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Trina Moyles knows a thing or two about fires.
After all, she spent years watching for them, 24 hours a day. Not everyone wants to sign up to spend five-month summers all alone, climbing 100-foot towers and watching for sparks in the boreal forest. But that’s what the freelance journalist did — she even wrote a book about it.
Growing up in northern Alberta, the boreal forest has been front of mind in Trina’s family for decades. And as wildfires started taking centre stage this summer, a question crept up: what happens to the animals who make the burning forests their home?
Case in point: last year alone, threatened woodland caribou — Alberta’s reindeer — lost more than five per cent of their critical habitat in the province to wildfires. Some northern herds lost closer to 15 per cent of their ranges. (Alberta isn’t the only province where caribou are facing a crisis.)
Caribou numbers were already dwindling — something Trina’s dad had long been tracking.
“I grew up listening to the stories of my dad’s aerial flights over the badly fragmented boreal forest,” she wrote to me this spring. She talked about how her father, Dave Moyles, had worked for decades as a wildlife biologist, counting caribou in Alberta’s north. They were so otherworldly — such surreal, elusive creatures — he referred to them as the grey ghosts of the forest.
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