial cattle operations provide prodigious amounts of poo and animals like dung beetles are integral in removing and redistributing the fecal matter and burying it to prevent pastures from being damaged by an overabundance of excrement. To dung beetles, cow patties are an essential resource, while to ranchers, they are a potential source of contamination. Insects remain our partners in every aspect of agriculture.

Finally, like all ecosystems, some insects prey on other insects. Insect predators and parasites are fundamental to keeping populations in balance. Many insects are designed to hunt other insects. These include dragonflies, some beetles, mantises, and members of the true bug family, like the giant water bug. Wasps, in particular, are the perfect insect control program. They are one of nature’s most efficient natural regulators of insect populations. Wasps parasitize their prey. Their sting paralyzes them, and they lay their eggs inside the now helpless insect. When their larvae hatch, they’ll consume the host insect or spider from the inside out.

As you look into the almost endless list of things insects provide to ecosystems and agriculture, it begs the question…what are these services worth? If you’re going to ask a farmer to stop spraying chemicals that may impact honey bees or hoverflies, than what’s the actual benefit to balance against potential crop loss?

According to a 2006 study in the Journal BioScience, the value of ecological services provided to the U.S. every year can be valued at $57 billion. That’s the equivalent of about 25% of Canada’s annual healthcare costs. $57 billion is a vast amount of money. Now nothing comes without someone having to pay something…oh wait, except this. The services that insects provide humanity are essentially free.

Receiving all of these free services from insects should be seen as nature’s gift but alas we spray poisons to kill some insects and expect that those same poisons won’t also kill essential ones like ladybugs and bumblebees.

Before we can protect our 6-legged biome, we need to understand the myriad of ways that humans have been hampering their survival.

Surprisingly, whether we’re talking about woodland caribou or fireflies, habitat loss is always at the top of the list when populations struggle. Often, as the habitat shrinks, it also becomes fragmented so that small habitat patches are dissected again and again until little functional territory remains.

While some insects are more mobile than others, they all still need enough patches of habitat if they are to survive. Monarch butterflies are a great example. While they cover vast distances in their multi-generational migrations between Canada and the U.S. and overwintering spots in either California or central Mexico.

Monarchs are suffering in many ways. They eat only a single plant, milkweed, and throughout much of the 20th century, intense use of herbicides like Roundup has destroyed much of their native food supply. In addition, their overwintering range in the Mexican state of Michoacán is under attack by gangs of illegal loggers. Over the past month alone, two activists were murdered by these loggers. Thousands of other insect species are suffering similar losses of habitat every day.

While I’ve already covered the rampant pesticide use on insect populations, fertilizers can also have a similar impact by changing the local ecology and by adding to the acidity of the soil. In addition, the use of antiparasite drugs in livestock has a toxic impact on the many dung beetles that help to dispose of excess manure.

Light and noise pollution are also becoming more and more problematic. Many insects are drawn to lights and streetlights and other urban illumination can disorient them and also interfere with the strategies of insects like fireflies. Other insects, like cicadas, use audible communication and excessive noise can reduce their ability to communicate.

Invasive species are also a constant threat to insect populations. Invading insects may outcompete, prey upon, or bring diseases to native species. In some cases, the loss of a single insect can cause co-extinctions if there are parasitic insects that rely upon the insect that is lost.

European fire ants (Myrmica rubra) are an invasive insect that is moving into Canada from areas further south. Not only does it compete with other ant species, but they are very aggressive and often feed on other insects and even small animals.

First discovered in British Columbia in 2010, they’ve subsequently also turned up in Toronto and Richmond, Ontario.

Recently our news media has been widely focussed on the new coronavirus outbreak that’s spreading very rapidly and killing many of its victims. Well, invasive diseases are also impacting insect populations. An invasive fungi, Nosema bombi, is thought to have played a role in the collapse of many bee colonies across the continent.

Climate change is also taking its toll on insects both on the land and in aquatic habitats. Climate change can cause drastic changes in the timing of events in an ecosystem. For instance, flowers may bloom earlier, or fruits may ripen earlier. If insects rely on the flowers or fruit but are unable to adapt to ongoing changes, they may disappear simply because of poor timing. Similar challenges are seen in bird populations, and even in bears.

Insects like dragonflies spend most of their life as aquatic nymphs and are very susceptible to changes in water temperatures due to warming climates.

Finally, one challenge we often ignore is overexploitation. As I’ve already mentioned, many insects are harvested either for collections as in butterflies, as pets kept in terrariums (very popular in Japan), used in alternative medicine, or even eaten.

Insects are very high in protein and in many cultures, they make up a large part of the protein in people’s diets. As populations grow, so does the demand on insects used for food and populations may collapse under the strain of harvesting that overwhelms even an insect’s ability to produce large numbers of offspring.

Insects really are one of the most critical groups of animals on the planet. Understanding why they are disappearing is only half of the challenge, but there are things we can all do to help turn the tide. Insects reproduce rapidly and people can have a huge impact on helping populations to recover by thinking about how we use the land, harvest its products, change its microhabitats, and react to the impacts of changing climates.

In a companion piece to the warning to humanity study that I’ve been quoting, a second story looks at the many ways that we can help turn the tide. This is a lengthy article, but it is incredibly insightful. I highly recommend you read both of these stories if you’d like to truly understand both the challenges facing us and the many opportunities for solutions.

In order for us to reverse the trend of insect losses, we need to understand that all insects play a vital role in the ecological engine that runs the planet. The article states:

“Stopping insect decline rests on a foundation of appreciating that human and insect survival depends on mutual well-being, while being clear on the difference between financial value in terms of service provision and conservation value in terms of irreplaceable compositional and functional ecological integrity. We then need to understand the threats facing insects, and aim to maintain their various components and aspects. To do this, we require an acute appreciation of spatial scale, most easily communicated through conservation of the landscape.”

If we look at the example of forest management, there are many ways to reduce insect loss. Forests are very complex ecosystems and have many small microhabitats and microclimates. What kid hasn’t flipped over a big rock to find the worms and beetles scurrying away when their secret home is revealed. This is a great example of a microhabitat – a tiny area with unique characteristics and climate.

When we look at forests, we need to understand what makes each forest unique. It’s this uniqueness that hides the habitats. Tall matriarch trees are often the first to fall to the axe, when they are also the source of vast numbers of tiny insect habitats. Leaving some of these trees can help provide refuge and seed populations for many insects.

Understanding natural processes like fire, and how fire has historically shaped a forest can help ecologists to replicate its impact on the landscape and preserve those ecological interactions that have helped to make the forest unique. A good example of this in the Rockies would the be lodgepole pine forests. Lodgepole pines rely upon fire to open their cones and so maintaining natural fire cycles can help to retain habitats.

Once those fires flicker out, white-spotted sawyer beetles flock to the dead trunks to lay their eggs. As the beetles arrive, so do the woodpeckers to ferret out these wood boring beetles. Fires bring insects, which bring birds.

If natural grazers are no longer present, limited grazing by livestock can help to mimic the historic effects on the landscape. Selective logging can help simulate natural tree loss that would open up the canopy and allow new growth.

What is most important is to look at a landscape and look at ways to replicate and protect vital microhabitats and processes like fire and flood cycles. This doesn’t mean we shouldn’t use the land. It just means we need to use it more intentionally. By better understanding that a forest is much more than a collection of trees, we can plan our usage in a way to preserve habitats and the important services that the resident insects provide us on a daily basis.

We need a strong government to pull this off. We need to understand that it can’t be business-as-usual any more. We are at a tipping point and if we don’t turn the clock around, then we may find entire habitats dying. Even a single tree is an ecosystem. From the roots to the canopy, different microhabitats support different species. Each of those insect species has different predators, parasites, and microbes that depend on them for their survival.

It really is a time for us all to become a cheerleader for things that may have made our skin crawl in the past. For every kid that once said, “I hate bugs!” It’s time to realize that much of what is beautiful in our world may have been helped along by insects.

If you’re looking to explore or photograph the mountains, I would love to show you the secrets behind the scenery. As a company, my sole purpose is to help people like you to explore, photograph, understand, and appreciate the landscape, ecology, and culture of the mountain west.

If you’d like to reach out to me personally, you can hit me up on Twitter @wardcameron or drop me a line at info@wardcameron.com or better yet, stop by WardCameron.ca and book your mountain adventure.

The post 086 Dangers of the Insect Apocalypse appeared first on The Mountain Nature and Culture Podcast.

Wolves have for generations been one of the most maligned of carnivores. They have been demonized, poisoned, hunted, trapped, and in many areas completely wiped out. As American settlers made their way westward following the steps of Lewis and Clark, the persecution of wolves continued.

Settlers and ranchers always saw wolves as the enemy. The “big bad wolf” was there to kill their cattle and place their families in danger. As more and more land was put to the plough and domestic livestock took the best forages, there were fewer and fewer elk and deer for wolves to hunt.

As wolves were forced to hunt domestic livestock, they learned how efficient humans can be at eliminating unwanted carnivores. Programs of predator control, which still take place in many parts of Alberta, focussed on eliminating wolves from the landscape.

Yellowstone National Park was established in 1872, making it the first national park in the world. Surely wolves would be welcome in a Park! According to the National Park Act of 1872, the Secretary of the Interior “shall provide against the wanton destruction of the fish and game found within said Park.”

The problem with wolves was that their simple quest to feed their packs was considered to be “wanton destruction” and so they were continually persecuted. According to a National Park Service story, some 136 wolves were killed in the park between 1914 and 1926. By 1950, wolves were completely wiped out from most of the contiguous U.S.

Park managers believed that wolves would indiscriminately damage elk and deer populations. Hunters screamed that the wolves were reducing the elk herds they loved to hunt and ranchers blamed wolves for killing too many of their cattle.

By the 1960s, attitudes were beginning to change in the park and policy changes were brought into effect to allow wildlife populations to regulate themselves. Unfortunately, without including wolves in the picture, true self-management of populations was merely a pipe dream.

In 1973, the Endangered Species Act was passed and by 1978 every subspecies of wolf in the lower 48 states was on the list with the exception of Minnesota (where it was listed as threatened). This act meant measures had to be taken to restore listed species, including wolves, back to their natural role in the ecosystem.

By the 1980s, wolves were beginning to naturally re-establish themselves in Montana, likely seeded by wolves moving south from populations in Alberta and British Columbia, and by 1994, 50-60 wolves roamed the state. While wolves were infrequently spotted in and around Yellowstone, there were no breeding populations within the greater Yellowstone region.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service was required to develop a plan to facilitate wolf recovery and identify potential recovery locations. They produced the Northern Rockies Mountain Wolf Recovery Plan. Published in 1980, the plan:

“emphasized gray wolf recovery through natural processes (dispersal southward from western Canada) where possible. Where this is not possible because of distance from ‘seed’ populations, translocation is the only known way to establish a population. either philosophy necessitates conservation of suitable habitat in appropriate recovery areas. Establishing and maintaining wolf populations in three separate areas is believed necessary for recovery at this time. The probability of recovery through natural recruitment is high in northwestern Montana, moderate in Idaho, and remote in Yellowstone National Park. Characteristically, the recovery areas that have been identified are large and remote, where the potential for conflict situations would generally be limited to their periphery. However, resolution of such conflicts is requisite to successful natural reestablishment and thus is an essential element for recovery.”

The goals of the wolf recovery plan were quite modest at first, “to secure a minimum of ten breeding pairs of wolves in each of the three recovery areas for a minimum of three successive years.”

Within each of the recovery areas, the land was divided into one of three zones with zone 1 being areas where recovery would be promoted due to a low likelihood of conflict with other land uses. Zone 3 would be areas where the potential for conflict was high and so recovery would not be emphasized. Zone 2 represented the buffer between the two other zones.

The northwest Montana and central Idaho wolf recovery areas relied on natural repopulation from Canadian packs expanding southward.

Of the three wolf recovery areas, Yellowstone was the one that was isolated from areas with healthy populations capable of naturally reseeding the area so translocation was the only option available to park managers.

It seems like such a simple decision, but the wheels of politics roll slowly and there were still many steps to be taken before any wolves could be released in the park. First and foremost was the preparation of National Environmental Policy Act documents that included full public input phases. They also had to propose a rule change to designate the Yellowstone population as an “experimental population.”

This was necessary to give park managers more flexibility in how they would be allowed to manage the wolves once they were released into the park. A proposal had to be filed with the Federal Register “of a proposed rule detailing the geographic location of the experimental population and identifying procedures to be utilized in its management”. This step is critical to allow biologists to keep the population within specified boundaries, and if necessary, destroy nuisance animals.

Control plans also needed to be developed to detail exactly how managers would deal with wolves preying on domestic livestock and procedures for reducing conflicts with ranchers. the plan had to detail how they would remove the minimum number of wolves in order to resolve any conflicts while not impacting the recovery program.

The plan allowed them to use numerous options including live-capture and relocation, holding offending animals in captivity, or killing animals if initial efforts to trap a problem wolf were unsuccessful and the predations continued. It was also an option if relocated wolves returned. They also were given the option of reducing wolf numbers if unacceptable numbers of elk and deer were being killed, but only to a point where it wouldn’t jeopardize the recovery.

Prior to the reintroduction, Alistair Bath of the Department of Geography at the University of Calgary undertook a study to gauge the public attitudes towards the wolf, their basic wolf knowledge, and their willingness to support the reintroduction of wolves to Yellowstone.

As the wolf recovery plan stated:

“In making decisions concerning wildlife reintroduction programs, especially of controversial species such as the wolf, resource managers need not only biological knowledge but also sociopolitical data.”

In fact, according to this study, resource managers had to deal with five different types of variables: biological, physical, economic, social, and political. It’s important to keep in mind this study was done before the first wolf ever made paw prints in Yellowstone.

The University of Calgary study looked to explore numerous objectives:

1. “to define the extremes of the resource management issue spectrum by documenting attitudes of two diametrically opposed interest groups,
2. to define significant lobby groups in the resource management issue area and to document their attitudes toward the issue
3. to document the attitudes of the statewide general public, and
4. to document the attitudes of the public surrounding the resource management issue.”

Within each various study group, they wanted to also explore their attitudes towards wolves in general, their basic knowledge of wolf biology and ecology, their openness towards reintroducing wolves, and compromises that would need to be made by individuals on both for and against reintroduction.

The study revealed some interesting insights towards public attitudes towards the recovery, along with large variations in basic wolf knowledge.

As expected, members of the Wyoming Wildlife Federation and the Defenders of Wildlife had slightly higher basic knowledge about wolf biology and ecology, it seemed that all groups would benefit from additional public education.

When they looked at attitudes towards reintroduction, 91.2% of the Stock Growers opposed wolf reintroduction, while only 6.2% of the Defenders of Wildlife and 22.1% of members of the Wildlife Federation opposed it. Statewide though, 48.5.% of Wyoming residents and 38.8% percent of Americans supported the reintroduction.

When researchers looked into the variances in support of reintroduction, they found that most of the differences were based on the respondent’s basic attitude towards wolves. Those with more positive attitudes towards wolves were 72% more likely to support reintroduction. In addition, people living closer to the park were also less likely to support the reintroduction when compared to respondents living further away.

Unfortunately, for those most fiercely opposed to reintroduction, their attitudes were not swayed very much regardless of various compromise proposals.

Offers of financial compensation changed 9% of respondent’s minds. Measures to limit livestock losses to less than 1 percent swayed 12%. Measures designed to keep wolves restricted to the park and surrounding wilderness changed 20% of opinions and killing offending wolves only impacted 10% of opponents.

So why is it important to go into so much detail when looking at public attitudes towards reintroducing a species like wolves? As the report states:

 “This study proceeded by documenting extreme viewpoints, thus identifying the emotional spectrum of the issue, and then by identifying attitudes of other interest groups and the general public in comparison to these viewpoints. This approach is useful in making sure that highly vocal lobby groups are not overrepresented in the decision-making process.”

So often, when it comes to changes on a local level, there are very strong negative views held by those people who live closest to the area experiencing those changes. It also reflects the challenges of land managers in trying to achieve a larger conservation goal while still trying to allay the concerns of, in this particular case, ranchers and stock growers.

It’s critical that governments try to reach accommodation wherever possible and attempt to find ways to improve local buy-in.

Once the decision was made to move forward with the reintroduction of wolves into Yellowstone, it was up to park staff like Norm Bishop, the park resource interpreter to begin to sell the idea of a restored ecosystem including wolves.

With polarized views regarding the possibility of wolves being transplanted into the park, education became a critical tool for creating a positive political landscape.

In a profile posted by the Bozeman Daily Chronicle, he detailed his years of doing programs to educate park visitors on both the need for a reintroduction program and of the predicted impacts that returning wolves were expected to have on the park.

When the wolves finally arrived in crates towed by trucks on January 12, 1995, the real work for park managers began. Three acclimation pens were set up to release the wolves. Like the recent bison release in Banff National Park, these pens were designed to allow the wolves to become accustomed to their new home until the time came for their wider release into the park.

There was some fear the wolves might just point their noses north and head back to Canada, and by placing them in acclimation pens, it was hoped they would slowly accept their new habitat as home.

In the Chronicle story, Bishop described their arrival:

“After the truck convoy got through the park gate — where a crowd of wolf advocates, reporters and school children had gathered to watch — it headed east from Mammoth Hot Springs. Once it was close enough to the pen, it stopped and park staffers loaded six of the crates onto a mule-drawn sleigh. The sleigh carried the captive animals over the snow to Bishop and the others tasked with hauling the boxes to the pens.

It wasn’t easy — 100 pounds of wolf inside 100 or more pounds of metal. Four people per crate. They were as quiet as possible. So were the wolves, Bishop remembered, unaware of the fanfare of their journey.”

The wolves had been captured in Alberta and translocated to Yellowstone National Park for release. Contrary to popular belief though, they weren’t captured within the boundaries of Jasper National Park, but on provincial lands adjacent to them.

Carter Niemeyer, the trapper involved in capturing the Canadian wolves for transport, recently described the capture of the wolves in a FaceBook post:

The ones we collared early before the kennels arrived were radio-collared and released. Used those collared wolves to located packs for helicopter capture later. In fact, we held the first three in bear culvert traps, collared them and then hauled them back to the field for release.”

Essentially, they captured three wolves, and then radio-collared them and subsequently re-released them. Those three acted as a type of Trojan horse that led the trappers back to the rest of their packs. The trappers then tranquillized the entire pack by helicopter. In this way, the capture of a few wolves helped them to capture entire packs. This kept family groupings together for the transfer and in total, 14 wolves were trucked off to their new homes.

Alberta has for decades been waging its own war against wolves. Just a few episodes ago, in Episode 80 I describe Alberta’s intensive culling program that government officials claim is for the purpose of conserving endangered caribou. However, they don’t do anything to address the real reason that caribou are in trouble – too much human development in their critical range.

Kevin Van Tighem, a former park Superintendent in Banff National Park has an interesting take on this transfer. In a recent Facebook post Van Tighem pondered: “Given what their fate would have been otherwise, one might say they were rescued from us.”

These may have been some of Alberta’s luckiest wolves. They escaped constant persecution in their native Alberta to arrive in a landscape without competition from other wolves, and an overabundance of prey to feed on.

Once the wolves were set free in Yellowstone, they quickly took advantage of the virgin terrain and began hunting large game animals, in particular elk, within the park area. Decades of absence had allowed the elk herds to grow to unbelievable numbers.

As the elk herd grew in the absence of wolves, they severely over-browsed the landscape, causing terrible damage to the aspen and willow stands. So aggressive was their browsing that there was virtually no new growth taking place in areas with large elk accumulates. Because willows and aspen reproduce largely by suckers, long underground roots that periodically produce new shoots, the elk chomped down every new shoot as quickly as it emerged from the grassland.

Without willow, the beaver disappeared and along with the beavers, so went their dams. There was a huge ecological collapse in the absence of wolves and I detailed that in great depth back in episode 45, as well as the incredible recovery that the return of wolves aided in the Greater Yellowstone ecosystem.

As I do more and more research in the creation of these episodes, I continue to learn more about wildlife ecology. When I look back at episode 45, I may have been too general in some of my descriptions of the benefits that wolves had on the recovery of willow and aspen trees in the park.

Wolves in Yellowstone have been given so much credit for the Yellowstone recovery, yet they represent a single component of a very complex ecosystem. Some willow and aspen stands have still not recovered despite the presence of wolves and lower elk numbers.

This has forced researchers to look into more complex changes to the landscape that had taken place during the many years the park lacked wolves and many other creatures like beavers.

When an ecology changes for long periods, the changes that take place can, in time, become normalized. The ecosystem finds a new stable state so that simply replacing wolves might not bring things back to the way they once were.

This was particularly evident in the northern reaches of the park, particularly along creeks like Blacktail Deer Creek, Lost Creek, and Elk Creek. While the intensity of elk browsing was also reduced in these areas due to the renewed predation by wolves, aspen and willow trees did not recover as they had in other areas of the park.

Without willow and aspen recovery, these areas still didn’t have sufficiently available willow to attract beaver recolonization. Beavers create dams along watercourses that helps to raise the water table across wide areas, even areas distant from the flooded area.

It was also documented that in the decades where wolves and beaver were both absent from these northern streams, the river eroded more deeply into the bedrock, lowering the water level even further. Beaver dams naturally slow the movement of water down a valley bottom. When the beaver vanished, and the dams eventually collapsed, the faster flowing streams had much more erosional power.

As river channels deepened, the water table dropped in keeping with the lower river levels. Willow and aspen are particularly thirsty trees and biologists speculated that reducing browsing on willows may not be enough without the water table corrections that returning beaver dams would bring to the landscape.

Biologists believed these northern streams could not improve on their own. While browsing had been reduced, they feared that water levels had dropped too far for aspen and willow roots to reach and if that were true, then they wouldn’t be able to recover. Without willows, beaver wouldn’t return to these streams. It was a classic catch-22.

To test the impacts of each of these factors, they designed an experiment that took place along several of the creeks that had shown no improvement despite the return of wolf predation on elk. They asked two main questions:

1. Does water table depth limit willow height increases in the absence of browsing? and
2. Does water table depth influence willow height gain under changing ambient browsing pressure?

In the study area, water tables dropped substantially throughout the summer months. In spring, they averaged less than .5 m below the surface but dropped as deep as 1-2 metres by late summer. When they started the experiment, most of the willows were small, between 30 and 60 cm tall.

They looked at three species of willow native to the region. Over the years, excessive foraging prevented shoots from growing high enough to prevent elk from browsing the top of the stem, or the terminal bud. This prevented the tree from growing vertically to take on a taller tree-like form that might attract beaver to recolonize the stream. For a willow to escape this type of browsing, it needs to grow higher than 200 to 250 cm, putting it out of reach of the hungry jaws of elk.

When dams were added to the streams, the impact on water tables was immediate. On average, they rose 0.37m higher, but in August the effect could be as high as 0.9 m. By damming the river, the late-summer drop in water levels was limited because the standing water allowed for a more consistent water table.

Some areas were enclosed to keep elk from browsing, but in areas where elk were able to continue feeding, they browsed approximately 70% of a particular year’s growth. Almost immediately, there was a very positive impact on willow growth in the area. All four species began to grow vertically, whether or not browsing took place.

It shows that in areas with narrow stream channels, elk may have precipitated the problem by overbrowsing and out-competing local beaver colonies. However, once the beavers were gone, excess downward erosion in the channel meant that simply reducing the amount of browsing by reintroducing wolves, wasn’t enough to allow for a full recovery.

To fully recover these narrow stream ecosystems, reduced browsing had to be paired with water table management – at least until beaver return to the area and take over the water management in the way they did before wolves were first removed from the park.

After four years, willows in the study area where the water wasn’t managed averaged only 87 cm tall, meaning that elk could easily browse the entire tree height. The combination of water table management and reduced browsing showed incredible vertical growth

This study was limited in its scope because its permit didn’t allow it to build dams that might create overland flooding, which is exactly what natural beaver dams do. It’s also important to remember that as beavers flood an area, the increase in the water table is experienced in areas quite distant from the river channel or even the flooded beaver pond. Gravel river systems allow water to travel kilometres on either side of river banks to create vast impacts from any increase in the water table. Way back in Episode 15, I describe the amazing ecology that spreads across entire valleys in gravel-bed ecosystems in the mountains.

Studies like this one have helped ecologists to understand the complexity of large wildlife reintroductions like Yellowstone’s wolf recovery. Once a component is returned to the ecosystem, it doesn’t automatically mean that everything will return to what it was in the past. In many areas of Yellowstone, in particular, those areas with a stable water table, adding wolves to the ecosystem was enough to allow willows to regrow and the ecosystem to rebound.

Unfortunately, in others, the cascade of changes left behind in the absence of wolves means that more work is still necessary to bring more significantly altered landscapes back to their historic ecologies. Reintroducing wolves may need to be supplemented with reintroducing beavers to some locations. It seems the wolves may need an industrious partner to finish the ecological rehab that started with a few wolves from Alberta.

Don’t forget that Ward Cameron Enterprises is your source for exploring the mountains on foot, snowshoe, or motorcoach. Why not visit www.WardCameron.ca to book your mountain adventure. As a business, we have one philosophy – we sell wow!. Book your adventure now.

The post 085 Celebrating the 25th Anniversary of the Reintroduction of Wolves to Yellowstone appeared first on The Mountain Nature and Culture Podcast.

If you’re a regular listener to this podcast, are you getting out to the mountains to explore? Are you looking for a guide to show you the best places the mountains have to offer? Let’s strap on a pair of snowshoes and follow the footsteps of martens, weasels, lynx, and snowshoe hares.

Why not throw on a pair of ice cleats and explore the frozen cascades of Johnston Canyon? Want a photography tour or workshop? Ward Cameron Enterprises has been showcasing our mountain landscapes for 35 years. If you want a guide to help you explore the mountains, visit www.WardCameron.ca. Let’s explore together…and with that said, let’s get to it.

Feeding Birds Ethically and Effectively

Are you a bird feeder? If so, you’re not alone. According to the 2012 Canadian Nature Survey, Canadians spend $537 million on bird-watching every year. Those expenses are split between money spent “watching, monitoring, photographing, filming, and/or feeding wild birds”. The average amount spent per participant was $201/year. Nationally, Canadians spend more than $40 billion on nature-related expenses every year.

The Canadian Nature Survey takes place every 15-years and is a cooperative study operated by the Canadian Biodiversity Strategy, the federal, provincial, and territorial working group on biodiversity.

Nationally, the report revealed that 4.7 million, or 18% of Canadians, spend some time watching and/or feeding birds. Of all the nature-based activities, birding is the activity that shows the highest number of participant days near home, as well as the highest number of days engaged in nature-based activities away from home. On average, Canadians spend 133-days annually watching birds.

To put this into perspective, if 4.7 million Canadians spend an average of 133 days birding, that gives us a total of 631,750,000 person-days of birding across Canada. That’s the equivalent of every single Canadian spending at least 20 days a year watching some of the 684 bird species that can be spotted in this great nation.

The study breaks down the expenditures further. Birders spend:

• $151 million on transportation
• $70 million on accommodation
• $125 million on bird food and
• $191 million on equipment, fees, and supplies.

Looking at these numbers, $125 million is a whole lot of birdseed. OK, I did a little math on this number. On Amazon.ca, a 7 kg bag of black-oil sunflower seeds can be purchased for $16.49. I’ve placed a link on the show notes for this page at MountainNaturePodcast.com/ep084. After a little mathematical magic, $151 million buys more than 53 million kg of sunflower seeds. I find that number hard to comprehend, but it does show that Canadians love their backyard birds.

The above Amazon products are some good options for black-oil sunflower seeds and sunflower hearts to kickstart your bird feeding program (I receive a small commission if you order based on these affiliate links)

A large part of the $191 million spent on equipment includes money spent on bird feeders and associated equipment, along with binoculars, field guides, and even telescopes.

In Alberta, 14% of the population are birders. This number increases to 19% in British Columbia and Manitoba, and 22% of Saskatchewan Riders fans are birdwatchers.

One of the things that makes bird watching popular is that of all the nature-based activities that Canadians pursue, it’s one of the least expensive. Canucks average a measly $10/day while engaging in their favourite pastime. Compare that to what a day at Sunshine ski hill costs.

Birding is big business. You can’t walk into a Walmart or Home Hardware without running into big bags of birdseed, bird feeders, and even birdhouses and baths.

There’s a good reason for this… people love birds! As an added bonus, birds flock to feeders, but beginners often end up asking two questions:

1. Should I be feeding birds at all? I don’t want to hamper the population and there are so many differing views as to the benefits and dangers of feeding birds.
2. If I am going to set up bird feeders, what type of feeders should I use and what type of seed should I offer.

First, let’s take a quick look at the rules surrounding bird feeding in mountain towns like Canmore, Banff, and Jasper. Of the three communities, Canmore has the most clearly stated rules. In terms of bird feeders, Town bylaws state:

3.4 …a person or owner may place or permit the placement of an outdoor bird feeder containing bird feed, seeds, suet, nectar or any other attractant provided that:

1. 1. 1. the bird feeder is suspended on a cable or other device in such a manner that it is inaccessible to wildlife other than birds and
      2. the area below any bird feeder is kept free of accumulations of any wildlife attractants.

3.5 Notwithstanding Section 3.4, no person or owner shall place or permit the placement of outdoor bird feeders containing bird feed, seeds, suet, nectar or any other attractant between April 1st and November 30th of each year.

3.6 Notwithstanding Sections 3.4 and 3.5, no property owner and no person shall place, or cause to be placed, on or near the property of that person, any matter which has the effect of attracting pigeons.

On the town of Canmore page detailing rules on Removing Wildlife Attractants it states:

“Do not use bird feeders of any kind during bear season (April 1 to November 30). Outside of those months, we recommend suspending the bird feeder on a cable so that it can’t be reached by any other wildlife and remember to clean the ground underneath.”

Ok, so what does this actually mean?

So for those of us in Canmore, most bird feeders are legal, but only between December 1 and March 31. I called Canmore Bylaw Services for clarification and they said bird feeders do need to be removed in the summer. In addition, it’s illegal at any time of the year to feed or attract pigeons.

There’s a very good reason you’re required to take your feeders down in a community like Canmore. Bird feeders are no different than unharvested fruit trees. If you leave food out, bears may become attracted to them and then you’re putting the safety of the bears at risk. If you neglect to take down your feeder and it attracts a bear, you’re liable for a $250 fine.

Banff and Jasper have historically stayed quieter when it comes to the rules regarding bird feeders. Technically, feeding wildlife is illegal anywhere in a national park, and so by extension, bird feeding is not allowed. In reality, they’ve historically taken a blind eye towards feeding in the parks.

Park officials have mulled a bird feeder ban but haven’t yet had the town enshrine a specific ban into their bylaws.

In a December 2018 Rocky Mountain Outlook article, reporter Cathy Ellis stated:

“Town of Banff officials say Parks Canada has also indicated it’s a cumbersome process to charge someone caught with a birdfeeder in town, which includes a mandatory court appearance under the Canada National Parks Act.”

According to the story, bylaw services supervisor Tony Clark stated:

“The feeding of wildlife obviously is covered under Parks regulations, but when they actually have to do the enforcement when it comes to charging, they have a very onerous process”

I spoke with Banff Bylaw Services and they said they are in the process right now of drafting rules that will ban bird feeders in Banff Townsite. It was unclear whether that would be a blanket ban because of its location within a national park, or a seasonal ban as in Canmore.

The officer stated that it should be in place by next summer, but if not, it will definitely be in place by the summer of 2021.

So if you can’t feed birds in the summer, what’s a bird lover to do? Your best option is to plan your backyard landscaping and gardening with birds in mind. Plant shrubs and trees to offer shelter, protection, and nesting opportunities for them.

If you do put out a feeder in the winter, be sure to keep it stocked. If you can, place your feeders close to trees and other shelters.

Ok, now that we’ve got the rules out of the way, we come to the next question – should we feed birds? Or to put this into another perspective, is feeding birds helpful or harmful to the birds?

On this subject, there are lots of different studies, with most of them showing a positive benefit. In my constant hunt for stories, I found a 2014 study in the publication Frontiers in Zoology 

This study looked at the impacts of bird feeding and how it impacted reproductive success, the number of eggs laid, and even the timing of nest building.

The availability of food, and when it’s available, are two of the greatest limitations placed on most animal populations. This is compounded by how much energy a bird needs to spend to get its beak on that food.

The study states:

“The energy involved to obtain food and process it is tightly related to the physiology and behaviour of animals, and the proportion of total energy and nutrients that are allocated to reproduction.”

It’s important to realize that in many populations, food isn’t the most important limitation. Other challenges include predation and other important resources other than food that keep populations in check like climate change, competition, and many other factors.

Birds attempt to time nesting so their eggs hatch when the most abundant food supply is present. Migrations are timed for the same reason. Unfortunately, with warming climates, some plants are blooming earlier and insect populations are peaking earlier. If migrations end up out of sync with their food sources, there will be severe impacts on reproductive success. Each bird species timing of migration has evolved over very long periods and it’ll take some time for populations to respond to changes in food availability.

For birds that feed on small mammals, their population and reproductive strategies mirror the natural ebb and flow of the rodent population. However, for some rodents, these population swings can be extremely dramatic.

In other cases, there are periodic insect population explosions or seed mast events. The latter refers to coniferous trees like white spruce periodically producing vast amounts of cones. The theory is that massive numbers of cones would overwhelm the ability of predators like birds, and in particular the red squirrel, to eat or cache all the seeds produced.

While these events may correlate with improved reproductive success, without careful study, it’s difficult to definitively state that successes or failures were caused by increases in available foods.

Supplemental feeding of birds offers a more controlled way to test whether providing quality food to birds over an extended period has a positive impact on their reproductive success.

This study looked at the impacts of bird feeding on the reproductive success of 48 different species. It sought to determine whether feeding prompted birds to nest earlier, and/or have an impact on factors such as clutch size, egg dimensions, hatching success, brood size, chick weight, or the number of chicks successfully fledged.

Secondly, it looked at “key factors (including life-history traits, behavioural factors, environmental factors, experimental design) that can induce variation in laying date, clutch size and breeding success in response to food supplementation.”

Researchers examined a total of 82 different studies that covered the following groups:

• birds of prey – 19 studies
• jays, crows, and ravens – 11 studies
• perching birds and songbirds – 38 studies
• seabirds – 7 studies
• wetland birds – 5 studies
• other birds – 2 studies

Coincidentally, most of the studies looked at more northern bird populations with 44 of the studies looking at birds north of 50 degrees latitude. This puts them within Canada’s territory.

Overall, the study showed a positive correlation between feeding birds and laying date, clutch size, chick weight, and breeding success. It didn’t seem to impact egg size, brood size or hatching success.

Clutch size, or the number of eggs in a nest, was most positively impacted in corvids – the family that includes the jays, crows, and ravens. Because these birds cache their food supplies, they were best able to take advantage of the additional food offered at feeders.

Rather than consuming all of the food right away, they collected as much as possible and stored it. These larders let them continue to feed even if the feeders run dry.

The study also showed that feeding birds had the greatest impacts when natural foods were less available than at other times. In times of plenty, most birds don’t need bird feeders, but when times are tough, they are a welcome addition to the landscape.

It also showed the additional calories provided by feeding were mostly allocated towards reproduction, allowing some species to nest earlier, have larger clutches, and heavier chicks. All of these things help increase the number of chicks that successfully leave the nest.

Earlier nests also provide better opportunities for re-nesting in cases where the original nest is destroyed by predators like red squirrels. This improves the odds their second attempt at nesting will be successful. The impact on nesting date diminished the further north you travel.

In the north, short summer seasons mean there is little option to vary the timing. Nesting is timed to take advantage of the briefly favourable weather window and timed so the eggs hatch when the most food is available. In many species, nesting is triggered by natural rhythms unrelated to food, like the amount of daylight, making them less flexible to alter these hard-wired behaviours.

In terms of clutch size, feeding did show a positive impact. This likely reflects one or both of two potential scenarios.

1. More food allows a female bird to devote more energy to egg production or
2. having an excess amount of food before nesting can be seen as a predictor of how much food will be available when the eggs hatch and thus how much food will be available for rearing chicks.

There are so many things that can impact reproductive success, and feeding is just one of them. Competition between breeding pairs, food competitors, and predators also have a great impact. How long supplemental food is available also has an impact. Birds that are fed before and during the breeding and rearing stages showed the greatest impact.

Not all impacts are positive though. Crowded feeders can increase the potential spread of disease and parasites.

This study wasn’t able to look at the varying quality of different food brands. Every food has different nutrient profiles with some being more nutritious than others. Like most studies, this one leaves the door open for more research investigating nutritional aspects like these.

In 2010, a paper was presented at the Ecological Society of America annual conference. It also used citizen science to enlist 173 Canadian and American bird feeders to undertake a careful study comparing different foods and feeders to see how 106 different bird species selected their preferred foods and which feeders they preferred.

There are so many online sources telling you which foods are preferred by birds, but it’s difficult to tell how accurate they are, particularly because most are based on personal opinions and beliefs. In other cases, they may simply be marketing pieces by companies trying to sell you feed.

Differing articles often recommend different foods – often for the same species. If you put out the wrong foods for the birds you want to attract, you can end up with lots of uneaten seed which can rot and become potentially dangerous, or it may attract other animals including rodents, Canmore bunnies, or even bears looking for an easy feed. Remember, a bird feeder full of sunflower seeds is an irresistible attraction to a bear. This is the key reason it’s critical to take down feeders during the summer season when bears are active.

This study compared 10 different seed types, to see how different birds selected both food and feeder. What makes it unique is that it wasn’t done by scientists, but by passionate backyard birders that worked with researchers on a rigorous survey designed to get accurate results in the real world. It looked at backyard bird feeding and tried to better quantify how to select the correct feeder and food based on the birds you want to attract.

The study, called Project Wildbird, looked at 5 different questions:

1. 1. “Are the number of bird visits within species equivalent at different seed types?
   2. Are the number of bird visits within species equivalent at different feeder types?
   3. Does the number of bird visits at each seed type vary by feeder type?
   4. Does the number of bird visits at each seed type vary by season?; and
   5. Does the number of bird visits at each seed type vary by region of the U.S. and Canada?”

Answering these questions helps increase your success at attracting your favourite birds, and also a wider variety of species than you’ll get with a more haphazard approach.

By using citizen scientists, researchers were able to tap into an already motivated group of regular feeders enabling them to compile vast amounts of data while working closely with volunteers to ensure they followed the rigorous scientific guidelines.

They received far more volunteer applications than they could accommodate, but after 2 separate phone interviews designed to test volunteer’s ability to identify birds and follow the required procedures, only about 10% of the applicants were accepted.

Each participant was given 4 bird feeders and also equipped with squirrel and raccoon guards to keep them out of the feeders.

They were also given 10 types of birdseed: black-oiled sunflower, cracked corn, fine sunflower chips, medium sunflower chips, Nyjer, red milo, safflower, striped sunflower, white proso millet, and whole, unshelled peanuts. Sunflower chips are simply hulled black-oil sunflower seeds with the edible hearts chopped into different sizes.

These 10 seed types are the most commonly offered in most commercial seed mixtures.

There were also three kinds of feeders with each researcher getting 4 separate feeders but of only one of these types:

1. 1. tube-style where the food was dispersed through metal ports with perches
   2. hopper style where the feeder looks like a small house with the seeds being dispersed on a ledge on the bottom and
   3. platform feeders where the seeds are placed on a large platform.

The available space for birds to land and perch increased as you moved from tube-style, to hopper, and finally to platform feeders.

The volunteers monitored the feeders during each of 4 seasons for an entire year (and in some cases two years), and the seeds were rotated through the feeders on an assigned rotation schedule. Black-oil sunflower and white proso millet were always available in at least 2 of the 4 feeders.

The remaining 8 seeds types were offered 2 at a time in the remaining two feeders.

The study included 173 volunteers from 38 states and 3 provinces. During the study, more than 1.2 million visits of 106 species were recorded. Of those visits, American goldfinch, house finch, and house sparrow represented 55% of the visits.

Nyjer seed and sunflower chips attracted smaller finches like the goldfinch, redpoll, and pine siskin. Black-capped chickadees, red-breasted nuthatches, and purple finch preferred black-oil sunflower.

Ground feeding birds like red-winged blackbirds, song sparrows, and dark-eyed juncos flocked to white proso millet. Blue jays and white-breasted nuthatches preferred peanuts while downy woodpeckers enjoyed sunflower chips.

As was expected, if you want to attract larger birds like blue or Stellar’s jays, then platform feeders were the most effective. These feeders also enchanted ground feeders like the brown-headed cowbird and dark-eyed junco. It also kept the feed off the ground where it could attract other animals.

Tube and platform feeders attracted smaller birds able to take advantage of their more limited perch space. These included black-capped chickadees, chipping sparrows, common redpoll, purple finch, and song sparrows.

The bottom line is that black-oil sunflowers, medium sunflower chips, and white proso millet were the most popular foods across all regions. With these three foods, you’ll attract the largest variety of birds. Of these three, though the black-oil sunflower seeds and sunflower chips were more than 10 times more popular than the millet.

In this area, if you just put out a single food, make it black-oil sunflower seeds. Depending on which feeder or feeders you use, it will influence which feathered visitors join your buffet.

Seed preferences are based on many factors. These include seed and beak sizes, beak shape, the nutritional value of the food, and the bird’s feeding habits. An all-around strategy would include placing one tubular and one hopper feeder. This will attract the widest diversity of birds. Chickadees and nuthatches can hang at the tubular feeder while blue and perhaps Stellar’s jays will say hello to your hopper.

What makes this study unique is its huge number of individual observations and its coordinated method of comparing feeder types against foods for more than 100 different bird species.

Now that you have an idea of what the most popular foods are, you may be tempted to just grab a seed mix to try to cover all of your bases. Keep in mind that many of these so-called “mixes” are full of cheap seeds that most of your birds won’t ever eat. Focus on quality foods and quality feeders. If you travel to Calgary on a regular basis, check out the Wild Bird Store. If you want to shop locally, and I always promote that when possible, you should have no problem buying black-oil sunflower seeds at Home Hardware in Canmore and Banff, but again avoid the mixes.

I would also avoid seed bells. They’re convenient, but eventually, they get eaten to the point where they fall off of their hook and become ground food. If you do buy a bell, buy their sunflower seed only bell.

The challenge with shopping at a hardware store is simply that they don’t know birds. I’ve placed a few links to feeders and feed available on Amazon as well that may help to get you started. You can check those out on the show notes for this episode at www.MountainNaturePodcast.com/ep084.

A related story has to do with people feeding the mallards on Policeman’s Creek. Please don’t feed bread, crackers, or popcorn to our local ducks. Not only doesn’t it help the mallards; but in fact, it’s extremely detrimental to their survival. After all, we all know that bread rarely adds nutritional benefits to our diet – especially white bread, crackers and popcorn.

The more ducks fill up on bread, the less they feed and forage for natural foods.

Too many carbs as in bread fed urban ducks can suffer from a disorder called angel, or airplane wing.

According to a National Geographic blog post:

“Angel wing is a condition where the last joint on the wing is distorted and causes the end feathers to stick out laterally—sideways—instead of lying flat against the body. This prevents the bird from flying.”

According to the article, it’s curable in young birds but not in adults.

The more people feeding ducks often means the more ducks in that area. Every duck has to get rid of their bready meal and as more and more ducks (each attracted by free food), contribute carbon, phosphorous, and nitrogen in the water and surrounding area, the more the area becomes susceptible to harmful algae growths, fish kills, and other challenges.

As ducks get more accustomed to being hand-fed by people, they tend to lose their fear. This can make them easy prey to predators like coyotes, foxes, roaming cats, etc. They may even be more likely to wander out of the pond and onto roadways.

So there you have it…don’t feed bread, crackers, popcorn or similar foods to ducks in Canmore! Remember the mantra – “No crackers for quackers!” If you’d like to read more on this subject, here is a great article, and full credit goes to them for this catchy quote.

If you absolutely must feed your local mallards, then plan and provide the most nutritional foods. What do they normally eat – greens and bugs.

This means natural greens like chopped up kale (yuck), lettuce, and even dandelions are awesome. If you happen to have any mealworms or freeze-dried crickets, the ducks will also take those off of your hand. Insects form a big part of their summer food even though most of us don’t realize it.

Remember though, ducks don’t chew, so make sure all of your offerings are in nice bite-sized bits.

Now, let’s wrap up with a few other tips. When lots of birds gather at a feeder, there is also the opportunity for the spread of parasites and even diseases. It’s critical that you keep your feeders clean. At least once a month, take down your feeder and give it a good cleaning with hot water and a good brush. Make sure any residue is well cleaned and the feeder is dry before hanging it again.

With the frigid temperatures, the mountains recently endured, our avian friends had it much harder. They expend a great deal of energy trying to stay warm, so when the weather is at its worst, you need to be at your best and ensure the feeders stay full.

Clean, full feeders during the limited season we are allowed to feed birds can make sure your feathered friends benefit from your generosity.

If you’re listening to this episode and thinking to yourself, “well I don’t live in Canmore, Banff, or Jasper, so I can put up feeders all year long”, I would ask that you consider a few points.

When it comes to feeders, just because you may be allowed to have summer feeders, you might ask yourself whether you should. As an educator, I spend my summers with visitors from across North America. I often hear them lament on how black bears are so problematic where they live.

My usual response is to ask them a few questions:

• Do you have fruit trees that you don’t harvest?
• Do you feed your pets or other animals outside?
• Do you store food or garbage outside? and
• Do you keep up bird feeders in the summer?

All of these things will attract bears to your yard, especially when other natural foods may be scarce. All too often, when people complain about bears being such a hassle, usually it turns out that they are the cause of their own complaint.

Quite simply…”If you feed them, they will come”. If we make sure to keep our yards free of bear attractants during the season they are out and about, we can enjoy our avian friends while the bears slumber.

The post 084 Feeding Birds Ethically and Effectively appeared first on The Mountain Nature and Culture Podcast.

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The Real Man Behind the locally Filmed Movie The Revenant

You would have to be living under a rock to be unaware of a recent blockbuster film using the Canadian Rockies as its backdrop – the Leonardo Di Caprio film The Revenant. Released in 2015, the movie was largely filmed in the Canadian Rockies in general, and Spray Valley Provincial Park in particular. The wild character and winter landscape led to the dark feel of the picture and the mountain panoramas added interest.

The film follows the life of fur-trader and mountain man Hugh Glass who was badly mauled by a grizzly bear and subsequently left for dead. It’s a story of tragedy and revenge amidst the rugged landscapes of the Rocky Mountains.

Like most movies, there are some connections to the true story of Hugh Glass, who was indeed a real historical character. In this episode, I want to share the true story upon which the movie was based. At the same time, I’ll highlight some of the many ways the movie chose to vary from what is known about Hugh Glass’s real experiences.

Like many such films, it displays an “Inspired by a true story” message at the beginning of the film. This frees it from pesky things like any requirements to remain true and accurate to the actual events upon which the story is based.

To best understand the story of Hugh Glass, you first need to gain an understanding of the world in which he lived. He was one of a rare breed of man collectively referred to as mountain men.

In 1803, American President Thomas Jefferson negotiated the Louisiana  Purchase from France, and in a single transaction, he doubled the size of the United States. While the western portion of today’s U.S. was still in Spanish Hands, the Louisiana Purchase gave the U.S. the entire Saint Lawrence river and the territory between St. Louis, Missouri and Great Falls Montana along the length of the Missouri River.

It was one of the best bargains in American History and added more than 2 million square kilometres to American territory. Along with this purchase though, also came a lot of questions. Much of this new territory was unknown and so in 1804, Jefferson tasked the Lewis and Clark expedition with a very specific list of goals. According to Jefferson’s letter to Meriwether Lewis:

“The object of your mission is to explore the Missouri river, & such principal stream of it, as, by it’s course and communication with the waters of the Pacific ocean, whether the Columbia, Oregan, Colorado or any other river may offer the most direct & practicable water communication across this continent for the purposes of commerce.

Beginning at the mouth of the Missouri, you will take [careful] observations of latitude & longitude, at all remarkeable points on the river, & especially at the mouths of rivers, at rapids, at islands, & other places & objects distinguished by such natural marks & characters of a durable kind, as that they may with certainty be recognised hereafter….”

The letter continues:

“The interesting points of the portage between the heads of the Missouri, & of the water offering the best communication with the Pacific ocean, should also be fixed by observation, & the course of that water to the ocean, in the same manner as that of the Missouri.

Your observations are to be taken with great pains & accuracy, to be entered distinctly & intelligibly for others as well as yourself…. Several copies of these as well as of your other notes should be made at leisure times, & put into the care of the most trust-worthy of your attendants, to guard, by multiplying them, against the accidental losses to which they will be exposed….”

The expedition of Lewis and Clark illuminated a vast wilderness and opened the door for future exploration.

Contrary to popular belief, they were NOT the first people to cross the Rocky Mountains by land. That honour belongs to Alexander Mackenzie who accomplished the task for the North West Company in 1793. In fact, he arrived at Bella Bella on the west coast only a few weeks after Captain George Vancouver had passed the same point during his naval exploration of the region.

If you read the fine print, Lewis and Clark were the first to cross the Rockies by land south of the Missouri River. Regardless, their expedition opened the door for endless explorers, adventurers, fur traders, trappers, and settlers.

It also marked the beginning of the end for the traditional lives of the many indigenous peoples they would encounter as they ushered in a flood of European settlers into their world.

As James P. Ronda wrote in Smithsonian Magazine in 2003:

“You could even say that Lewis and Clark began the American invasion of the West, which aimed at making it safe for cows, corn and capital at the expense of bison, prairie grasses and cultures not fitting the expansionist agenda. If we want to be hard edged, we could even make a case that the Lewis and Clark story is a mainstay of the same shelf-worn narrative that glorifies and justifies the American conquest and dispossession of the North America natives.”

Their expedition crossed amazing country full of furs-bearing animals, in particular, the beaver. It didn’t take long for adventurous mountain men to begin to advance into this wilderness.

There was no typical mountain man. They encompassed every cultural, religious, and educational spectrum. The one thing they all had in common was a thirst for adventure and a quest for getting rich through trapping.

in Europe, the beaver hat was all the rage and there was a ready market for beaver and other pelts collected from these vast and largely untrapped landscapes.

Once the pelts made their way to Europe, hatters would use chemicals like mercuric nitrate to weave the fine underfur into felt used to make the tall hats worn by gentlemen. Of course today, we know that mercury is not a great thing to work with. Over the years, these hatters developed twitches and mannerisms as a result of mercury poisoning, and that is where the expression “mad as a hatter” comes from. So the Alice in Wonderland character is actually based on fact and can be attributed back to the exploration for furs in Canada and the western United States.

Once mountain men left civilization behind, they had to be tough enough, and smart enough to simply survive. They needed to be their own doctor, hunter, and pharmacist.

They needed to be able to find and trap furs successfully, and they needed to be constantly vigilant for the many signs of danger that were all around them.

They had to wary of grizzly bears, unfriendly locals, and rival parties. The climate was unforgiving. Many mountain men simply perished in storms.

Rivers were a common place to encounter grizzlies, but the rivers were also one of the main transportation corridors followed by these same mountain men.

The mountains attracted many men, all looking to live life on their own terms. Some were independent trappers, but most worked as part of larger organizations like the Rocky Mountain Fur Company. This is one bit of artistic license in the film as the Rocky Mountain Fur Company wasn’t established until 1830 – some 7 years after the events in the movie.

It’s more likely they would have been a part of the Henry & Ashley Company which would eventually evolve into the Rocky Mountain Fur Company.

If you’d like a great introduction to the history of the mountain men, check out this History Channel documentary:

This is the world where we find the story of Hugh Glass. The very first historical mention of Hugh Glass was in an 1825 publication called The Port Folio. This publication attempted to bring to life the adventures of the fur traders of the American west.

The article described the life of:

“the trapper whose erratic steps lead him continually into new toils and dangers. Being compelled to procure his subsistence by very precarious means from day to day, in those immense regions of wilderness into which he fearlessly penetrates, he is sometimes· known to live for a considerable period upon food over which the hungry wolf would pause for a polite interval before carving. The ordinary food of a trapper is corn and buffaloe-tallow, and although his rifle frequently procures more dainty viands, he is often, on the other hand, forced to devour his peltry, and gnaw his mocasins (sic).”

Little is known of the early years of Hugh Glass, and of the events that led him on the path towards the fateful events of the movie. He is believed to have been born near Philadelphia around the year 1783, but the actual details have been lost to history.

As to the events in his youth that moved him towards this eventual meeting with a grizzly bear, there are only a few sources and little hard evidence of the truth behind the stories.

The principal account covering this period is based on the memoirs of George C. Yount who supposedly knew Glass personally and joined the fur trade in 1825. It was years later that Yount shared his stories with Reverent Orange Clark, a catholic missionary and they then languished until Clark’s scattered notes were finally published in 1923 by historian Charles Lewis Camp.

If true, it appears that the early years of Hugh Glass’s life were as adventurous as his life with the fur trade. According to Camp’s article, Glass began his career as a sailor, and between 1817 and 1820, he found himself, along with his crew, captured by the notorious French pirate Jean Lafitte.

As the story goes, the crew of the American ship were given the option to serve the pirates or die. Glass chose the rogues life and joined Lafitte’s crew.

According to Yount’s journal:

“When the crew, of which Glass made a part learnt their conquerer’s terms, he & one other instantly decided to become Pirates; & were hailed as good fellows, when they had taken the oath of allegiance, which was an awfu1 one, & too horid to be written here – All went on well for a season, but the crue1 murders to be perpetrated daily, – as they shuddered from their inmost souls & shrunk from those deeds or blood, it was impossible for them to conceil from their despotic lord the emotions of their hearts.

Glass and his colleague were apparently not the most enthusiastic pirates and one evening overheard the crew planning to execute them on the following day.

According again to Yount:

“They therefore concluded to consult their own safety; & in the darkness of night, swam from the ship to the land & fled for life – This event proved the epoch of Glass’s life; & from his own lips.

Ahh, if things were only so simple. Apparently, after swimming several miles to the coastline, they travelled inland to escape the coast, travelling some 1,600 km northward until they were captured by members of the Wolf Pawnee Nation.

They had travelled so far, avoided an endless number of other indigenous warriors, but somewhere in the central plains, their luck ran out.

Unfortunately, the Pawnee were determined to torture and kill the two escapees, but lucky for Glass, he was selected to go second – being forced to watch his friend be slowly tortured and murdered.

His friend’s body was slowly pierced by hundreds of burning slivers of pine before he was finally burned at the stake – all in front of Glass who was forced to witness the ordeal.

After several days, it was Glass’s turn. According to Camp’s article:

“… two approached him to strip him of his apparel, the ruling Chief stood by to pierce his skin with the first splinter, which was deemed to royal privilege – Glass thrust his hand into his own bosom & drew from thence a large package of vermillion; an article which the savages value above all price. He gave the packet to the proud & haughty Brave, with an air of respect & affection & bowed his final farewell.”

This air of bravery earned Glass the respect of the chief, and as a result, not only was his life spared, but the chief adopted him as his son.

As such, he lived with the Pawnee for several years, taking one of the Pawnee women as his wife. He learned their language, customs, and how to live off of the land. He joined them in war with their enemies and this experience taught him skills he would use to survive when he later joined the ranks of the mountain men.

According to Edmund Flagg, in 1822, Glass joined an expedition of the Fur Company of Henry & Ashley leaving St. Louis and charged with following the Missouri River upstream to trade on both sides of the Rocky Mountains.

This was a huge party, totalling some 160 men. They departed in March of 1822 in two large keelboats filled with all of the provisions and trade goods necessary to undertake the planned expedition.

At some point in the expedition, a smaller party under the guidance of a Major Andrew Henry, ascended present-day Grand River as it branched westward off of the Missouri.

This group was quite small, travelling through the territory of the Arikara, or Rees as the traders referred to them. These indigenous peoples were known to attack fur trading brigades and so the group tried to move very stealthily. Henry ordered everybody to remain together at all times.

Grizzly bears were a constant danger to mountain men in the American west. In a 1930 article by Lieutenant Phillip St. George Cooke in the Southern Literary Messenger, Cooke stated:

“The white, or more properly, the grey or grizzly bear is, next to the Indian, the greatest enemy the hunter meets with in this region; it is the lion of our forests; the strongest and most formidable of all its animals. It is about 400 pounds in weight; its claws more than three inches long; the buffalo bull, perhaps stronger and more active than the domestic, is a certain victim to its strength. If a grizzly bear is reported to be in the vicinity of an Indian camp or village, fifty or an hundred warriors turn out (as in the East for a lion or tiger) to hunt to its death so dangerous and dreaded a neighbor.

The grizzly bear never avoids, very often attacks a man; while on the other hand, the hunter, but under the most favorable circumstances, carefully avoids him.”

Depending on which historic source you read, Glass and a companion, regardless of Henry’s orders, set off on their own in search of food.

The Port Folio story credited Glass’s rifle as “being esteemed as among the most unerring”. It was said that he and his companion went out to hunt game for the party.

According to Flagg’s version, it was wild berries they were looking for. This would seem to make more sense as the party was trying to move as quietly as possible and would want to avoid the sound of gunfire which might alert the Aricara to their presence.

According to the Port Folio story:

“He was a short distance in advance of the party, and forcing his way through a thicket, when a white bear that had imbedded herself in the sand, arose within three yards of him, and before he could ‘set his triggers,’ or turn to retreat, he was seized by the throat, and raised from the ground. Casting him again upon the earth, his grim adversary tore out a mouthful of the cannibal food which had excited her appetite, and retired to submit the sample to her yearling cubs, which were near at hand. The sufferer now made an effort to escape, but the bear immediately returned with a reinforcement, and seized him again at the shoulder; she also lacerated his left arm very much, and inflicted a severe wound on the back of his head. In this second attack, the cubs were prevented from participating by one of the party who had rushed forward to the relief of his comrade. One of the cubs, however, forced the newcomer to retreat into the river, where, standing to the middle in water, he gave his foe a mortal shot, or to use his own language ‘I burst the varment.’ Meantime, the main body of trappers having arrived, advanced to the relief of Glass, and delivered seven or eight shots with such unerring aim as to terminate hostilities, by despatchmg the bear as she stood over her victim.”

If you watch The Revenant, this scene is portrayed with similar ferocity. By the end of the battle, Glass was left torn, mangled, and broken. According to Flagg’s account:

“He had not less than fifteen wounds, any one of which under ordinary circumstances would have been mortal. He was conveyed carefully in the arms of his companions across the Chian, and his wounds were bound up, though it was as thought by all he could not possibly survive. A litter was constructed from the boughs of trees, and during that day and the succeeding one, he was borne onwards, as a corpse upon a bier. On the third day the party arrived at a fine grove some distance from the route of the wandering tribes, in the middle of which was a large spring supplying a creek.”

At first, it seemed like there was no way Glass could survive this attack. Yet on the third day, while he stubbornly continued to breathe, the group held a meeting. It was too dangerous for the party to remain indefinitely and so after a collection of $300 was taken, two of the party, John S. Fitzgerald and a young Jim Bridger would stay to wait for the wretched man to die, bury him, and then rejoin the party.

The longer Glass kept breathing, the greater the risk of them being discovered by the Aricara. According to Flagg:

“…what a situation! A man languishing from wounds thousands of miles from all surgical succor – surrounded by roving savages – almost destitute of the necessaries of subsistence – and in the care of two lawless men, whose interest it was that their patient should, as soon as possible, cease to live, and who, even with the most kindly intentions, were unskilled to afford the aid and attendance so imperiously demanded!”

According to the Port Folio story:

“They remained with their patient five days, and supposing his recovery no longer possible, they cruelly abandoned him, taking with them his rifle, shot-pouch, &c. and leaving him no means of either making fire or procuring food These unprincipled wretches proceeded on the trail of their employer; and when they overtook him, reported that Glass had died of his wounds, and that they had interred him in the best manner possible.”

The only problem with their story was that, by some strange miracle, Glass held onto life. When he regained his senses slightly and began to fathom his dire circumstances, he managed to find unimaginable strength.

Somehow, he managed to crawl a few metres to a small stream for water. He began to pick a few cherries and buffaloberries to gain some strength. He spent 10-days in this one spot, before starting an arduous journey towards Fort Kiowa some 560 km distant.

Travelling 560 km alone in this landscape would be incredibly dangerous and difficult even for a healthy man. Glass, on the other hand, could not even stand up. He simply began to drag himself, metre by metre, day by day, closer and closer to the distant fort.

He had neither a rifle or a knife. All he could do was eat berries when he could find them and keep crawling, day after day after day.

One afternoon, he saw a pack of wolves killing a bison calf, and when he was sure the calf was dead, he managed to spook the wolves from their feast and claim the carcass.

Unfortunately, lacking basic tools such as a knife to butcher it, or a flint to cook the meat, he simply dug in, feeding on it in whatever manner he was able to without the most basic implement. Regardless, it was meat, and it was nourishment.

With no witness to his journey, all of the historic references vary in the telling of his story. Eventually, he managed to crawl, stumble, and limp all the way to Fort Kiowa, arriving in early October.

Here he was finally bandaged and had an opportunity to build his strength and heal. After a few weeks, he and 7 other trappers headed out towards the Yellowstone River where his previous comrades had travelled.

He would be travelling late in the season, as autumn gave way to winter, but Glass was fueled with thoughts of revenge against Fitzgerald and Bridger for abandoning him. He wanted his revenge, but also the return of his rifle.

They ascended the Missouri River towards a series of Mandan villages. The Mandan were friendly with the traders but while Glass was separated from the rest of the party hunting, he was discovered by a group of Aricara.

They took chase and Glass would have surely perished had two Mandans not also discovered him, rode their horses right into the melee, and grabbed Glass before his pursuers could finish him off. When he arrived at the Mandan villages, he learned that the other 7-men in his party had all been killed by the Aricara. He alone survived.

From the villages, he continued upstream to the point where the Missouri River crosses the Montana border, arriving at Fort Henry on New Year’s Day 1824.

Instead of revenge, Glass learned that Fitzgerald had been sent to Fort Atkinson, Nebraska. Not to be deterred, Glass volunteered to be a mail courier to take letters to the fort. He departed on Feb 29th, 1824 with four men.

This journey wasn’t without mishap. They were once again set upon by Aricaras and two of the men were slain. After 15-days, he arrived at Fort Kiowa before continuing further down the Missouri River to Fort Atkinson and his nemesis.

When he arrived at Fort Atkinson, he learned Fitzgerald had enlisted in the army and was thus untouchable by his quest for vengeance. Any attempt to harm Fitzgerald would result in Glass being hanged. He was thus forced to let Fitzgerald live, although he did receive his rifle back, and according to one source, $300 to appease his quest for revenge.

Later, when he encountered young Jim Bridger, he realized that he was just a 19-year old kid and decided to forgive him. Bridger would later become one of the most well-known and respected of all the mountain men.

At this point, Glass moved on with his life. By this time, the fur trade was beginning to wane in the west. The beaver had been largely trapped out, and fashion trends in Europe were abandoning beaver for silk felts.

He continued his work as a trader though, travelling through many areas of the Yellowstone region. In 1828, he was present at the Bear Lake Rendezvous. These annual events allowed the mountain men to sell their furs, socialize, and drink.

By March of 1830, Glass was working near Fort Union (the former site of Fort Henry), as a hunter. He apparently was able to shoot so many bighorn on the hills opposite the fort that the area became known as the Glass Bluffs.

In 1832, Glass relocated to Fort Cass at the junction of the Bighorn and Yellowstone Rivers. He was hired as a hunter to supply meat to the fort. The following spring, Glass, along with two companions, was sent to trap beaver a short distance from the fort. As they crossed the frozen river, they were attacked by a large war party of Aricara who had been hiding in the bushes.

After so many harrowing escapes, this was the final adventure of Hugh Glass. The three men were shot, robbed, and scalped. The west had lost one of its great explorers. Glass had spent a little more than a decade in the west, but he had gained a great reputation as a fearless individual that could work well under pressure.

At this point, if you remember the movie, you’ve probably already noticed a number of discrepancies from the story as related by the historic sources.

First, the story didn’t occur in the mountains in winter. In fact, his grizzly attack took place on the border between North and South Dakota, hardly a mountain landscape – and in the summer.

The real discrepancies in the film relate to the reasons for Glass’s quest for violence and the resolution.

While Glass may have had a native wife, there is no evidence that he had a son. In the movie, it was the murder of his son by Fitzgerald that fuelled his quest for vengeance. Fitzgerald also didn’t murder the expedition leader Andrew Henry as he did in the film. In fact, Henry retired from the fur trade in 1824.

Fitzgerald vanished from the story after he was discharged from the army in 1829. Glass had long since given up his quest for revenge, forgiven the young Jim Bridger, and continued his various exploits along the Missouri and Yellowstone Rivers.

While the story didn’t take place as and where it was filmed, the mountain landscape lends an imposing character to the story. Like most Hollywood films, often it’s the story that counts the most.

Director Alejandro González Iñárritu had great plans for this movie when he decided to bring it to the screen. Actors like Leonardo Di Caprio would be pushed to their limits in order to make every moment of the film seem real.

When it comes to the bear attack, well there wasn’t even an actual bear. It was entirely computer-generated. According to a story in Business Insider, production designer Jack Fisk had rubber trees placed around the site where the attack would be filmed. This would keep Di Caprio from being injured when he was tossed against them during the attack. A series of cables attached to the actor allowed production crew to yank him back and forth. The bear was added in post-production.

In another scene, Di Caprio jumps off of a cliff on his horse to escape a band of Aricara. The actual jump scene was CGI and the horse that Di Caprio slices open to crawl inside to stay warm was another creation of the production department.

In the end, the movie won three Academy awards including best actor for Di Caprio, best Director for González Iñárritu and Best Cinematography.

The filming took place in 12 different locations in three countries, Canada, the U.S., and Argentina. Most of the wild landscapes were filmed at Fortress Mountain in Kananaskis and the Spray River Valley. The fort built for the movie was also in the Spray Valley not far from Canmore, Alberta. Other scenes were filmed in Calgary, Drumheller, Squamish, and Burnaby, British Columbia.

The final scenes were filmed in Argentina simply because the winter weather in Kananaskis Country had warmed up and they needed more snow.

The Revenant has become a classic film that once again showcased the magical landscapes of the Canadian Rockies. With each new film produced here, there is more and more motivation for additional crews to make their way to the local mountains.

The next time you’re watching a movie that takes place in a mountain landscape, take a moment to study the backdrop, you may recognize some local features.

Over the years, I’ve tried to compile a list of movies filmed in the Canadian Rockies but I still get surprised from time to time. I remember watching my favourite Dustin Hoffmann film, Little Bit Man, when all of a sudden I noticed the distinctive face of Mount Yamnuska in the background. I hadn’t realized that it has been partially filmed on the Stoney Reserve and in Calgary.

Other classic panoramas in films include Anthony Hopkins movie Legends of the Fall, which was also filmed on the Stoney Reserve along with locations in Calgary and Vancouver.

There have been so many movies filmed in and around the Rockies that I could never list them here. The important thing is to watch movies for more than a great storyline – look at the background and you may see a few familiar panoramas.

The post 083 The Real Story Behind the Filming of The Revenant in Kananaskis Country appeared first on The Mountain Nature and Culture Podcast.

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Now Listed as one of the Top 15 Ecology Podcasts on the Internet

Before we get started I just wanted to share the news that the Mountain Nature and Culture Podcast was recently selected as one of the top 15 podcasts focussing on ecology by Feedspot. I’ve put a link to the list in the show notes for this episode, but if you want to head straight there, you can visit https://blog.feedspot.com/ecology_podcasts. If you like this show, you may be able to find additional shows to subscribe to. One example is a show called Naturally Speaking produced by the Institute of Biodiversity, Animal Health and Comparative Medicine at the University of Glasgow.

Alternatively, you may enjoy the show Future Ecologies which looks at the ecological processes that define planet Earth, how they affect us, how we’ve affected them, and how we can align with them to create vibrant, biodiverse, and resilient societies.

If you’re like me, I’ve always struggled to find ecology-focused programs so this list might just be the place to go to expand your subscription list…next up grizzlies tearin’ up the turf.

How do Grizzlies Impact the Alpine Landscape when they dig?

Grizzly bears are designed to dig. It’s what they do. They dig for roots and tubers. They dig for ground squirrels and marmots. In fact, digging is so important to brown and grizzly bears that their entire physiology has evolved to make them the ultimate excavator.

If you’re lucky enough to get a good look at a grizzly bear, you’ll notice their claws are incredibly long, up to 8 cm, making them longer than your longest finger. In addition, they sport a huge shoulder hump made of dense muscle to power those sharp claws as they tear the turf apart.

Do you hike in the Rocky Mountains? If so, you’ve probably come across grizzly bear diggings when wandering through the subalpine and alpine. When a grizzly tears into the turf, it’s like a commercial excavator has worked over the meadow.

In other episodes, I’ve examined the many seasonal foods that drive the annual movements of grizzly bears in the central Rockies. The seasonal availability of specific foods motivates bears to be in the right place at the right time to maximize their annual calorie count.

While these seasonal movements have been a key part of the annual food hunt of bears, there has been very little research to look at the impacts of these digs on sensitive alpine and subalpine landscapes. After all, we’re always told how sensitive the alpine is to disturbance and reminded to stay on the main trails when possible to avoid unnecessarily damaging delicate plant communities.

However, there’s an interesting thing about nature; any time there is a regular and inevitable disturbance to the landscape, nature will learn to adapt to it, and in many cases thrive because of it.

Take forest fires for example, and I’ve spent a great deal of time talking about the fire ecology of the mountain west over the past few years, but most of our local forest ecosystems have adapted to thrive through regular, low-intensity fires.

As it turns out, the mountain landscape has also adapted to the digging of bears. In this episode, I want to look at two particular studies, one that looked into the effects of shallow digs for the roots of glacier lilies, and another that investigated deeper digs when the bears were excavating ground squirrel and marmot dens. Surprisingly, each type of digging had different impacts on the meadow.

In September of 1824, Hudson’s Bay Company trader, Alexander Ross was in the Stanley Basin in Idaho. He described a scene he came across:

…we observed at some distance the appearance of … a field, and riding up towards it, found a ploughed large piece of ground more than four acres in extent, dug up and turned over. On getting to the spot, we observed no less than nine…grizzly bears at work, rooting away.

That would have been a remarkable sight and would be amazing in any place in the world where grizzlies still thrive. Unfortunately, the passage of time has not been kind to bears. Where Ross could see nine bears at one time in 1824, today there are only around 40 bears in the entire state of Idaho.

In a 1998 study published in The Ecological Society of America, Sandra Tardiff, and Jack Stanford looked at grizzly digs in Glacier National Park in Montana. They wanted to explore how digging impacted the availability of nitrogen to the roots of glacier lily plants. They believed that tearing up the turf might impact nutrient availability in meadows right down to the molecular level.

They wanted to look into whether the act of churning meadows might add additional nitrogen to the soil, and thus improve the growth of nitrogen loving plants like the glacier lily, a key fall food for grizzly bears.

Just about anywhere species interact, there are always impacts, some positive and others negative. When we talk about sensitive high elevation landscapes, it would seem that a large bear tearing up the surface might not be great for the ecology of the meadow.

Plant-eating animals by their very definition are always impacting the landscape as they feed. Beavers harvest aspen and willow trees and build dams that alter entire ecosystems.

Elk and deer browse grasses and shrubs, and if not controlled by strong predator populations, can seriously impact entire ecosystems. Back in episode 45, I described the many changes that happened in the Yellowstone ecosystem when wolves were returned to the landscape and for the first time in decades, elk were finally back on the menu as the wolves put the entire ecosystem back into balance.

Interactions between species also alter nutrient cycles present in every ecosystem. What’s a nutrient cycle? Here’s a good definition from Brittanica.com:

“The cells of all organisms are made up primarily of six major elements that occur in similar proportions in all life-forms. These elements—hydrogen, oxygen, carbon, nitrogen, phosphorus, and sulfur—form the core protoplasm of organisms, and the first four of these elements make up about 99 percent of the mass of most cells. Additional elements, however, are also essential to the growth of organisms. Calcium and other elements help to form cellular support structures such as shells, internal or external skeletons, and cell walls. Chlorophyll molecules, which allow photosynthetic plants to convert solar energy into chemical energy, are chains of carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen compounds built around a magnesium ion. Altogether, 16 elements are found in all organisms; another eight elements are found in some organisms but not in others.”

Essentially, we’re all composed of at least 16 different elements and they all occur in both organic and inorganic forms. The nitrogen cycle is just one of the important cycles impacting all global ecosystems. Nitrogen is the most common element in the atmosphere, comprising 78% of the air we breathe.

Nitrogen is often converted to nitrates by lightning, making it available to plants as it falls as rain during storms. In the soil, nitrogen occurs in numerous forms. Nitrogen-fixing bacteria and decomposing fungi and bacteria create ammonium, which is then converted into Nitrates by nitrifying bacteria. These nitrates are then absorbed by the roots of plants.

Essentially, nitrogen is constantly cycling through various forms. Plants absorb nitrogen through their roots. Animals eat the plants, and occasionally carnivores eat the herbivores. Eventually, all things die and the action of bacteria and fungi help to return those nutrients to the soil.

An important aspect of the nutrient cycle is the ratio between carbon and nitrogen in soil. A ratio of 10:1 indicates that there are 10 units of carbon for every unit of nitrogen. The ratio has a strong impact on how the nitrogen is absorbed by plants and animals.

Since the nitrogen cycle begins with microbes, it’s important to understand their metabolic requirements. According to Agriculture.com: “microbes need a C:N ratio near 24:1: Around 16 parts of carbon are used for energy and eight parts for maintenance.”

Just like we need to eat the right foods to enable efficient digestion, microbes need the right ratio of carbon to nitrogen in the food they consume. Every plant has a different ratio of carbon to nitrogen, which then impacts the metabolic needs of these tiny microbes. As it turns out, the availability of nitrogen is the most important aspect of this ratio.

The quicker microbes are able to absorb nitrogen, the faster plants can grow. If microbes are digesting high ratio plants like wheat with its 80:1 ratio, it doesn’t provide enough nitrogen for the amount of carbon it contains.

The bacteria then need to find additional sources of nitrogen by absorbing it from the soil, resulting in a nitrogen deficit that will persist until the microbes in turn die and decompose, releasing the nitrogen stored in their bodies. This leaves the soil wanting for nitrogen leaving less for the roots of plants to absorb. Less nitrogen means slower growth of plants.

Alternatively, if microbes are feeding on plant residues with a low carbon-nitrogen ratio, like vetch with its 11:1 ratio, they digest it quickly leaving excess nitrogen available in the soil for growing plants.

Herbivores also prefer to eat plants with a low carbon-nitrogen ratio. They selectively crop the low ratio plants leaving behind harder to digest high ratio plants. Microbes are now limited to feeding on the remnant high carbon sources, resulting in the nitrogen in the soil decreasing.

When bacteria are consuming soil nitrogen as opposed to releasing it, plants requiring less carbon, meaning plants with a high carbon-nitrogen ratio have a competitive advantage over more nitrogen hungry plants.

This creates a negative spiral of soil nutrition. The more high ratio plants growing, the less nitrogen released to the soil, and so on. Moose are a good example. If a moose overbrowses an area, the amount of nitrogen in the soil also diminishes.

I know. This is a lot of sciency stuff, but gaining a good understanding of how nitrogen moves through the soil is critical to understanding how bears impact that ecosystem in their quest for glacier lily bulbs.

Curiously, when animals burrow into the ground, like grounds squirrels, the amount of nitrogen adjacent to the burrow often increases. An area with significant burrows can support a more diverse plant community simply because the act of burrowing improves nitrogen availability when compared to adjacent areas lacking burrows.

These changes don’t go unnoticed by animals like pronghorn or bison which will preferentially feed on areas with prairie dog (Cynomys ludovicianus) colonies.

Can you see where I’m going with this? Since burrowing animals have shown to have a beneficial impact on nitrogen availability and, in turn, plant growth, might grizzlies digging have a similarly positive impact?

Unlike ground squirrels and prairie dogs, grizzlies cover vast territories and thus impact a wide variety of habitats. According to the study:

“Disturbances caused by grizzly bears foraging for plant roots could have pervasive effects on the local plant assemblage, initially by changing species’ distributions and abundances and soil mineral nitrogen concentrations, and ultimately by changing successional patterns within disturbed patches.

If preferred forage species revegetate digs, they could be larger and or more nutritious as a consequence of disturbance effects that would minimize plant competition and potentially increase soil nutrient availability.

Competition would be minimized because of the decrease in the number of plants growing in a dig. Available nitrogen could increase for a variety of reasons, including the following: increased mineralization rates due to physical disturbance of the soil, decreased uptake by plants, and increased mineralization of organic material, such as grizzly bear excrement.

This scenario of larger and/or more nutritious plant foods might encourage grizzly bears to selectively dig in previously disturbed areas. Moreover, the patch mosaic created by grizzly bear digging over time would also affect other organisms living within the ecosystem.”

Here’s my English translation of this paragraph. Grizzlies digging for glacier lily roots may provide a local boost in available nitrogen to the soil for future generations of lilies. If this is true, the added nitrogen might mean that subsequent crops could be larger and potentially more nutritious in previously excavated sites.

The act of turning over the soil also may reduce competition in a dig site meaning more and larger lilies might be available. Digging up the soil interrupts plant growth, and increases soil mineralization, reduces the amount of nitrogen being absorbed by plants during the period of disturbance, and while feeding, bears may add additional nitrogen through their droppings. After all, manure is an excellent source of nitrogen.

The term soil mineralization simply refers to the process of decomposition where chemical compounds like nitrogen are released to the soil as organic matter decomposes. Digging up soil helps to increase this rate of decomposition.

If this is true, then bears may return to previous dig sites to find more nutritious and more plentiful glacier lilies. This study looked at recent digs, those less than 5 years old, and compared them to adjacent, undisturbed meadows.

Glacier lilies are perennial plants that live for many years, but often take up to 8 years to begin producing seeds. It also rarely reproduces vegetatively, meaning seeds are needed for new individuals to colonize a site. They’re an early bloomer, being one of the first plants to bloom on avalanche slopes in the spring.

Blooming early in the season means they’ve finished flowering before grizzly bears become interested in them in the autumn. Like other root vegetables, they’re a fall crop, and the bears only dig them when they are at their most nutritious.

Grizzlies don’t have to dig deep to find these nutritious potato-like tubers, usually just 10 cm or so. The bulbs are subsequently munched down, while the rest of the plant is left behind. Keep in mind, that the lily has long since finished growing by the time the bears excavate them.

Other favourite roots, like Hedysarum, are often still growing when they’re dug up, but the bear still just chomps down the roots and leaves the stems and foliage behind.

The study showed that bears had a definite preference for previously excavated sites. If you hike up to Chester Lake in Alberta’s Kananaskis Country, you can see a perfect example of this. Right adjacent to the shoreline is a regularly recycled area of extensive digging. It’s obvious that bears return to the same dig site on regular occasions.

They also found that in areas where the bears excavated, glacier lilies were the first plants to reappear, resulting in dig sites having a different plant composition than adjacent sites. After excavation, glacier lilies encompassed 41% of the total plant cover while bare ground accounted for 65%.

In undisturbed areas, glacier lilies were limited to just 24% of the plant cover. This finding showed that glacier lilies thrived on the increased soil nitrogen in areas where grizzlies excavated. Plants in dig-sites had higher amounts of nitrogen in their tissues when compared to undisturbed sites.

While glacier lilies take a great deal of time to become established, bears never manage to eat every bulb in an excavation. In turn, the plants that remain produce twice as many seeds as plants growing in adjacent, undisturbed meadows.

Glacier lily seeds are also heavy, meaning they don’t disperse very far, with all of the seeds falling with a metre of the parent plant. On a dig site, most of those seeds fall on bare soil, which only enhances germination.

What we begin to see is a story where the glacier lilies in previously excavated sites have less competition from other plants, are larger and more nutritious and thus more easily digestible for grizzlies.

It also goes without saying that previously tilled sites would be easier to dig up in the future as well. While the actual number of bulbs in previously excavates sites may be lower than undisturbed sites, their higher nutritional value seems to be a strong attractant to return visits.

It’s always amazing how species become so intricately connected. When we look at any landscape, it’s a reflection of the endless number of interactions between species.

So if grizzly digs are beneficial when they’re relatively shallow, are there still benefits to deeper digs? A study in the publication: Arctic, Antarctic, and Alpine Research by Daniel Doak and Michael Loso looked at the impacts of grizzlies excavating deeper holes in search of ground squirrels.

This study differed in many ways from the previous one. They looked into a total of 43 bear digs to look at how they affected “species richness and diversity, recolonization patterns, and plants with different clonal growth strategies”.

For many high elevation plant communities, growing seasons are simply too short for widespread reproduction from seeds. Instead, most alpine plants spread out vegetatively to create clone plants. Many of these clonal plants grow as dense carpets low to the ground as in the very common moss campion (Silene acaulis).

Being able to spread vegetatively allows alpine plants to colonize harsh landscapes where the growing season is simply too short for most seeds to germinate. It also allows them to more efficiently utilize scarce resources, which in turn, makes them more competitive.

Despite the difficulty of seeds germinating through the short growing season, some plants do beat the odds and establish new plants which then send out stolons to expand a single plant into larger and larger clonal patches or carpets.

In addition, well established clonal patches can live very long lives. They also grow very slowly, with moss campion’s growth rate varying between .06 cm and 1.82 cm/year. This slow growth allows some of the largest campion cushions to live upwards of 350 years. In other mountain regions, such as the Andes of South America, some clonal plants can be as old as 3,000 years.

The slow growth of alpine plants is one of the reasons that we, as guides always try to reduce our impact when hiking off-trail above treeline. By spreading out, rather than walking in single-file, groups can reduce their impact on individual plants. It’s also important to try to step on rocks when possible and in doing so, save the plants from possible damage.

So, what does happen when a grizzly comes and digs deep holes in the hunt for ground squirrels and marmots? Well as our first study showed, disturbing soil had beneficial effects on glacier lily populations, but those were quite shallow excavations.

While this study took place in Alaska, the results are easily applicable to the mountain west as many of the species are similar to those found in alpine areas further north. This study looked specifically into how these digs impacted:

“mature alpine plant communities, with special reference to the differential effects of disturbance on plants with different growth forms. In particular, we asked the following questions:

1. 1. How does the species richness and diversity of bear digs compare with those of neighbouring mature tundra?
   2. How does that relationship evolve over the life of the dig?
   3. Do bear digs influence community structure, at least in part, by differentially favouring plant species with particular clonal forms?”

OK, once more now in English! They wanted to see how digs changed the landscape and plant communities over time, as compared to undisturbed areas nearby. Which plants were more positively impacted, and were certain growth forms able to benefit more than others.

In the plots they studied, there were no annuals, or plants that reproduce by seed every year. The ground cover was limited to long-lived perennials that reproduced, at least in part, vegetatively. While most alpine plants reproduce vegetatively, there are numerous strategies that plants can take, and this is an important part of understanding this study.

They looked at two main strategies, each subdivided into two sub-strategies.

For plants that produce new clones vegetatively, there are two main strategies: those whose daughter clones grow beneath the parent’s plants canopy, and those whose daughters form away from the parent plant. Of these two main strategies, the expanding regions of the plant might be either above ground, or below the surface.

This gave them four main strategies:

• plants whose daughter clones remained close to the parent
  • with their expanding horizontal stem, or stolon, remained above the ground such as heathers, mouse-ear chickweed, mountain avens, crowberry, moss campion, and purple saxifrage.
  • with their expanding stems below the ground such as columbine, pussytoes, paintbrush, shooting star, fleabanes, gentians, and goldenrods.
• Plants whose clones were more distant from the parent and
  • their stolons above the ground like willows and finally,
  • stolons below the ground like yarrow, windflower, arnica, fireweed, and horsetail.

What I find interesting in this list, as complicated as it seems at first, each of the alpine and subalpine plants I’ve admired for decades each has a very different way of surviving at high elevations with short growing seasons.

Each of these strategies has proven very successful for the plants that employ them, but what was unknown at the time of this study was what would a grizzly tearing up these vegetative plant colonies do to the meadow.

Once they had divided plant strategies into 4-different groups, they further subdivided the landscape into two main habitats: moist snowbeds and warmer, drier meadows.

Snowbeds represented those areas where patches of snow persisted well into the summer, remained moist most of the season, and experienced the coldest temperatures. Meadows were warmer, had longer growing seasons and were significantly drier.

Snowbeds were dominated by saxifrage and willow, while meadows hosted lingonberry and pyrola, a type of wintergreen.

Ground squirrels and marmots burrow deeply into the ground. Not only did bears excavate equally deep holes, but they could also cover an area of up to twenty square metres. The simple act of tearing away at the vegetation meant they were ripping up, in some cases, centuries of slowly growing plant life.

As they shovelled downward, they left a pattern of holes separated by mounds of soil removed by their exploration. This study ignored the mounds and instead focussed on the impact the digs had on the ecology of the meadow. The mounds also recolonize vegetatively much quicker than those areas where the bear has removed the surface layers.

As a guide, I think of all the time I’ve gingerly crossed meadows hoping to have minimal impact, while bears leave a much deeper impression on the landscape.

At the end of the study, researchers found that 88 species of plants colonized the mature tundra, but only  62 were found in dig sites. When the bears put claws to tundra, they usually removed all the plants as their claws sought dinner.

The plants did recolonize the dig sites but, as the report states:

” Mature tundra plots have higher average plant species richness than bear dig plots, and very slightly lower mean species diversity than bear digs”

This sentence uses two very specific terms: richness and diversity. If two plots of land have the same number of species, say 5, then they both have the same richness. However, if in one plot the site is largely dominated by only one of those species and the other has a more even distribution of all 5 plants, than the second plot would have higher diversity.

With this in mind, while long-established sites had very rich plant growth, there were fewer species than an area of tundra with bear digs. The digs helped to reset the clocks in terms of plant colonization and allow a larger number of species to recolonize on in the newly tilled soil.

Once the turf was tossed, the future of the site was up for grabs, although most regrowth showed an affinity for plant species found nearest to the excavation.

This study can’t determine the point at which excavation would become a negative impact on species diversity however, it’s clear that a moderate level of grizzly digging enhances species richness over the long term.

Diversity isn’t the only thing that is impacted when the turf of a meadow is tossed in search of furry prey. It can also impact the mix of plants that are left behind as the excavation heals and new growth repairs the disturbance.

In this study, researchers compared 4-different growth strategies. Did bear digging offer advantages to one or more strategies? The results were dependant on whether the digs were in snowbeds or meadows.

The study found that:

“In snowbed areas, all clonal types except the most dominant one were favoured by digging, suggesting that the statistically significant reduction in aboveground guerrilla species may release species of other clonal types from competition, leading to the observed increases in species richness and diversity

This means that most plant groups benefitted from digs in snowbed zones with the exception of plants like willow whose stolons run far from the parent plant and remain above the ground.

Rather, it appears that tilling the soil, provides opportunities for plants of different clonal groups to make a play for the newly opened habitat by reducing the dominance of any one strategy that may have previously been well established on the site. This adds more species richness and diversity.

In meadow areas, digging favoured the plants with below ground stolons that remained close to the parent plant. It actually suppressed those with above-ground stolons like willows, heather, moss campion, and purple saxifrage. Plants benefitting from the dig included columbine, pussytoes, paintbrush, shooting star, fleabanes, gentians, and goldenrods.

The result is that regular digs help to prevent a single plant species from becoming dominant, even though the tundra may, at first glance, appear to be mature.

Some of the plants that benefited most by excavation, like fireweed, also occurred in mature sites, but usually in locations fractured by frost heaving. It can be argued that these sites disturbed by the constant freezing and thawing common in the high country are also disturbed sites. Fireweed is well known to prefer such sites. After all, it’s also one of the first plants to recolonize forest fire sites as well.  Biological disturbances like digs often create ecological opportunities similar to non-biological changes like frost heaving.

The report speculates that those plants that spread slowly, with new clones forming very close to the parent are at a disadvantage in mature meadows. Disturbances like grizzly excavations may give them an advantage over more successful strategies like willows whose stolons spread to sites quite distant from the parent plant.

Basically, grizzly digs offer new opportunities for plants to colonize the disturbed site. Some plants are able to more effectively take advantage of individual digs depending on what the dominant vegetation was before the dig, whether the dig occurs in a snowbed or meadow, and what the species richness was before the bear arrived on the scene.

What does this study tell us…well it shows that bears are an important part of the alpine landscape, but at the same time, additional studies need to be done to determine just what their quest for ground squirrels has on the wider mountain ecology.

That’s the cool thing about science. It’s never done. Each study helps formulate questions for subsequent studies. As grizzlies disappear from portions of their historic range and expand into new habitats with warming climates, future research will need to look into how their changing range impacts landscapes in their absence from some areas and their advancement into new territories.

I recently returned from guiding visitors on polar bear viewing expeditions near Churchill, Manitoba. Few people are aware that Wapusk National Park, only a few kilometres from Churchill, is the only park in Canada that has black, grizzly, and polar bears. As habitats change, so do ranges. As ranges change, so do the impacts of bears altering the landscape in their constant quest for food.

And with that it’s time to wrap this episode up. I want to take this moment to say thank you for sharing your time with me. I know you’ve got a busy schedule and I appreciate your spending a little bit of it with me. Drop me a line if you’re coming to the mountains and are looking for a guide or guidance to help you make the most of your mountain experience.

If you’d like to reach out personally, you can hit me up on Twitter @wardcameron, or drop me an email at info@wardcameron.com, and with that, the snow’s falling and it’s time to go snowshoeing. I’ll talk to you next week.

The post 082 Top Ecology Podcasts, and grizzlies digging up the high country appeared first on The Mountain Nature and Culture Podcast.

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New Research Looking into Overtourism

From the very first episodes of this Podcast, I’ve talked about the challenges of over-tourism in the Canadian Rockies. Every year the number of visitors increases while local, provincial, and federal tourism agencies continue to spend millions of dollars to attract more and more visitors. The Rockies are one of Canada’s most iconic destinations, but while more and more and more people flock to the same 2% of the park, the paved corridors, the local landscape becomes overwhelmed with oceans of people, cars, and an endless stream of rental RVs.

The Rockies are in good company as dozens of destinations worldwide that are finding themselves suffering due to unsustainable tourism burdens. Recently Megan Epler Wood, director of the International Sustainable Tourism Initiative at Harvard University presented some of their findings at the Banff Centre. Harvard produced a detailed report on the true cost of tourism entitled Destinations at Risk: The Invisible Burden of Tourism. It offers a detailed look at how places like Banff and Jasper can better understand how to reevaluate their tourism so as to reduce the risk of compromising the very thing that attracts visitors in the first place.

The term “overtourism” has now become so popular that it was one of Oxford Dictionary’s “Words of the Year” for 2018. This report offers one of the most complete analyses of the mistakes most tourism destinations make, as well as a prescription for charting a new course towards a more sustainable future.

One of the biggest challenges to any tourism destination has to do with what the report calls the invisible burden. This refers to the fact that tourist hot spots have a long list of costs that generally aren’t accounted for in tourism budgets and master plans. While current planning incorporates marketing costs, it rarely includes critical infrastructure and utility costs. The report states:

“Local capacity to manage the ballooning costs of tourists is hindered by a lack of quality analysis that accounts for the cost of managing each tourist on local municipal ledgers. This invisible set of local budgetary obligations is placing destinations in a position of financing additional required infrastructure for energy, waste, wastewater and the protection of natural and cultural resources, without recompense from the tourism economy. These costs lower the economic benefits of tourism and are not recognized in international and local economic impact analyses.”

As tourism grows, it puts an increasing burden on local communities that need to provide services for ever-increasing numbers of tourists, all of who need power, water, sewage treatment, roads and highways, etc. Rarely are these costs accounted for when tourism budgets are set.

All too often, budgets look at how much it will cost to manage tourism assets, but it doesn’t look at the true cost to manage each tourist. For years, communities like Canmore, Banff, and Jasper have been fighting provincial and federal budgets for increased tax revenue to help them manage all the additional costs of providing tourism infrastructure. Small tourist towns simply don’t have the local tax base to pay for all of the associated additional costs that result from high numbers of visitors.

This report defines the invisible burden “as the unaccounted for destination costs to provide local infrastructure and the protection of eco and socio-cultural systems for tourists and local people.”

Tourism brings a massive amount of money into local, provincial, and federal treasuries each year, largely through various taxes like GST, airfares, tourism levies, and accommodation. Unfortunately for the destination, most of those tax dollars leave the park to find their way into provincial and federal coffers. With a small tax base, the destination is expected to cover the costs of infrastructure to, according to the report: “transport, feed and house, provide energy and water, and manage wastewater for the growing numbers of visitors and tourism workers in each destination.”

The report continues:

“These local economic burdens are too often invisible to national decision makers who focus on promoting tourism growth, but are very real for local municipalities which are seeing budgets that exceed local uses by multiples of 8-10 times higher than local consumption without the utility metering to properly assess these costs.”

Unfortunately, the existing system of tourism measurements usually ignores these hidden costs. What is needed is a new way of accounting for the true cost of tourism that looks at all of the real and hidden costs to develop a true cost to the destination for each visitor. It also needs to account for who pays for those hidden costs to prevent negative impacts to both the destination and the natural and cultural assets that the destination is trying to protect.

Already, sites like Lake Louise, Peyto Lake, and Moraine Lake are collapsing under unsustainable numbers of visitors at peak times. Townsites are struggling to maintain road and utility infrastructures to support the endless numbers of visitors drawn by glitzy brochures, Youtube marketing videos, and Instagram photos.

To an accountant, all of these unaccounted for costs of being a tourism destination are defined as “operational externalities”. This past winter, I travelled to the Mayan Riviera and unfortunately, it has become a poster child for what happens when these externalities are ignored.

One of the main costs that are often ignored when tourism budgets are created is the cost to support and service the workforce that is critical to the experience of visitors that are drawn to the place. Because these costs are often ignored, the tourism budgets didn’t provide funding to cover the growing costs of infrastructure to compensate for the seasonal influx of workers.

In the Mayan Riviera, only a third of the sewage and gray water is treated, meaning that human waste was usually illegally dumped, finding its way into rivers, underground caves (or cenotes), and eventually the ocean. This, along with warming climates, has fueled massive blooms of algae which now fouls most of the beaches along the coast.

In addition to the seaweed, overbuilding on the coast caused erosion to degrade many of the beaches for which the Mayan Riviera has become famous. Now when you want to go to the Riviera, one of your first priorities is to look for hotels with fewer reports of seaweed yet still have nice sandy beaches.

Like many destinations, 80% of the tax revenue goes to the national coffers and not into the local community. As a result, the very things that attract millions of tourists every year are being slowly lost. As for me, I’ll stick to the left coast of Mexico from now on…at least until I see the same challenges taking root there.

There are so many costs that are usually ignored in tourism budgets. Here is a list of some of the most critical:

• Greenhouse gas emissions
• ecosystem maintenance
• ecosystem restoration
• renewable energy costs
• renewable water sources
• wastewater management
• socio-cultural restoration
• socio-cultural maintenance

If we look at just the cost of providing energy and reducing Greenhouse gases, it’s important to account for the cost of infrastructure upgrades, the management of peak power demand, and an increased reliance on non-renewable energy sources.

According to the report:

“The challenge for the tourism sector is determining how best to account for the operational externalities caused by the invisible burden in order to support destinations from further erosion of cultural and environmental value and operational losses. In short, we need to develop approaches that enable localities to measure and manage the true costs of operations at the destination level. Tourism businesses may ostensibly pay for municipal services such as water and energy, and the use or maintenance of public assets such as beaches and monuments, but additional costs associated with tourism are often passed on, partially or fully, to residents.”

Last week I mentioned in an unrelated story that the funny thing about science is that you rarely get results that you don’t look for. When it comes to the impact that tourism has on driving up local energy costs and greenhouse gas emissions, to a large part it’s due to the simple fact that governments haven’t sought out the information.

More importantly, is investigating what the peak energy demands are during the busiest times of the tourism season. Energy infrastructure has to be able to deal with the very highest demands, even though they may only occur for a short period during each tourist season.

The report states:

“The process of managing costs for energy, and accounting for those costs per tourist, will allow decision-makers to judge what steps are required in order to cover costs while transitioning to a greener economy, as part of their commitment to the Paris Agreement and the Sustainable Development Goals.”

Understanding the basic energy costs PER VISITOR gives a value that can be easily tied to other tourism metrics. For instance, most tourism plans account for the marketing cost to acquire a single visitor. Accounting for all infrastructure inputs per visitor allows for a more realistic way to plan and budget for the true cost of tourism in a particular destination.

In many destinations, water and solid waste treatment are even more critical. Tourist destinations like Canmore, Banff, and Jasper need to constantly pay for upgrades to their fresh water system, sewage treatment, and solid waste management. These are costs that are largely incurred because of the additional load on the systems brought about by ever-increasing numbers of tourists.

Just this year, the Town of Canmore announced that it will be borrowing 7.6 million dollars to help pay for the replacement of a wastewater lift station, construction of a new water main, upgrades of numerous wastewater mains, and improvement to the water pressure along Bow Valley Trail.

In 2018, Parks Canada completed a 6 million dollar upgrade to the sewage treatment plant at the Miette Hot Springs.

More and more visitors will mean that investments in these critical infrastructure projects will continue to be needed, yet are not accounted for in tourism marketing budgets or tax revenue to the communities that need to pay for them. Instead, they rely on occasional infrastructure grants, or as in the town of Canmore, the community taking on debt to pay for them.

In 2016, Canmore, Banff, and Jasper collaborated to produce a report examining the true cost of being tourism destinations. They learned that collectively, the three communities account for just 0.68% of Alberta’s population, but hosted 13% of provincial tourism visitation.

In addition, visitors to the Rockies generated $1.09 billion dollars in direct tourism spending in 2012 out of a provincial total of $7.27 billion. The three towns were responsible for 24.8% of Alberta’s international tourism revenue, or $700 million dollars in 2012.

By 2015, the three communities were generating $1.5 billion dollars. Banff generated 57.4% of that with $885.5 million. Next was Canmore with $344.9 million and Jasper with $318 million dollars in direct tourism spending.

Across the province, 23,301 Albertans worked in the tourism industry, and of that number, 18,539 were in Canmore, Banff, and Jasper.

The amount of total GDP or Gross Domestic Product contributed by tourism for each town varies based on how diversified their economies are. For Banff, with no other real industry, tourism accounts for a whopping 89% of the GDP. Jasper is more diversified due to the Canadian National Railway and so tourism accounts for 48% of the GDP while Canmore is the most diverse of all with tourism accounting for 18% of the GDP.

Unfortunately, relative to the number of tourists that visit each year, the permanent populations of the communities are quite small. The report states:

 “The three communities draw large numbers of visitors annually. The number of visitors far exceeds the resident population of each community, which presents unique challenges. These challenges include much higher than average infrastructure costs to support the large visitor population. There is also a need to provide higher capacity and higher quality infrastructure, civic amenities, and services to support the many visitors to the area. The resulting ‘wear and tear’ on civic infrastructure from high use also leads to high maintenance and operating costs for the local governments. This issue is further exacerbated by limited revenue-generating tools that the local governments can employ, forcing them to rely primarily on property tax revenue. The Province’s formula for infrastructure funding, which is based on resident population, does not result in funding that accounts for the large number of visitors.”

Things are even more complicated in Canmore where 30% of the population are not permanent residents, which had driven house prices to the point where they are unaffordable for many of the workers needed to service these large numbers of visitors. As a result, we read stories about “Vanmore” with large numbers of people living in their vans and campers in order to have an affordable place to sleep.

In an article in the Rocky Mountain Outlook, Lisa DeSoto, Canmore’s Chief administration officer was quoted as saying:

“From our perspective, the growth in the tourism industry cannot happen without the support of the mountain municipalities of Canmore, Banff and Jasper, however the current revenue model that is available to municipalities through the Municipal Government Act is pretty much reliant solely on property taxes, we have very few revenue tools,

She continued:

“We believe this revenue model disproportionately burdens the local taxpayer and actually benefits visitors and higher orders of government.”

Despite the fact that the province charges visitors a 4% tourism tax on hotel rooms, none of that money stays in the communities that collect it. It all goes into tourism marketing, which only serves to make the situation worse.

At the same time, it’s unfair to place the entire burden on the hotel industry. There needs to be a way to keep more of the tax dollars currently generated in these communities.

In other global tourism destinations, the communities are able to impose additional tourism taxes or levies in order to account for some of these hidden costs. Unfortunately, the Government of Alberta does not allow communities to levy these additional dollars.

British Columbia has a program called the Resort Municipality Initiative with divvies up $13 million between 14 communities that, like Canmore, Banff, and Jasper, are tourism towns. It’s designed to help them to drive tourism to their communities.

Tourism has much higher costs to the communities that support the visitors and there needs to be a way to make those communities sustainable.

Rocky Mountain Ecosystems at Risk from Overtourism

Perhaps the areas that are most at risk in the central Rockies are the actual natural and cultural assets that draw visitors to the area. Around the world, destinations are sacrificing the natural and cultural capital that forms the main reason that people visit. Globally, the natural capital found in protected areas accounts for $700 billion in tourism revenue and more than 8 billion visits annually.

Despite this massive income stream, only $10 billion is spent annually to maintain these parks and protected areas. According to the United Nation’s best estimate, that number should be closer to $76 billion if destinations want to protect the biodiversity and ecological integrity of those same protected areas.

In the mountain national parks, our local landmarks are overrun by unsustainable numbers of visitors, and there is increased pressure to develop environmentally destructive trails like the now-defunct Icefields Trail proposal.

More and more companies and government tourism departments are seeing dollar signs, but the landscape – the real reason that the visitors are drawn to the mountain west – is being treated as if it is invincible.

I applaud many of the changes that Parks Canada has undertaken in order to reduce congestion on roads in Banff, as well as the increased availability of public transit to help people visit sites like Lake Louise, Moraine Lake, and Lake Minnewanka. Unfortunately, if the main reason for these moves is to simply get more people on the shoreline of Lake Louise than the entire process is folly.

We are at a point where we need to begin to demarket certain locations and also put finite limits on the number of visitors that can be at a certain site at a particular time. To date, Parks Canada has not been willing to limit the number of visitors to sites like Lake Louise and as a result, the experience available to the average visitor during the peak season has dropped precipitously over the past 10 years.

These problems are not unique to Canada’s mountain national parks. Yellowstone National Park is feeling the same crush. In August of 2017, they released a transportation study. It stated:

” The new data from the Visitor Use Study shows that visitors enjoy and care about Yellowstone, but they think it’s too crowded during the summer season. Visitors value the park for its natural character and come specifically to experience scenery, wildlife, thermal features, a largely intact ecosystem, and sounds of quiet and nature. More than half of Yellowstone’s visitors surveyed think that there are too many people in the park.”

It continues:

” The Transportation and Vehicle Mobility Study shows that within Yellowstone’s most heavily-travelled corridors, parking lots are overflowing, traffic jams abound, and roadway safety incidents are on the rise. The report identifies the busiest corridors as the roads that connect Yellowstone’s West Entrance with visitor attractions throughout the western and central parts of the park (such as Old Faithful, other geyser basins, the Canyon Area, Hayden Valley, Fishing Bridge, and Lake Village). During much of the summer season, there are on average nearly 30 percent more vehicles using these corridors than those roads can comfortably and safely handle. “

Banff Townsite is also seeing more and more congestion every year. While 24,000 cars per day are considered the start of serious congestion, once the daily total exceeds 20,000 cars drivers begin to experience ever-increasing delays as they try to navigate town roads.

In Episode 47, I looked at some of the congestion problems already occurring within Banff National Park. In the 2017-18 fiscal year, 4.2 million cars entered and exited the park. This was up 22% over the 2013-14 tourism season.

If we combine all seven mountain parks, including Banff, Jasper, Yoho, Kootenay, Waterton Lakes, Mount Revelstoke, and Glacier, a total of 9,207,562 visitors were recorded during the 2017-18 fiscal year.

The town of Banff counted 4.6 million cars so far this year which is an astounding increase of 21% over 2014. A full 1.7 million of those were during the summer.

While the maximum vehicle count was 34,275 on July 2, the average count was 27,512. This means that almost every day was above the congestion point of 24,000 cars.

It’s clear that these ever-increasing numbers aren’t sustainable. Adding additional public transportation, as the park has done with free shuttles, without a financial disincentive to driving doesn’t solve the problem.

One of Banff’s former superintendents, Kevin Van Tighem, has suggested parking fees for private vehicles to visit key sites like Lake Louise and Moraine Lake. This would provide a financial incentive for people to park their cars and use the shuttles.

Another option, as suggested in the report on the invisible burden, is to look at inventory control, much like airlines do. If the park is willing to determine a finite limit to the number of visitors that a site like Lake Louise can support, then it can create an online booking system to allow visitors to book their shuttles online.

This would allow them to manage the inventory and would also help people that are planning a trip to know when they can visit. It would reduce the endless growth and give managers a way to reduce the congestion at our most iconic locations.

It’s not inconceivable to begin charging for the shuttles in the future. I can envision a time when only the shuttles, and perhaps hotel guests, are allowed to drive to the shoreline parking lot of Lake Louise. Everyone would arrive in pre-booked buses.

This would help to provide income for the park to help it cover some of the many costs associated with providing the shuttle service. Currently, the free shuttles amount to just another unbudgeted cost to Parks Canada. It should be a self-funded service so that dollars are not diverted from other important functions like wildlife research and conservation.

In fact, with an online booking system, it would be easy to discount visits during off-peak hours and shoulder seasons. The more we expand the tourism season outside of the July and August peak, the less stress we put on our park resources. There could also be incentives for early booking.

To add another wrinkle, one that I’m not sure how I feel about, the report suggests that, like the airlines, parks could charge different fees based on demand. Peak hours could cost more than off-peak times. This would definitely help to steer visitors to getting up earlier or visiting later.

It would though, add an economic filter to the cost of visitation, and that may be less palatable here where it would mean that people with more money were the only ones visiting at the most convenient times. I have to stress the fact that it would be the most convenient, and not the BEST times.

If you want the absolute best visit at most of our mountain sites, arriving (during the peak summer months) at 6 am or at 8 pm, depending on the site, is a much better visual experience – and the crowds are less of an issue. I for one, strongly encourage my clients to do exactly this.

I want my clients to get the best experience and not the most convenient one. If you’ll get up early, I’ll show you Lake Louise as few other visitors see it – and it will likely be much quieter than it will be by 9 am. Your day’s outing will end earlier and you can relax in your hotel or explore the townsite at a more leisurely pace.

If your focus is on photography, well, we’ll want to head out waaaaaay earlier to get the best light. Mid-day is for naps when your a photographer. It’s all about the first light of day and the last light at twilight.

All of this crowding adds to the challenges of ecological integrity. In the last episode, I talked about how our caribou herds are already on the verge of collapse due to excessive development in their critical habitats. According to the newly published Wildlife Protection Assessment by the World Wildlife Fund, across Canada, 84% of habitats with high concentrations of at-risk species are either inadequately or completely unprotected.

Likewise, Seventy seven percent of habitats with high densities of soil carbon or forest biomass are inadequately or entirely unprotected. Both of these habitats are very effective at sequestering carbon, helping to reduce the rate of global warming. In episode 76, I shared a report that showed that Canada is already warming at twice the global average.

As summers have been warming, trees are now growing higher and higher up the mountains. This places some of our high elevation specialists like pika and mountain goats at risk as their habitat shrinks.

As we look at the future of tourism in Canada, and in the Rockies in particular, we need to keep our focus on making it as sustainable as possible. To do this, we’ll need to implement some way to not just reduce the number of vehicles at popular destinations, but also the number of people.

According to the National Parks Act, the protection and restoration of ecological integrity is the primary responsibility of every Park Superintendent. It is the measure by which ALL tourism decisions are supposed to be measured. Currently, the mountain national parks are at a very high risk of permanently impacting both the ecology of the mountain landscapes while also diluting the quality of the experience that draws visitors to the mountains.

And with that said, it’s time to wrap this episode up. Don’t forget that Ward Cameron Enterprises is your source for making the most out of your visit to western Canada. Don’t forget to check out the show notes at www.MountainNaturePodcast.com/ep081 for links to the original source material mentioned in this episode as well as additional material. If you’d like to reach out personally, you can hit me up on Twitter @wardcameron, or drop me a line at info@wardcameron.com…and with that the sun’s out and it’s time to go hiking. I’ll talk to you next week.

The post 081 Overtourism in Canada’s Mountain National Parks appeared first on The Mountain Nature and Culture Podcast.

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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.

The post 080 Conserving caribou by blaming carnivores and ancient human footprints lead the way to a new coastal migration theory appeared first on The Mountain Nature and Culture Podcast.