Any day now, a piping plover will make its seasonal return to Wasaga Beach, as it has done every spring for nearly 20 years. This time, its beachfront home could be a little less secure, which is why a new court case is pressuring the federal government to ensure the plover is kept safe. 

The world’s longest freshwater beach provides the perfect habitat for the tiny endangered birds, offering natural sand dunes and shrubbery for nesting and growing their population. 

For decades, both the Georgian Bay beach and the plover have been protected by the Ontario government through two main tools. First, the designation of Wasaga Beach as a provincial park, which meant  development and disruption of the sandy shore was off-limits. Second, the plover was offered extra protection under the provincial Endangered Species Act. 

Neither of those protections stand anymore.

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Last fall, the Doug Ford government removed a majority of the beachfront from Wasaga Beach Provincial Park and transferred it to the local municipality in an effort to boost tourism development. And just last month, the government officially repealed the Endangered Species Act and replaced it with much weaker legislation that no longer recognizes the plover on its list of protected species.

The town has promised it will protect the plover after the transfer — and has begun working with Birds Canada on its habitat protection — but residents are not convinced. Two local officials agreed to speak to The Narwhal on the condition their names be kept confidential, for fear of retribution. They said on Apr. 13, a tractor owned by the municipality was seen raking more beachfront than was previously permitted — an action that could damage habitat and destroy plover nests. Though the raking hasn’t been repeated, many are concerned the beach is unprotected. The town did not respond to The Narwhal’s request for comment by the time of publication. 

As a result, environmental groups are taking the matter to federal court. 

In January, Ecojustice, on behalf of Environmental Defence and Ontario Nature, petitioned the federal government for an emergency order to offer protections for the piping plover by March, before machines are brought in to clear the beach after winter, and the birds begin migrating back. The federal government did not respond by that deadline.

In response, the groups have asked for a judicial review by the Federal Court of Canada into the delay and to compel Environment Minister Julie Dabrusin to make a recommendation to cabinet to issue the emergency protection.

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The groups have also asked the court for an urgent, temporary order — or an injunction — to prohibit any raking or harmful development on the beach, which is federally recognized as a critical habitat. 

Here’s what you need to know about the tiny bird and its fate in Wasaga Beach.

What are piping plovers? And why are they endangered?

Piping plovers are sprightly shorebirds, each no bigger than a cotton ball, that can sometimes be seen bounding over Great Lakes beaches in the summertime. But seeing them isn’t easy — their sandy colour blends into their surroundings and they’ve become extremely rare in Ontario due to human encroachment.

“The main threat to the piping plover is human disturbance,” according to the Government of Ontario, “since the sandy beaches where plovers live are also popular for human recreation which can destroy nests.”

Plovers generally spend winters in the United States and Mexico, but return to more northern climates to nest for the summer.

For a long time, the Great Lakes were a prime destination for would-be plover parents. It’s been estimated that the region was once home to up to 800 breeding pairs. But the Great Lakes plover population cratered in the 1960s and ’70s, and the bird was considered extinct in Ontario by 1986.

But in recent decades, plovers have been staging a tentative comeback in the Great Lakes. A breeding pair returned to Sauble Beach (now Saugeen Beach) in 2007, sparking hope and enthusiasm among bird watchers and conservationists in the area. The birds have been spotted in the region annually since then.

But plovers’ hold is anything but secure. Some years pass with only a handful of breeding pairs observed, and other years come and go with no fledglings reaching maturity.

Why is Wasaga Beach important to plovers? And what do they like about it?

“Wasaga Beach is the most important and most productive nesting site for piping plovers in our province.”

That’s what Sydney Shepherd, the Ontario piping plover coordinator for Birds Canada, told The Narwhal last summer. The beach has been home to 59 nests and 87 fledglings since the birds returned about two decades ago, according to Birds Canada, a national conservation group. 

While plovers have been observed on other beaches in the Great Lakes region, none are anywhere near as popular with plovers as Wasaga Beach. The plovers that have been born on Wasaga Beach make up nearly 50 per cent of all fledglings in Ontario, and many of them have gone on to establish their own nests elsewhere in the region. 

Plovers tend to value Wasaga Beach for different reasons than human beachgoers. While tourists might prefer a well-groomed beach for lounging, plovers require naturalized shorelines: shrubbery and sand dunes offer cover from predators. That means of all the 14 kilometres of beachfront at Wasaga, only a small fraction near the northeastern tip of the park is suitable plover habitat.

What’s happening at Wasaga Beach?

The fortunes of the Town of Wasaga Beach have long been tied to the sandy shoreline that gives the town its name. Tourism to the area is the main economic driver, drawing more than 1.6 million visitors a year according to the municipality’s website.

But while tourism brings opportunity to the residents of Wasaga Beach, it also puts pressure on plover habitat. Until recently, that tension was managed by staff at Wasaga Beach Provincial Park, who were mandated to preserve and protect the sand dunes and other beach areas that plovers frequent.

The vast majority of the beachfront had long been within the boundaries of Wasaga Beach Provincial Park, and some in the town believed the park hindered efforts to spruce it up and develop new amenities and attractions to boost tourism revenue.

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The Doug Ford government heard those concerns and acted on them. Ontario would sever more than half of the beachfront from the park and hand it over to the town to manage, Ford announced in 2025. Earlier this year, the province confirmed its intention to move forward with that plan, despite 98 per cent of formal citizen feedback on the plan being negative.

The Narwhal confirmed that transfer has now happened. 

All of the suitable plover habitat on Wasaga Beach is within the land set to be removed from the provincial park, meaning the habitat will no longer be protected by a provincial park designation.

The town, for its part, says it’s committed to protecting piping plovers. But it has yet to release its full redevelopment plans, and that leaves conservationists worried that the beach’s plover habitat is threatened.

Shepherd told The Narwhal this week that Birds Canada is in the process of formalizing their role with the Town of Wasaga Beach. The group is “seeking a committed partnership” to support the long-term protection and recovery of piping plovers that would enable them to monitor and protect the nests and the birds, and also increase education and awareness of the species. 

“So far, we have collaborated for one training session for [town] staff to begin to introduce what piping plover conservation entails,” she said in an email.

Are piping plovers otherwise protected?

The removal of provincial park designation from plover habitat on Wasaga Beach comes on the heels of other policy changes that weaken species protection in Ontario.

In 2025, Ontario repealed its Endangered Species Act and replaced it with new legislation called the Species Conservation Act, a weaker set of rules that drops some key protections.

One difference between the two acts is the newer one adopts a more narrow definition of “habitat” than the former act. When it comes to legal protections for the habitats of endangered species, the new legislation’s scope is limited to the specific area an animal nests or dens in, rather than the larger area it uses to travel or find food.

But even that limited protection doesn’t stand for piping plovers, which have been removed from Ontario’s list of protected species. With the loss of provincial park status, the plover habitat has been stripped of another protection that could have restricted the beach grooming activities that render Wasaga Beach unsuitable for plovers — and appear to have already begun.

That’s why environmental groups are now turning to the federal government to fill the gap. Nationally, there is a species-at-risk law that can be invoked for the protection of an endangered species and the broader habitat it needs to survive. The question is whether the federal government will use it to save the piping plover’s favourite Ontario beach.

Updated on April 22, 2026, at 2:55 p.m. ET: this story has been corrected to note that piping plovers have been removed from the Government of Ontario’s list of protected species, meaning even the individual and its nest are not provincially protected.

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Seven years after a coalition of four northern Manitoba First Nations banded together to conserve the province’s last major undammed river, the Seal River Watershed is now “on the cusp” of permanent protection.

On Friday, the Seal River Watershed Alliance, the province and the federal government released a joint proposal to designate the 50,000-square-kilometre ecosystem — one of the world’s largest intact watersheds — as an Indigenous Protected and Conserved Area.

“This announcement is an absolutely historic moment in time where we have all different levels of government [and] … the nations coming together to preserve some of the most beautiful areas in the world,” Manitoba Environment Minister Mike Moyes said Friday. 

“I am so proud to be part of a government that is moving forward on this historic agreement that is going to protect seven per cent of Manitoba.” 

The proposal recommends creating a “mosaic” of national and provincial parks across the region, including a national park on the eastern third of the watershed and a new Indigenous traditional-use provincial park on the western two-thirds.

To accommodate a new national park, the proposal recommends adjusting the boundaries of the three existing wilderness parks, Nueltin Lake, Caribou River and Sand Lakes, and transferring about 18,500 square kilometres of predominantly Crown lands to the federal government. 

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The mosaic approach would allow for a variety of economic activities including tourism, recreation and traditional harvesting practices, the proposal says. A little under half of the national park would remain open for licensed hunting and outfitting for 10 years as a “transitional measure,” while hunting, outfitting “and the full range of outdoor activities that typically occur in Manitoba’s provincial parks would continue to be permitted in the new provincial park.”

Industrial activities like mining, hydroelectric developments and forestry would be barred throughout the protected region. Future land management decisions would be made by a joint management board elected by leadership from all parties, the proposal says.

Alongside the proposal — which is open for public comments through EngageMB — the province announced a $4-million endowment contribution to support long-term operational funding for the project. 

“We are celebrating major new investments in the Seal River Watershed, we are sharing a proposal for protecting these lands and waters for all people, and we are breaking trail for what protected areas in the province can look like,” Stephanie Thorassie, executive director of the Seal River Watershed Alliance, said Friday. 

“It’s inspiring to see you standing side by side and talking about our work together. You are showing the world what nation-to-nation-to-nation partnership looks like — not just in words, but in action.”

The Alliance, made up of members from the Sayisi Dene, Northlands Denesuline, Barren Lands and O-Pipon-Na-Piwin Cree Nations, formed in 2019. By 2022, it had secured a commitment from provincial and federal governments to explore a protected area in the region.

It took two years — and a change of government — for the parties to sign a memorandum of understanding agreeing to move forward with a feasibility study for the protected area, and to temporarily ban mining in the region. The study was completed in early 2025, concluding that an Indigenous-led protected area was feasible, and would come with ecological, cultural and economic benefits.

The watershed is wintering habitat for scores of caribou and home to more than 30 species at risk, including polar bears, wolverines, belugas and lake sturgeon. The landscape itself stores 1.7 billion tonnes of carbon, equivalent to about eight years’ worth of total greenhouse gas emissions in Canada.

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Tourism in the region generates about $11 million in revenues per year, according to the feasibility study, and the Alliance has already created about two dozen jobs for community members and youth. 

“This is a practical, community-driven approach. It protects the land and supports opportunities for the future, from land-based education and sustainable tourism, to jobs that keep people rooted in their home,” Rebecca Chartrand, Minister of Northern and Arctic Affairs and member of Parliament for Churchill—Keewatinook Aski, said Friday. 

In late March, the federal government released its $3.8-billion nature protection strategy, which included a commitment of $74.7 million over 11 years and nearly $8 million in ongoing funding to support the Seal River protected area. 

“The investments announced today will create more opportunities for these youth, opportunities to find jobs and stewardship and tourism, to gain knowledge and training and to feel pride in who they are and the work that they do,” Sayisi Dene Chief Kelly-Ann Thom-Duck said Friday. 

The proposal is now open for public consultation. Manitobans have until June 2 to submit feedback on the plan through the province’s EngageMB portal, including the proposed boundary changes to existing provincial parks and the transfer of Crown land to the federal government for a new national park. 

Public feedback will be shared with the Alliance and Parks Canada to help inform next steps.

“We think this is a very important way to have a safe, clean and healthy environment, to support Indigenous cultures and also to open up new tourist opportunities for Manitobans and Canadians,” Manitoba Premier Wab Kinew said Friday.

Julia-Simone Rutgers is a reporter covering environmental issues in Manitoba. Her position is part of a partnership between The Narwhal and the Winnipeg Free Press.

The Narwhal’s reporters are telling environment stories you won’t read about anywhere else. Stay in the loop by signing up for our free weekly dose of independent journalism.

Early in the afternoon of Oct. 10, 2015, John Ashley Pryce noticed something strange in his yard. A garbage bag was torn open, and trash was “strewn about the property” in Eastgate, B.C., a small community just east of E.C. Manning Provincial Park.

Pryce took in the scene, his eyes passing over yellowing leaves and dried grass before coming to rest on a massive creature sniffing the detritus. Its fur was mottled with shocks of brown, blonde and black. His eyes traced a prominent hump behind its shoulders and a round, dish-shaped face, both hallmark characteristics of a grizzly bear. 

Pryce grabbed his camera. The shutter snapped as he took a photo. The bear looked up at him for a few seconds before tearing off down the hill and disappearing.

Pryce couldn’t have known it at the time, but this would be the last confirmed grizzly sighting recorded in the North Cascades. A range of mountains, glaciers, rivers and forests stretching from Lytton, B.C., to just east of Seattle, Wash., it is one of the wildest transboundary ecosystems anywhere along the Canada-U.S. border. It is also home to one of the most endangered grizzly bear populations on the continent. 

Scientists estimate that, at most, six grizzly bears still live in the North Cascades. It’s not clear how many bears were once there, but according to Hudson’s Bay Company records, some 3,788 grizzly pelts were shipped from forts in the region between 1827 and 1859. Later records from miners, surveyors and settlers make note of dozens of grizzlies killed throughout the region. 

Today, many experts call the North Cascades grizzly an extirpated species, meaning locally extinct. The International Union for Conservation of Nature has “red-listed” the bears, labelling them “critically endangered.”

Since the bears were listed as threatened under the U.S. Endangered Species Act in 1975, efforts have been made on both sides of the border to recover the population. Most recently, in 2024, the U.S. National Park Service and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service announced they would begin reintroducing bears into North Cascades National Park — an effort derailed after Trump’s return to office led to funding and staffing cuts for both agencies. 

But an Indigenous-led project called the Joint Nations Grizzly Bear Initiative has continued to move forward. Led by the Okanagan Nation Alliance, the project is a collaboration with First Nations throughout the region, including the S’ólh Téméxw Stewardship Alliance, the Nlaka’pamux Nation Tribal Council, the Lillooet Tribal Council, the Upper Similkameen Indian Band, Simpcw First Nation and the St’át’imc and Sekw’el’was. Together, they’re hoping to begin reintroducing grizzlies to the North Cascades in 2026. 

Cross-border grizzly efforts hindered by false starts and government cuts

The mountaintops in Manning Park were still dusted with snow when Joe Scott arrived in early June 2024. He had travelled from his home in Washington for the first in-person gathering of the Joint Nations Grizzly Bear Initiative. For Scott, the trip was decades in the making. He started working at Conservation Northwest, a transboundary conservation group based in Washington that was then called the Northwest Ecosystems Alliance, in 1998. At the time, he explains, “It was the only group that was advocating for grizzly bear recovery. Nobody else would touch it.”

When the Joint Nations gathering began, it had been only a few months since U.S. agencies announced their reintroduction plan. Grizzly advocates felt that they were closer than ever to bringing bears back to the North Cascades. But Scott had seen recovery efforts fail before. 

In the 1990s, budget constraints forced then-U.S. grizzly bear recovery coordinator Chris Servheen to choose between recovering bears in Montana or in the North Cascades. In what Servheen called a “command decision” he picked Montana, arguing that the Montana project seemed more likely to succeed.

British Columbia came close a few years later. In 2001, they were on the verge of moving bears from Wells Gray Provincial Park in the B.C. Interior to Manning Park. But when the BC Liberal Party swept to power, it cut wildlife and conservation programs, prematurely ending that effort. Since then, according to Scott, North Cascades grizzly recovery has been a series of “lurching fits and starts.”

At the June 2024 meeting, conversations among the more than 70 Indigenous leaders, community members, researchers and conservationists connected Western and Indigenous science. Participants spoke about preparing for grizzlies’ return to the landscape, discussed challenges in public education and coexistence strategies. They outlined plans to mitigate human-bear conflict and shared ways to manage garbage and other attractants. 

Matt Manuel, natural resource coordinator for the Lillooet Tribal Council, described it as looking for “solutions within a common habitat that needs to be shared between the grizzly bear and those that are occupying or using the land” in a video produced at the gathering.

Much of the conversation at the Manning Park gathering focused on the North Cascades National Park Grizzly Restoration Plan, which would have relocated three or five bears per year on the American side of the border. At that rate, attendees expected it would take decades to establish a healthy population in the park, and even longer for the bears to move into surrounding lands or up into Canada. Still, the gathering closed with palpable excitement. 

But something nagged at Scott. He was “sitting there on pins and needles with full awareness that the [2024 presidential] election is going to make all the difference in whether this gets done.”

When President Donald Trump was re-elected and unleashed Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency on federal agencies, the worst-case scenario followed: more than a thousand national park rangers, scientists and other staff were laid off in February 2025. Facing an uncertain future, many others resigned. According to the National Parks Conservation Association, the Park Service had lost 24 per cent of its permanent workforce by the summer. The impact on grizzly reintroduction was devastating. 

“Park Service loses staff, Fish and Wildlife loses staff,” Scott explains. “They’re already behind the eight ball with a lack of capacity, and then at this point, they just said, ‘We don’t have the people to do this,’ so it just died.”

The collapse of the plan was a blow, but there was still hope. At the Manning Park gathering, the Joint Nations Grizzly Bear Initiative had not only been preparing for the U.S. plan to bring bears back into North Cascades National Park. They were also developing their own plan, a comprehensive strategy that included habitat conservation, community engagement, public education and, eventually, restoring grizzlies on this side of the border.

First Nations-led effort rooted in Indigenous knowledge of the region

Mackenzie Clarke had never seen a grizzly before she packed up her life and moved from Saskatchewan to the Kootenays to work on a grizzly research project with Garth Mowat, the B.C. government’s large carnivore specialist. Soon, she was hooked. 

Eventually, working on grizzlies brought her to the Joint Nations Grizzly Bear Initiative, where she works as the tmixʷ (wildlife) program lead on the project.

Clarke’s role is unique in wildlife conservation. Rather than a nonprofit or government agency, she works for the Okanagan Nation Alliance, a First Nations government. As someone with settler roots, she thinks it’s an important shift in how wildlife conservation happens. “There wasn’t a lot of Indigenous involvement or consultation” in previous North Cascades grizzly recovery efforts, she explains.

Despite this, Indigenous knowledge has long been key to understanding the history of North Cascades grizzlies. After grizzlies were listed as threatened under the U.S. Endangered Species Act, researchers began looking for at-risk populations. When researchers began studying North Cascades grizzlies, they struggled to find bears. Researchers found evidence of bears, including tracks, scat, digs and bear dens. They set up fur-snagging traps, lengths of barbed wire hung near scented lures and used the gathered fur samples in genetic testing that confirmed the presence of bears. Despite all the evidence of grizzlies, no live bear has ever been captured or collared in the region. 

In the late 1980s, some scientists and politicians argued that researchers’ struggles to capture a bear were evidence against a historic grizzly presence in the North Cascades. So researchers turned to Indigenous knowledge to prove their case. 

“There’s a lot of historical knowledge from the communities on where the bears used to be,” Clarke says. 

Early efforts relied on anthropological research from the first half of the 20th century, which included accounts from Indigenous people of grizzlies near the Chilliwack and Fraser rivers and among high-elevation berry patches. According to late archaeologist William Duff, the Stó:lō knew grizzlies to be “particular frequenters of the high country.”

But by the late 1990s, First Nations were leading their own studies. In 2001, the Stó:lō published a Traditional Knowledge study as part of the B.C. recovery effort. They interviewed more than a dozen community members, recording decades of grizzly bear sightings throughout their territory. 

Both this study and the anthropological records included stories about the unique nature of grizzly bear harvests before settlers arrived in these lands. Grizzlies were not seen as a major food source. They would be eaten if killed, but the nature of the harvest suggested a deeper connection between people and bears. 

Grizzly bear hunters would track the animals while carrying a sharpened bone about the length of their forearm. When they found the grizzly, the hunter would attempt to jam the bone into the bear’s open mouth with the sharp end pointed up. When the bear slammed its mighty jaws, the bone would strike a killing blow into the grizzly’s brain. The stories noted that many grizzly bear hunters ended up one-handed.

In 2014, the Okanagan Nation Alliance’s Chief Executive Council passed a resolution declaring grizzly bears “at-risk and protected within Syilx Territory.” They directed staff to work with scientists and communities to support “immediate action to assist [grizzlies] from disappearing due to low numbers and habitat isolation.”

By 2018, the resolution was starting to bear fruit. They launched field surveys and began writing their own recovery plan. They also started meeting with other First Nations interested in North Cascades grizzlies.

“The governments of all the nations mobilized,” Scott explains, who at the time helped to funnel conservation funding to the efforts. “The intent was to move the recovery process along by identifying the needs and filling the various gaps.” 

That February, the Okanagan Nation Alliance, alongside the Stó:lō, St’ati’mc, Nlaka’pamux and Secwepemc launched a “multi-nation approach for grizzly bear recovery efforts” that would help launch the Joint Nations Grizzly Bear Initiative in 2021. 

Restoring grizzlies benefits the environment — but also cultures and communities 

Jordan Coble was in university when the first pieces that would become the Joint Nations Grizzly Bear Initiative were being put in place. But now, serving as both a councillor with the Westbank First Nation and as the chair of the Okanagan Nation Alliance’s Natural Resource Committee, he’s grateful for “the courage of those that come forward and say, ‘We should do this, and we must do this, and we must do it together.’ ” 

To Coble, the extirpation of grizzly bears from the landscape echoes what happened to Indigenous Peoples. 

“Where we’re at today is rebuilding from 150 years of colonization, of separation and forced removal and isolation from our land itself,” he says. In this context, he sees restoring grizzly bears as a way to restore not just a creature but also landscapes, communities and relationships. 

“Guiding the path forward has been interesting because colonization was quite effective in separating our communities from one another [and] separating our communities from the land itself,” he explains. “Now that we’re turning back to those practices where we’re reminding ourselves that we have interconnections beyond our communities, beyond our nations.”  

This relational approach extends to the natural world as well. For Coble, North Cascades grizzly bear recovery is just one piece of a bigger project. 

“The nation started returning salmon back to the Okanagan, and then saw the success from that built out into forestry and other aspects,” he says. “That interconnection of all those living species, right from salmon to the tops of the mountains where the grizzly bears live, is really important. It’s kind of nice to think about it that way, that we kind of worked our way up into the mountains.”

North Cascades region can sustain grizzlies, expert says

In late July 2025, a little more than a year after the gathering in Manning Park, Michelle McLellan was back in the North Cascades. McLellan, an expert in the relationship between grizzlies and the landscapes where they live, had been at the 2024 meeting. She had also been hired by the Joint Nations team to evaluate North Cascades habitats for potential reintroduction.

Using studies from the Coast Range, which extends from Yukon to the Fraser River, and other regions where researchers had tracked grizzlies with radio collars, she correlated bear movements with habitat factors such as landscape, climate and plant cover, and used the data to build a model of the potential grizzly bear habitat in the North Cascades.

It was a good start, but McLellan “felt it was important to go to the landscape and see what that looks like.” She and a group of researchers, park rangers and conservationists spent the better part of a week ground-truthing the maps. They bushwhacked through overgrown forests, taking note of the horsetail ferns and sedges that bears like to eat in the spring. They climbed into the alpine, looking for whitebark pines with cones that make a calorie-dense grizzly snack. They counted blueberry and huckleberry bushes, snacking on sweet purple huckleberries as they moved through the landscape, considering the locations of roads, campgrounds and other human pressures that could impact bears or bring them into conflict with people. 

“There’s definitely sufficient food to sustain a population there,” McLellan says, though not as high-quality as the grizzly habitat of the Coast Range or the Rocky Mountains. “In general, we did find some good patches that were far from people … the kind of remote valleys you couldn’t just walk into.”

The habitat evaluation was a big step, but it is only one piece of a complex puzzle that reflects the long history of challenges with recovering bears in the North Cascades. 

One of the more notable chapters in that history was the story of a grizzly bear named Winston. In 1992, Winston was captured near Pemberton, B.C. He had already been relocated once but had returned and was getting into trouble with local farmers. 

Winston was released in eastern Manning Park later that year. He travelled south, crossing into the Pasayten Wilderness, Wash., on the eastern edge of the North Cascades. From there, he headed northwest, through Manning Park and into the Chilliwack River Valley, where hunters picked up his trail and chased him north. 

On Dec. 30, 1992, his radio collar pinged near Bridal Falls, B.C., a small community just east of Chilliwack. Researchers lost track of Winston through the winter, but in April they picked up his trail again and headed north along the banks of Harrison Lake. Whether he had swum across the Fraser River or used a bridge is anyone’s guess. 

By that June, he was back in the Lillooet River Valley close to Pemberton. His radio collar fell off sometime that summer, and for a few years, no one knew what happened to Winston. Then, in 1999 bear with similar markings to Winston was captured again in the Pemberton Valley. This time, the bear had been going after chickens on a local farm. It was relocated to the Anderson River Valley near the town of Boston Bar, where it destroyed its radio collar and was never seen again.

It’s still a topic of some debate whether that last bear was truly Winston. And while North Cascades grizzly researchers like to tell this story, they use it mainly to point out the myriad ways bear relocation has improved since then. For one, male grizzlies, which require massive habitat ranges and have strong homing instincts, aren’t typically used for relocation programs meant to recover grizzly populations. Successful programs in other regions have taught scientists that sub-adult females have the highest success rate. They have also learned to source bears from ecosystems with food profiles similar to those of the recovery area and have developed rigorous evaluation criteria to identify the best candidates for relocation. 

It’s also why grizzly bear augmentation is a slow and meticulous process, expected to take decades to restore populations to a level where they might begin to interact with people. 

For McLellan, success might look like moving 20 bears in the next 10 years. 

Coble takes an even longer view of it.

“I feel like we’re not going to know until 20 to 50 years down the road if there’s grizzly bears back in the North Cascades in a sustainable manner,” he says. 

Opposition and concern over grizzly reintroduction lingers, but support is widespread.

Still, when McLellan talks about the project in public, she hears a lot of people worried that “all of a sudden, there’ll be grizzly bears all over the landscape.” 

This isn’t a new concern. Scott describes North Cascades grizzly recovery as “a relatively simple body of work that has been made really complex by people who don’t want to see it happen.” 

Opposition to grizzly bear reintroduction has been loudest on the eastern side of the North Cascades, where livestock operations raised concerns about depredation. In 1993, government representatives at a public meeting about reintroduction held in Okanogan, Wash., faced death threats. In 2001, B.C.’s reintroduction efforts faced opposition from cattle ranchers in the Nicola Valley, including one who told the Vancouver Sun he was “hoping this whole friggin’ program will go away.”

Over the years, many of the concerns of those opposed to reintroduction have been addressed by government agencies and conservation groups. Today, opposition to reintroduction is a small minority. According to polling released by the National Parks Conservation Association in 2023, 85 per cent of Washington residents support the reintroduction of grizzly bears in the North Cascades. There isn’t specific polling on the North Cascades in B.C., but a majority of the public regularly supports efforts to protect grizzly bears across the province. 

Still, the Joint Nations project isn’t taking any chances. When reintroduction seemed imminent in 2024, they began ramping up public education, stakeholder engagement and community efforts. 

“We’ve been trying to make sure that nobody’s going to be surprised that bears are going to be coming back to the landscape,” Clarke says. 

She sees education, habitat restoration and conflict management as critical to the long-term viability of the North Cascades grizzly recovery. Building up support for grizzly recovery in communities is also essential.

“It’s okay to take this community by community, but also, step by step,” Coble explains. “Building that awareness, building the understanding that, more than anything, it’s important that the grizzly bears are here.” 

For Clarke, this community work also means increasing the sense of agency that people throughout the region feel about coexisting with bears. She points out that some of this work is already underway in communities where black bears live. But she also points to a range of other ways for communities to get involved, such as conducting community bear-hazard assessments, developing attractant management plans and engaging Indigenous Guardian programs in bear management.

They’re also working to spread the word in non-Indigenous communities. Groups like Conservation Northwest and Coast to Cascades, an organization that aims to restore connectivity among bears in the Cascade and Coast mountain ranges, have long been partners. In B.C., the Joint Nations Grizzly Bear Initiative is increasingly working with the Hope Mountain Center for Outdoor Learning, an outdoor education non-profit based in Hope, B.C. that runs a phone line for reporting North Cascades grizzly sightings. 

Clarke admits it’s an ambitious project with many moving parts. But she is also optimistic about recovering bears and about being ready to support both bears and communities once that happens. 

“There’s not really that many bears,” she says, “so you can set things out properly before, and hopefully, have all the resources in place.” 

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Summary

• Alaska-caught salmon are more likely to be found in B.C. grocery stores than salmon caught in-province, partly because the Alaskan fishery is so much bigger than B.C.’s.
• Alaskan fisheries have also been more successful at obtaining certification as sustainable operations, even though some experts claim Alaskan fisheries are depleting salmon populations.
• Indigenous fisheries in B.C., such as the one owned and operated by Lake Babine Nation, prioritize sustainable harvests, and their products can still be purchased — though maybe with a little extra effort.

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Walk into a grocery store in British Columbia and you’ll likely see bright red sockeye salmon for sale, one of the province’s most iconic foods. You might assume the sockeye was caught fresh in B.C. — but it’s far more likely the fish was caught by Alaskan fisheries, and frozen before it reached this store.

Buying Canadian products is a top priority for many people, especially in the face of U.S. tariffs and annexation threats. Some Canadian conservation groups argue Alaska fisheries are unsustainable. So why is salmon from Alaska so much more common? 

A major challenge is volume: Alaska caught 194.8 million salmon in 2025 and 103.5 million in 2024. Some of those salmon would have spawned in B.C., Washington and Oregon — though it’s hard to say exactly how many of those would have returned to B.C. specifically. The catch includes all five species of wild Pacific salmon: sockeye, coho, Chinook, chum and pink. 

Meanwhile, B.C. caught 2.9 million salmon in 2025 and 2.4 million in 2024. 

Those are just commercially caught and retained salmon. Critics are concerned about how many fish are caught in commercial bycatch — those unintentionally caught while targeting other species. Recreational fisheries have an impact, too; catch-and-release can kill significant numbers of fish.

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Alaska’s salmon fisheries also have something B.C. salmon fisheries don’t: a globally recognized certification that tells stores and consumers its fish are caught sustainably. The Marine Stewardship Council certification faces some criticisms from conservation groups, but having it helps get fish on shelves and into shopping baskets.

So, why don’t B.C. salmon fisheries have it? How do we find B.C. salmon in stores, and how could there be more of it? What’s the most sustainable? Read on.

Why does Alaska have a leg-up on B.C. in selling salmon?

Alaska catches more salmon, which means it can sell them for less. Smaller fisheries pay more to process and ship fish to the store. The sheer volume also means frozen Alaska-caught salmon is available all year.

Big grocery stores “don’t necessarily care about the story,” Brittany Matthews, chief executive officer of Talok Fisheries in central B.C., says. “Price is going to win every time.” And Talok, owned and operated by Lake Babine Nation, can’t compete on price alone. “That’s what we’re fighting with, to add that care, to add that story, to add the power of an Indigenous product on the shelves and make people think about it versus just grabbing the Alaska fillet,” Matthews says.

And Alaska’s Marine Stewardship Council certification can act as a golden ticket, selling the message to stores and consumers that the fish is sustainably caught. “Major retailers, almost bar none, want [that] certification,” Greg Taylor, fisheries advisor to Talok, explains.

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The Marine Stewardship Council says, globally, fisheries responsible for 19 per cent of the world’s total marine catch have its certification. Getting it requires fisheries to go through a rigorous auditing process.

Due to climate change, forestry and overfishing, B.C. salmon fisheries “no longer produce the volumes to satisfy the Canadian market,” Taylor says.

The fact no B.C. salmon fisheries are certified “says a lot about how poorly our fisheries are managed,” Taylor argues.

Conservation groups have pointed out flaws in the Marine Stewardship Council certification program.

Smaller B.C. fisheries may choose not to take on the task and additional costs of meeting stringent reporting requirements — meaning they are less likely to be stocked in stores.

In 2019, the Canadian Pacific Sustainable Fisheries Society pulled the B.C. fisheries it represented out of the program, since it was likely to fail an upcoming audit, largely because of a lack of good data on the health and abundance of salmon.

Separately, conservation groups have argues the Marine Stewardship Council sometimes certifies unsustainable fisheries. In 2024, a group of Canadian conservation groups formally objected to Alaska salmon fisheries being recertified, but were unsuccessful. They argue that while Canada has been cutting down allowable salmon catch, Alaska is catching too many.

“Alaska’s indiscriminate harvest is preventing the recovery of vulnerable Chinook, chum, sockeye, coho and steelhead that are headed for Canada,” Aaron Hill, executive director of Watershed Watch Salmon Society, said in a statement about the objection.

Misty MacDuffee, biologist and wild salmon program director with Raincoast Conservation Foundation, argues the Alaskan Chinook fishery “deprives endangered southern resident killer whales of their primary food source.”

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Broadly, salmon are struggling. Lake Babine Nation paused its Ts’etzli food fishery in 2024 due to salmon struggling in shallow, warm water of the Babine River. “They’ve had a food fishery there for 8,000 years, and they stopped it two years ago because of climate change,” Taylor says.

Concerns about the Marine Stewardship Council’s certifications go beyond salmon: in March, the Antarctic and Southern Ocean Coalition objected to the Marine Stewardship Council’s decision to recertify the Antarctic krill fishery.

The council’s Canada program director, Kurtis Hayne, says certifications are led by independent experts and include stakeholder input and peer review. The council itself does not lead assessments. Certification requirements include effective management and responsiveness to environmental conditions.

“We are confident in the credibility and outcomes of [our] assessment process,” he said in an emailed statement.

Where do these sustainability concerns about commercial practices come from in the first place?

In the open ocean, most commercial salmon is caught using purse seines and gillnets, which can scoop up non-targeted species, including from endangered stocks. Marine fisheries often catch salmon when they are still far away from their spawning grounds, and in B.C., operate on Canada’s best projections of what returns may be — but in reality, returns can be lower or higher than expected. If they’re lower, there’s no way to un-catch those fish.

Salmon have lost habitat due to development and are impacted by flooding, drought and warming water temperatures. Meanwhile, federal monitoring has declined, leaving spotty data for many populations.

Scientists and conservationists see the value in what First Nations have done for millennia: selectively fishing close to spawning grounds, a sustainable management practice called a terminal fishery. These in-river fisheries enable close monitoring of how many have returned to spawn.

Talok Fisheries, where Matthews is chief executive officer and Taylor is an advisor, is a terminal fishery that is preparing to apply for Marine Stewardship Council certification with support from Fisheries and Oceans Canada, Matthews says.

“Indigenous-produced, sustainably harvested, selectively caught — they hit all the buttons to what a sustainable fishery should be,” Taylor says.

The council told The Narwhal the Quinsam River pink salmon in-river fishery has nearly finished its assessment to be certified as well.

So how can a B.C. fishery compete with Alaska?

Talok salmon is stocked at Costco, Sobeys and Thrifty Foods, thanks to its partnerships with distributors North Delta Seafoods and Premium Brands. It also sells fish through Authentic Indigenous Seafood, a collective that shares processing and shipment costs across Indigenous fisheries. These partnerships have been essential and gave Talok the chance to explain its selective practices, Taylor says.

Otherwise, “for small producers to get into Loblaws or Sobeys is next to impossible,” he says, because the fees are too high and it’s hard to compete with bigger fisheries that can beat them on pricing.

Talok is one of the biggest commercial sockeye operations in B.C., but it still relies on just a couple boats and a beach seine net hauled by the nation’s members who remove fish by hand traditionally. That means a smaller carbon footprint than a fleet of fishing vessels on the ocean, Taylor argues.

During roughly the first two weeks of the season, Talok sees the brightest red salmon. They “have beautiful meat colour early on in our lake harvest,” Matthews says. When processed for the store, they don’t have the “shiny silver skin” buyers love. Alaska “floods the market” with silver-skinned, whole fillets, and has ample fish caught early “before any other B.C. inland fisheries have the opportunity,” she explains. Top that with the price, grocery stores are “going to take the Alaska fish — hand over fish,” she says.

After two weeks at Talok, the fish gets paler. Matthews explains those pale fish are harder to sell to grocery stores but are great for smoking.

The paler fish are sold internationally to be processed into food like fish flakes. The roe from these fish is also good quality, but there’s a limited market for it in B.C., Taylor says.

Alaska’s Bristol Bay sockeye fishery, which is Alaska-origin, is the world’s largest sockeye run. “Even in weaker years, Alaska still dwarfs B.C.’s total output,” Matthews says, and that “sets the tone for pricing, market expectations and buyer relationships.” 

Meanwhile, B.C. has smaller, more variable runs, “chronic” conservation issues and time restrictions. “Markets hate inconsistency — Alaska offers the opposite,” she says.

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Talok targets enhanced stocks, which are boosted through hatchery programs, not sensitive wild stocks. Those enhanced stocks return to specific spawning channels.

“If you reduce harvest rates on the coast, all those surplus fish end up at the spawning channels,” Taylor says. This means Talok can target different stocks appropriately, which is good for populations, and also efficient: “like shooting fish in a barrel.”

People count the fish passing the Babine fish fence. Once a million fish pass the fence, they get the green light to fish commercially. It’s prep, wait, then “fish like crazy” in the roughly four weeks they have, Matthews says. Last year they caught 191,872 salmon, according to Taylor.

“We will never fish until we know we have a healthy number to sustain the channels,” Matthews explains. Fisheries and Oceans Canada allows a specific number of these enhanced salmon to enter the spawning channels to maximize productivity in the habitat, and then closes a gate to the channel. Talok harvests fish still heading to that channel, which would have died with their spawn in them if they weren’t harvested. Matthews says the fishery leaves enough for the eagles, the bears and the river system while preventing too many from going to waste.

There’s some debate around spawning channels, since surplus stranded fish can affect productivity of the surrounding habitat. Taylor believes they ultimately should be removed, but it’s best to catch the surplus fish while they’re there. If removed, resources in those spawning channels, like flow control, could be directed to recovering wild streams instead, and Talok could catch a smaller yield.

So why do Alaska fisheries have this designation if B.C. fisheries have found it hard?

First is the capacity to meet monitoring and auditing requirements. Then comes the contention over whether the designation is applied fairly. Alaska and B.C. have interception fisheries, meaning they catch fish in the ocean before they reach their home waters in another country, not in their own jurisdiction. 

Alaska’s constitution requires fish to be maintained on a “sustained yield principle” in its own state, basically meaning “don’t deplete it.” But it allows a fishery to intercept fish returning to Canadian rivers where salmon stocks are experiencing depletion.

“It’s frustrating to see them wipe out the stocks that we have — and then also in the grocery store chain market, to compete against the Alaska fisheries is tough,” Matthews says.

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Taylor says “it’s appalling” for Alaska to apply a different standard to B.C. fish and the Marine Stewardship Council “is letting them get away with it.”

Though Taylor objects to this discrepancy he sees, he compliments Alaska for setting escapement goals for its own salmon stocks (meaning how many adults “escape” being caught and return to spawn). Most B.C. salmon stocks don’t have escapement goals. 

“You have to give Alaska credit for managing their own fishery. They do a much better job than Canada does — except when it comes to fishing our populations that are passing through their waters,” he says.

What does Alaska say?

Forrest Bowers, the Alaska Department of Fish & Game’s director of the division of commercial fisheries, says Alaska sells more fish partly because it has more salmon generally, and the vast majority of salmon caught spawn in Alaska. He agreed the Marine Stewardship Council certification helps get Alaska’s fish sold worldwide. He also points to the state’s escapement goals — the same ones Taylor commends — which prioritize sustaining populations into the future “over all other uses of salmon, including harvests.”

Bowers adds that Canada transferred allocation from commercial to recreational fisheries. In some parts of B.C., the recreational fishery catches more than the commercial.

In an emailed statement, Bowers said the cross-boundary fisheries are managed under the Pacific Salmon Treaty, and “a minute amount” of Alaska’s harvest would spawn outside the state. He says Alaska carefully monitors catches of Canadian-origin salmon to meet treaty requirements, “often forgoing harvest opportunity on our own stocks.”

Alaska’s commercial sector is made up of marine fisheries, though they can still be close to a river’s mouth. Pink and chum are its biggest catches. Bowers says in-river fisheries are not viable for Alaska because salmon spawn in thousands of waterways that aren’t connected by roads and would require airplane access.

“Attempting to harvest millions of pink and chum salmon in-river is not only impractical, but it would also lead to lower quality food products since pink and chum salmon sexually mature quickly in fresh water,” he says. He adds commercial operations in-river could lead to conflict with recreational and subsistence fisheries.

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How many Canada-origin fish is Alaska actually taking?

Taylor says the reality is “no one knows what that number is.” It takes several years to finalize annual estimates, and even then, specific numbers are difficult to obtain because they would require extensive genetic testing to be completely sure, he explains. Alaska gave The Narwhal a preliminary catch estimate of 260,000 B.C. salmon in 2025 (excluding some fisheries managed separately under the treaty) but said it doesn’t typically generate those estimates. Other observers think it could be much higher.

The Pacific Salmon Commission, which implements the treaty, told The Narwhal “there are no straightforward answers” in tallying a cumulative number of how many fish each nation intercepts from the other. Estimates of each salmon run are made separately because they “come with important caveats that make summing them together across fisheries and species problematic.”

What does Canada’s fisheries department say?

Fisheries and Oceans Canada (commonly called DFO) was not able to arrange an interview, despite repeated requests made several weeks in advance of publication. In a statement the department said it’s up to fisheries to apply for the Marine Stewardship Council certificate, but it supports applicants by providing data on stocks and compliance and explaining conservation measures.

The department says that while no B.C. salmon fisheries currently have the designation, B.C.’s groundfish trawl fishery has the certification for 16 groundfish species and the offshore hake and halibut fisheries are certified as well.

While the certification affects grocery store decisions, Fisheries and Oceans Canada says it “does not alter [the department’s] regulatory authority or consultation obligations.”

I want to support B.C.-caught salmon — what can I do?

Smaller, locally-owned shops may be more likely to carry B.C. salmon, and you can search and ask around for what B.C. fish is carried by bigger stores. You can find local fisheries in your area and see how you can support in-river operations. Fisheries and Oceans Canada responds to questions from civilians, and the Pacific Salmon Foundation and Pacific Salmon Commission have lots of public data so you can find out which stocks are doing well and which are struggling.

On the larger scale, protecting Pacific salmon relies heavily on co-operation between Canada and the U.S. The two countries signed an agreement in 2024 to suspend fishing of Yukon River Chinook for seven years, so such agreements are possible. Contacting your elected representative is one way to add your voice to the issue. You can also decide how you’re able to support local initiatives to restore salmon habitat and improve monitoring and share information among your peers.

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Summary

• The Ontario government has officially repealed its Endangered Species Act and replaced it with weaker legislation, almost a year after first proposing to do so.
• The province’s new Species Conservation Act removes provincial protections for many species and applies protections to a more narrow range of habitat for others.
• Conservation experts say the new law puts threatened species at further risk, but the Doug Ford government says the change will speed up road, mining and housing developments.

Ontario’s Endangered Species Act is now officially repealed. The province says the move will allow quicker approvals for road, mining and housing developments, while experts say it could streamline destruction of critical habitats, further threatening wildlife such as woodland caribou, barn owls and the golden eagle.

The Endangered Species Act, passed in 2007, set explicit provincial goals for species recovery and stewardship. It was once considered the gold standard for species protection in Canada, prohibiting anyone from killing or harming endangered or threatened plants and animals, or engaging in activities that would cause harm.

In 2025, the Doug Ford government passed Bill 5, the Protect Ontario by Unleashing our Economy Act, ultimately repealing the Endangered Species Act. It has been replaced with the Species Conservation Act, which removes provincial protection from many species, leaving some threatened fish and birds only protected by federal laws that are limited to federal land and waters. 

The new law limits how habitat is considered and protected. It replaces expert review of permit applications for activities that could harm at-risk species with an online registration that doesn’t require government review, and “allows most projects to begin as soon as they register,” according to the province.

Experts say the new law will put threatened species at further risk.

Introducing the Species Conservation Act

“The original goal of the Endangered Species Act was to allow the species to recover,” Laura Bowman, an Indigenous Rights and environmental lawyer at Macpherson Law, said. “We’ve effectively abandoned those objectives, and that means that species will continue to decline. Probably their decline will accelerate very rapidly.”

Some of the major interim changes, passed in June under Bill 5, include narrowing what counts as a “habitat” — redefining habitats to the specific area an animal dens in, for example, rather than the larger area it uses to travel or find food. This could pose problems for wide-ranging species-at-risk such as woodland caribou, which rely on large, connected habitats to survive.

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The province also no longer requires recovery strategies that guide efforts to bring an endangered species population back to health, laying out the required habitat and other critical factors. The province has argued former legislation was too rigid, preventing the government from focusing its resources to best benefit species.

The new act also removes provincial protections for migratory birds and fish, including redside dace, the minnows that became central to concerns over Ontario’s Highway 413 development, and the red-headed woodpecker. The province has argued they are already protected under federal laws. But in many cases that protection only extends to individual species under the federal Species at Risk Act and their dwelling places on federal lands, such as national parks or First Nations reserves, which make up less than five per cent of the range of most terrestrial at-risk species. The federal government can extend its protections to provincial lands through emergency orders and other means, but rarely does so.

The new act, the province says, is proposed to reduce duplication with federal regulations and allow projects to progress in a “more efficient and cost-effective way.” Bowman, however, said “federal protections for species at risk are extremely limited,” adding that there will be “many, many species and their habitats that are not protected under federal law.”

“There’s going to be a lot of really tragic stories coming out of the rollout of this change,”  Bowman said.

Ontario’s at-risk species protections ‘relying on a voluntary mechanism’

Under the Endangered Species Act, companies proposing industrial or development projects had to demonstrate that a number of criteria were met before moving ahead with development that could affect at-risk species. It was meant to prevent impacts so severe a species couldn’t survive or recover, Bowman said.

“Now that’s not part of the equation. It’s an automatic registration system. So we’re going to see a lot more habitat destruction in particular happening, but also potentially direct harm to species,” Bowman said.

This has been a big sticking point for Kerrie Blaise, a lawyer with the northern Ontario environmental non-profit Legal Advocates for Nature’s Defence. The organization is currently representing two Indigenous interveners challenging the constitutionality of Bill 5 in court.

“When you look at the new act we’re dealing with, it’s effectively relying on a voluntary mechanism,” Blaise said, whereby companies can share key project information, including — in some cases — a conservation plan.

Another matter of concern, Blaise said, is actions under the Species Conservation Act are exempted from the Environmental Bill of Rights, which requires a public posting on the provincial environmental registry. That means applications for work that could potentially harm wildlife no longer have to be posted for public review and comment.

“How are people supposed to weigh in?” Blaise said. “These are decisions that impact communities.”

The new act also sets out activities that do not require any registration or permits to proceed. These include cutting down endangered black ash or butternut trees or hunting threatened eastern wolves or northern bobwhite, a quail found in southern Ontario.

Tens of thousands respond to Species Conservation Act. One northern Ontario city supports it

Much of what was originally proposed for the Species Conservation Act last April under Bill 5 is being carried forward, despite more than 61,000 public comments fielded during the 30-day mandatory public comment period last spring. 

At the time, the full regulations hadn’t yet been set for the Species Conservation Act. Those were released on March 30, nearly a year after the act was first proposed.

Another 1,800 comments were submitted in fall 2025 around the regulations themselves, which now allow the act to practically come into force. Many of the comments call for greater First Nations consultation and a return to the Endangered Species Act’s original principles — including from the cities of Toronto and Markham, Anishinabek Nation and environmental groups.

Some municipalities, including the City of North Bay, are happy with the changes.

“We welcome the proposed changes, which appear to strike a more effective balance between responsible development and the protection of vulnerable species,” the city wrote in its public comment. “The proposed registration-first model aligns with the city’s long-standing advocacy for a more predictable, proponent-driven approach.”

North Bay’s member of Parliament, Vic Fedeli —– who is also Ontario’s minister of economic development, job creation and trade —– is a supporter of the Ring of Fire mining development in Ontario’s Far North, leading the region with a development-first mindset. Fedeli told BayToday in June 2025 that Ontario will lose billions of dollars of new investment “if projects are going to take ten years to get shovels in the ground,” and that Bill 5 is about unlocking Ontario’s “true economic potential.”

Blaise said the lands and waters of northern Ontario are critical for many endangered species, including cougars and several species of bat, adding that, “It’s not surprising that [the Ontario government is] looking for that agenda, which is disregard for species, disregard for habitat — their recovery, their protection.”

“It’s a very disappointing response,” Blaise said. “It shows that now, more than ever, citizens, community members, individuals, really need to practice their environmental rights. That means being informed, having a say, and communicating that — whether that’s to your municipal level of government, your provincial MPP or the federal MP.”

Updated on April 7, 2026, at 5:23 p.m. ET: This story has been updated to remove reference to golden eagles as having federal protections, and therefore being de-listed under the Species Conservation Act. Golden eagles are still listed under the new act, so receive provincial protection for their nesting area only.

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Mycologist Aishwarya Veerabahu regularly walks the forests near her home in Wisconsin, marvelling at the myriad shapes and colours of mushrooms, sometimes foraging for something to bring home and sauté in garlic and butter. It’s a landscape she knows well, but in the last few years, she’s been noticing a worrying and unfamiliar presence: a vibrant yellow, tightly clustered invasive making itself at home. 

Known as golden oyster, it’s a ’shroom completely altering native fungi communities in North America.

“Golden oysters will grow in an order of magnitude more than any other mushroom that you’d see. If you come up on a log with golden oysters on it, there’s always a ton of them, multiple clusters,” Veerabahu said.

The popular mushrooms, often found on menus and supermarket shelves, are native to forests in Russia and Asia. They were first brought to North America in the early 2000s for cultivation, and took to the forests by 2010, expanding their numbers and range rapidly.

“There are some times where I’ve gone through a forest and teared up because I know that there are other mushrooms that were in that wood that aren’t there anymore,” Veerabahu said. “It can be a very sad thing when now it’s just dominated by this one species.”

A researcher at the University of Madison-Wisconsin, Veerabahu published a study last August that used data from citizen scientists to confirm the trend she’s been seeing locally. Golden oyster mushrooms — scientific name Pleurotus citrinopileatus— are quickly invading North America, including Ontario. 

And, scientists say, a booming home-growing trend may be accelerating their spread into forests and impacting biodiversity.

Golden oysters have been found in 25 states, “after escaping cultivation” of commercial growers and hobbyists. They’ve made their way to Ontario, where there have been more than 80 sightings logged on the iNaturalist app of the clusters growing out of dead hardwood in forests, provincial parks and even residential neighbourhoods. 

While most golden oysters in Canada are still concentrated closer to the border with the United States, the species has already travelled as far north as Magnetawan, Ont., near Parry Sound, and is increasingly established around Georgian Bay, on Lake Huron. The speed and distance of its spread has been surprising, Veerabahu said.

“It has thoroughly been unleashed and rapidly spread over the course of a short decade,” she said, adding that the mushrooms have more recently appeared in Quebec. “The best thing that we can do now is to try and prevent it from getting to new regions.” 

Provincial invasive species regulations don’t capture golden oyster mushrooms

Cassidy Mailloux is a guide at the Ojibway Prairie Complex in Windsor, Ont., who takes guests through the nature reserves year-round. She’s also working on a biodiversity study of the region’s native mushrooms as part of her master’s degree at the University of Windsor and has posted golden oyster sightings on iNaturalist, observations that helped inform Veerabahu’s study.

“We’ve only seen it in one of our parks out of the entire complex … and that’s one of our heavily foot-trafficked and most travelled parks,” she said, adding that this is a good sign that the invasion “hasn’t fully taken off yet.”

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Still, she worries about the effect of invasive golden oysters on rarer species of fungi, such as the coral pink marulius, which is uncommonly reported but in large abundance in the Ojibway Prairie Complex. 

“I’m worried the golden oyster mushroom might take precedence,” Mailloux said, given golden oysters are an aggressive species that can grow quickly and prolifically in many kinds of wood and even sawdust — unlike some native species that require specific conditions to thrive. Both the city and her organization are still trying to figure out the best way to manage the invasive — and say visitors documenting sightings can inform this work. 

“Encouraging citizens to upload these observations can really help management and our ecosystem,” Mailloux said, “and just keeping a track on how bad it might be getting in the area.”

Despite the threat, the Government of Ontario has not added live oyster mushrooms to its prohibited or restricted invasive species lists, which would make it illegal to import, buy, sell — or sometimes even possess — an ecologically harmful strain.

Without this regulation, Veerabahu said, live cultures continue to be transported across borders. And, she said once golden oysters colonize an area, fewer other unique fungal species will be found there. The communities that do exist are also entirely changed. 

“Let’s say in an uncolonized dead tree, you had a nice, rich community of fungi A, B, C, D, E. Once golden oyster colonizes, now it’s golden oyster and fungi X, Y, Z,” Veerabahu said. 

This makes her concerned about a domino effect because fungal communities are primary wood decomposers of forests, playing an important role in cycling nutrients and storing carbon. “The identity of which species are able to coexist in that space is changing.” 

Monica Liedtke, terrestrial invasive plant coordinator for the Invasive Species Centre, in Sault St. Marie, Ont., agreed. She told The Narwhal via email that non-native invasive fungi can significantly disrupt Ontario’s ecosystems and environmental processes that have developed over thousands of years.

“When non-native invasive fungi establish, they can interfere with important symbiotic relationships between native fungi, trees and plants,” Liedtke told The Narwhal. Golden oysters can quicken the rate of wood decay, which then impacts the birds and bugs that use dead and dying trees for homes and food. “Over time, these disruptions can affect biodiversity across the entire ecosystem.”

Meanwhile, climate change is creating warmer conditions that will make Ontario even more hospitable to these mushrooms, allowing them to expand their range. Veerabahu and her team used a climate prediction model developed by NASA to predict what might happen in the next 15 years. The model predicted that the North American region climatically suitable for golden oyster mushrooms to grow would almost double. 

Grow-your-own mushroom kits threaten Ontario forests

Kyle McLoughlin, an arborist and supervisor of forest planning and health for the City of Burlington, said the reason he fears golden mushrooms is exactly why they’re popular among amateur growers.

“From an ecological perspective, they don’t have a niche. They can go anywhere. They’re very wide-ranging. They’re very comfortable in a lot of different types of wood and a lot of different environments,” McLoughlin said of golden oysters. “This is also why you can grow them so well.”

Kits with detailed growing instructions are readily available on the internet, with prices between $20 and $40. These are a “major source of their invasion,” McLoughlin said. 

“It’s literally being introduced into people’s homes and their properties through grow kits,” McLoughlin said. “We shouldn’t be selling people potential invasive species to bring into their homes.”

Still, grow kits remain widely sold with little public awareness of the risks. Consumers are often not warned when they buy a grow kit that tossing spent soil onto the compost pile, or leaving a kit outdoors, could unintentionally help an invasive spread.

There are some ways people can help slow the spread if they spot oyster mushrooms. If someone sees a log on their own property pop with golden oysters for the first time, it could be helpful to burn it, Veerabahu explained. People can also forage the mushrooms from forested areas, collecting them in closed containers to prevent spores from spreading.

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The challenge is to muster enough public awareness and political will before things get out of control.

“It’s kind of like cockroaches. Once you start to see them, you know there’s a heck of a lot more in your walls,” McLoughlin said. “They are putting billions of spores into the air when they’re fruiting. And this is happening constantly.”

Some companies that have sold these kits around the world, like Far West Fungi, North Spore and MycoPunks have since discontinued some products due to concern. In a blog post titled “Yellow Oyster Disaster Zone,” MycoPunks wrote: “No shade intended on any other vendors who choose to keep selling golden oyster kits … we’ve all got our own different moral codes, but it’s not something we feel able to do in good conscience any more.”

But, given a lack of regulation in the province, it’s still easy to import kits from within Canada or around the world to grow in Ontario.

“Gardeners [and] hobby farmers should carefully consider the species they are cultivating. Choosing native species helps to reduce ecological risk,” Liedtke, from the Invasive Species Centre, said. Some kits sell species such as lion’s mane or chestnut mushrooms, which are both edible and native to Ontario. 

For those who are growing golden oysters, the Invasive Species Centre advises that used grow kits should be sealed in a garbage bag and left in the sun for several days to a week; this process, called solarization, helps kill remaining spores and fungal material. Then, the bag should be disposed of in municipal waste — not compost. 

“Neither the producer nor the consumer wants to be part of that spread,” Veerabahu said. “The mushroom grow kits are a huge point of concern. They’re essentially a live culture that can be transported anywhere, but they’re not being regulated and I’ll never blame hobby mushroom growers for that.”

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In January, Todd Stone, the president and chief executive officer of the Association for Mineral Exploration British Columbia, told the crowd assembled for the association’s conference about a lobby meeting he had with Premier David Eby. Stone joked that he opened by congratulating the premier on his “success on 30-by-30.” 

The crowd began to chuckle as he continued his story about provincial and national targets for protecting 30 per cent of land and water by 2030.

“You’ve actually accomplished 47 by 2025,” he recalled telling the premier. He then recounted asking: “Can we start having a conversation about pulling some land back?”

That figure comes from a policy paper published in December 2025 by the association, arguing “up to 46.99 per cent” of British Columbia was protected land. That’s far more than the federal government’s figure of 19.9 per cent, and would surpass the province’s 30-by-30 pledge. 

According to Stone, a former minister under the B.C. Liberals, the comments led to the premier directing “the staff at the [Water, Lands and Resource Stewardship Ministry] to go back and look at all their numbers and sit down with us.”

According to public records, the association lobbied at least a dozen members of B.C.’s NDP government in late 2025 to press their argument. Those include the speaker, the minister of forests, the minister of labour, the minister of energy and climate solutions, the minister of mining and critical minerals and Randene Neill, the minister of water, lands and resource stewardship.

On Dec. 2, 2025, Minister Neill poured cold water on the lobbying effort.

“It is inaccurate to suggest these areas are currently fully protected when they are not,” she said. A section of the statement attributed to the ministry went on to add that many of the so-called protected areas cited in the association’s policy paper “do not restrict all resource activities that can negatively affect biodiversity.”

Torrance Coste, associate director at the Wilderness Committee, remembers seeing Minister Neill’s statement shared on an email list used by the province’s conservation groups. He described it as “encouraging” at the time. But Stone’s comments, and more recent statements by the ministry, have him worried.

According to a statement emailed to The Narwhal, the Ministry of Water, Lands, and Resource Stewardship said it is “developing an updated approach” to tracking the province’s progress towards the 30-by-30 conservation goal and appreciated the association’s “feedback as we proceed through this work.”

“This work includes a review of all existing areas within B.C. that have conservation measures in place or have restrictions on resource activity,” the ministry explained. 

To complete that review, they added they are working with “other resource sector ministries, including Forests, Mining and Critical Minerals, and Energy and Climate Solutions” as well as “industry and environmental non-governmental organizations.”

Coste thinks this could be a sign that the ministry is considering adopting some of the Association for Mineral Exploration’s definitions for protected lands. Something he describes “a naked attempt to lobby against the expansion of protected areas committed to by the governments of B.C. and Canada through the 30-by-30 commitment.”

“The Association for Mineral Exploration’s proposal has absolutely nothing to do with conservation,” he said. “The fact [that] the BC NDP government is even looking at the association’s nonsense is a huge scandal”. 

The Narwhal reached out to the Association for Mineral Exploration British Columbia regarding the meeting Stone described between himself and Eby, but did not receive a response by publication time. The premier’s office directed questions about the comments to the Ministry of Lands, Water, and Resource Stewardship, which sent the statement cited above. 

Conservation groups say the math doesn’t add up 

Despite the ministry’s statement that both “industry and environmental non-governmental organizations” are involved in the process of reviewing conservation measures and goals, Coste says the ministry has not contacted the Wilderness Committee.

The Narwhal did learn that the British Columbia office of the Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society had been engaged in conversations about how the province calculates protected lands. But those conversations began prior to the Association for Mineral Exploration’s recent lobbying, according to Coste and others The Narwhal interviewed for this story.

Coste says that if the province reaches out to him, his first move would be sharing “photos from this year of massive clear cuts in critical caribou habitat.”

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These photos, he explains, are from areas designated as ungulate winter range. A land designation under the Forest and Range Practices Act, it’s meant to protect critical winter habitat for species such as mountain goats, elk, bighorn sheep, deer, moose and caribou. It also accounts for 17.7 per cent of the province’s land mass — land the Association for Mineral Exploration says is closed to mining. 

Back in December 2025, the Ministry of Water, Land and Resource Stewardship disagreed with that assessment. In the same statement where Minister Neill rebuffed the Association for Mineral Exploration, the ministry argued ungulate winter range didn’t meet the 30-by-30 conservation criteria.

“There are two types of ungulate winter ranges: no harvest and conditional harvest,” the statement read. The former “are subject to restrictions on forestry activities, but do not restrict mineral development and exploration activities.” A conditional harvest zone, meanwhile, may not have stringent enough restrictions on forestry to satisfy international conservation requirements, according to the statement.

In other words, ungulate winter range isn’t fully closed to development. It’s a conclusion the Association for Mineral Exploration shared in a 2016 report, describing it as land “where new mineral claims may be acquired and access for mineral exploration and development may be permitted.”

Coste points to other land designations that the Association for Mineral Exploration calls protected that don’t fit the 30-by-30 criteria. Among them are special management zones and wildlife management areas. Both restrict some, but not all, mining and logging. Like ungulate winter range, the Association for Mineral Exploration’s 2016 report said these areas could be open to mining. 

In special management zones, the report stated that “resource development and extraction opportunities exist.” While in wildlife management zones, “resource extraction like mining may be allowed.”

To Adrienne Berchtold, the director of mining reform and habitat protection at SkeenaWild Conservation Trust, it’s more evidence that the Association for Mineral Exploration’s policy paper is using faulty figures.

“We’ve done some early fact-checking and found that around 27 per cent of operating mines, proposed mines and exploration projects in the province are located in areas [the Association for Mineral Exploration] is telling the government should count as protected areas,” she says. “These numbers show that not only is mining activity possible in these areas, it is actively occurring in significant quantities.”

The problem with ‘other effective conservation measures’

For Coste, one of the most egregious land designations included in the Association for Mineral Exploration’s policy proposal are old growth management areas. According to a 2024 report from the Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society B.C., less than one-third of old growth management areas are protected old-growth forests. Most of them, the report found, were young forests, and at least 27,300 hectares were active cutblocks. 

“They’re not protected areas,” Coste says. 

But the provincial government includes old growth management areas in the province’s 30-by-30 calculations.

Of the 20 per cent of land and water the province has logged in the Canadian Protected and Conserved Areas Database, 15.9 per cent is parks and protected areas. The other 4.1 per cent are listed under the heading of “other effective area-based conservation measures.”

A vague designation, other effective area-based conservation measures are not parks, conservation lands or other clearly defined, government-recognized protected areas. Their inclusion in 30-by-30 stems from the definition of protected areas developed by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature, an organization headquartered in Switzerland, which counts Canadian government and non-government entities among its members.

It defines a protected area as “a clearly defined geographical space, recognized, dedicated and managed, through legal or other effective means, to achieve the long-term conservation of nature with associated ecosystem services and cultural values.”

The “legal” side of this is straightforward: think provincial and federal conservation areas, ecological reserves and parks. “Other effective means” is where things get complicated. 

The province considers old growth management areas protected enough to include in their 30-by-30 calculations. The Association for Mineral Exploration agrees, adding ungulate winter range, special management zones, wildlife management areas and a few other designations they believe should also be included. 

But Coste disagrees, arguing that these designations “clearly don’t meet the International Union for the Conservation of Nature guidelines.” 

He describes the push to include them as government and extractive industries seeking “loopholes” to avoid real conservation. And yet, Coste said there are other means to meeting the 30-by-30 targets.

He points to Indigenous-led conservation areas as an example. These areas can fall into a legal grey zone, declared by nations but not recognized by the provincial or federal government. 

“If it’s Indigenous-declared, they’re probably going to need resources to do management plans and to get Guardians on the ground,” Coste says. “If it’s not a recognized protected area, that funding is not going to flow.”

He says that recognizing these areas as other effective area-based conservation measures could change that. It’s what happened, for example, in the Northwest Territories with Thaidene Nëné. 

An Indigenous protected area located on the northeastern arm of Great Slave Lake, it was designated by the Łutsël K’é Dene First Nation in 2019. Parts of the area were recognized by the territorial government as a territorial protected area and a wildlife conservation area. The rest was recognized by the federal government in 2025, forming the 26,000-square-kilometre Thaidene Nëné National Park Reserve. Earlier this year, the project received a major funding boost when the territorial government dispersed $21.6 million to support Indigenous-led conservation. 

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Without these other pathways to establish protected areas, Matthew Mitchell, a professor and researcher at the University of British Columbia’s faculties of land and food systems and forestry and environmental stewardship, isn’t sure that B.C. or Canada can meet the 30-by-30 targets. 

“We can’t always do conservation the way we traditionally think about it,” he says.

In 2021, Mitchell served on an expert panel convened by Environment and Climate Change Canada to explore pathways to meet Canada’s conservation goals. Along with other researchers, he concluded meeting the 30-by-30 target would require innovative solutions. 

He advocates for approaches such as Indigenous protected areas, urban parks and biosphere reserves that include working landscapes.

“There are lots of good examples of working landscape conservation, agricultural areas where we’re adding in buffer strips and hedgerows,” he says. “Things that can actually have big benefits to a variety of wildlife and agricultural production.”

These are the kinds of other effective area-based conservation measures that he thinks are useful. But he also acknowledges there are pitfalls, and that opening the door to interpretations like the Association for Mineral Exploration’s isn’t helpful. 

“How you define these things and how effective they are actually really matters,” he says. “Putting them all into one bin and saying that we’ve hit our 30 per cent target is not a good way to go.”

A proposed Indigenous protected area in the crosshairs 

At roughly 40,000 square kilometres, the Dene Kʼéh Kusān Indigenous Protected and Conserved Area would be among the largest tracts of protected land in British Columbia. Located at the heart of the Kaska Dena nation’s traditional territory, it’s four times the size of Tweedsmuir Provincial Park, the largest park in the province.

“As Kaska, we’ve been stewards of our territory, so in our mind, it’s about thoughtful land use planning that will protect one of the most intact ecosystems in North America,” Michelle Miller, director of culture and land stewardship at the Dena Kayeh Institute, says.

When it’s recognized, she adds, the Kaska will be able to promote sustainable economic growth and protect land, water and critical habitat. It would also contribute to the province’s conservation goals. 

“Dene Kʼéh Kusān is four per cent of the province,” Miller explains. “Protecting it would go a long way to helping B.C. achieve its 30-by-30 goals.”

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That has led projects like Dene Kʼéh Kusān to land in the Association for Mineral Exploration’s crosshairs. In their December 2025 policy proposal, the association called for a stop to “Northwest Land Use Plans, which are expected to add … significant new conservation areas to the province.” Conservation areas like Dene Kʼéh Kusān.

But Miller questions the association’s framing. 

“The idea of pitting conservation against economy, and against job creation, I think it’s an outdated argument,” she says. Dene Kʼéh Kusān is “not about opposing mining, it’s about where that can occur in other areas throughout the territory.” 

For Miller, that balance is at the heart of a “modern conservation economy” where “Indigenous stewardship, healthy ecosystems and economic opportunity can all move forward together.”

It’s a view she hopes won’t be lost if the government works with mining interests to change how they approach conservation and the 30-by-30 target. 

“The whole conversation around how you get to 30-by-30, I think we can recognize there’s some creative math going on there,” she says. “But we’re not here to debate that. We’re just here to say that Dene Kʼéh Kusān is worth protecting.”

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Few of us will admit to loving coyotes. The distaste for this exclusively North American canid runs deep: in a 1985 Yale University study respondents ranked them beneath skunks, rattlesnakes and vultures in terms of popularity. But are they simply misunderstood?

I have been fortunate to photograph many coyotes over the years, including three adorable pups in rural southern Ontario. I have learned much of the negativity directed at them comes from fear. 

Urban coyotes have followed humans to dense population centres where rodents are in abundant supply, providing an ample food source. Despite talk of modern “coywolves,” these are the same eastern canids previous generations knew, whose crossbreeding with wolves happened over a century ago.

Naturally, there are occasional encounters with citizens — and their pets — which become news. If a coyote acts aggressively and bites someone it is widely reported, usually without important context.

A study from 2011 found, on average, three people are bitten by coyotes annually in Canada, compared with 300,000 dog bites. When coyotes do attack, it’s often after humans have fed them, either intentionally or inadvertently. Sadly, the common response to a coyote attack is for the animal to be culled.

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Rural coyotes face a different problem. Having become the top predator in regions where traditional apex predators have been extirpated, coyotes sometimes target lambs and calves — if they can get inside their pens. But again, coyotes get blamed even when other species — such as dogs — might be responsible. The provincial government compensates farmers for livestock lost to predators. But coyote casualties and death by dog are treated much differently.

Losses due to coyotes are covered under the Ontario Wildlife Damage Compensation Program. Of the approximately $1.5 million paid out to farmers in 2024-2025, more than $1.2 million was for alleged coyote predation.

Domestic dogs aren’t covered by that program at all. Those losses fall under Ontario’s Protection of Livestock and Poultry from Dogs Act, which offers generally lower compensation than the wildlife damage program.

All over the world farmers complain of livestock loss due to dogs, so it’s curious why it is not widely acknowledged here. It’s a reason conservationists have suggested coyotes might be taking some of the blame for dogs.

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No doubt coyotes are more than a nuisance to some farmers. If a coyote, particularly one with mange, hangs around their house they will shoot them.

But many I speak with say coyotes around fields are mostly left alone, because they control populations of rats, mice and even groundhogs — a significant role. Coyotes are amazingly resilient, and their populations quickly rebound after attempts to cull them. They’ve migrated to every U.S. state (barring Hawaii) and every Canadian province and territory.

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In a typical coyote family only the parents will mate, but if one or both parents are killed any females will come into estrus earlier or disperse to find mates and start a family. And they will have larger litters if the food supply is abundant.

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But their bad reputation remains. In Ontario, hunting and trapping of coyotes is allowed all year, everywhere except in and around some provincial parks — a restriction put in place not for the coyotes’ sake, but to protect the endangered eastern wolf, which can look similar. In much of southern Ontario there is no limit to the number of coyotes that can be hunted. 

In Ontario, provincial law empowers municipalities to kill coyotes that pose a threat. Until recently, one outdoor store in Belleville, Ont., held an annual coyote killing contest. Animal conservationist groups took the Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources and Forestry to court in 2022 arguing they were not complying with the law preventing bounty hunting. Although they lost the case, the contest does not appear to have been held since.

But those of us who appreciate the animal for its resiliency, its devotion to family and its adaptability, know getting rid of them is nearly impossible. It is estimated the coyote species can withstand a kill rate of 70 per cent of their population, year after year.

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It’s denning season now across Ontario and in the coming months coyote pups will appear. I, for one, hope people can accept them as a valuable species, playing a vital part in our ecology.

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Summary

• A tiny village in Newfoundland and Labrador could become the site of a major floating liquefied natural gas (LNG) facility
• Amid talk about exporting LNG from the east coast, some community members look to Kitimat, B.C., home to Canada’s first major LNG facility 
• Residents of the village of Fermeuse, home to about 300 people, may be tempted by the prospect of jobs but one Kitimat, B.C., resident warns: “The noise, pollution, traffic and burden on the infrastructure is not worth it”

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About an hour’s drive from St. John’s, Newfoundland and Labrador, the little fishing village of Fermeuse sits on the shores of a deep harbour, sheltered from the tempestuous North Atlantic. Atop a hill overlooking the village, eight slow-turning turbines harvest energy from the nearly ever-present wind that flows from the open ocean. Generations of fishers have plied the waters off the coast, harvesting cod, crab and numerous other species.

More than 5,000 kilometres away, on the northwest coast of British Columbia, the town of Kitimat, B.C., is newly home to Canada’s first major liquefied natural gas (LNG) facility. LNG Canada started operations here last year, lighting up the night sky with its noisy and bright flare stack and welcoming a stream of supertankers to the deepwater channel that connects the community with pan-Pacific shipping routes. Years in the making, the LNG export project has undeniably changed life for those who live alongside it.

Fermeuse could be facing similar changes.

When the Atlantic cod fisheries collapsed in the 1990s — putting more than 35,000 people out of work across Newfoundland and Labrador — many left the village in search of good paying jobs, including in the province’s booming oil and gas sector. Now, as nearby offshore oil developments like Bay Du Nord get a boost from the federal government and the province eyes new revenues from the sector, the sleepy village of around 300 residents could become the focal point for an influx of new industry.

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Crown LNG Holdings Ltd., under the name of its Newfoundland affiliate, Fermeuse Energy, plans to develop a swath of the harbour to support several projects, possibly including a liquefied natural gas processing and export terminal. The company is approved for a marine base but has not yet submitted an official proposal for an LNG plant. In late January, Fermuese Energy signed an agreement with Hanwha Ocean, a South Korean shipbuilding company and expert in offshore facilities, to “jointly advance the Newfoundland and Labrador LNG development project in Canada.”  

“If the political will and the community support comes along, then we will move ahead with the project by the end of this year or next year,” Swapan Kataria, CEO of Crown LNG, told The Narwhal in an interview.

Valerie Walsh, whose family has lived in Fermeuse for generations, said many in the community are tempted by an idea that “our sons and daughters who moved away for work will maybe move back to Fermeuse” to build the LNG project.

“It’s a sought-after harbour,” she said, explaining it’s protected from the open water and safe for large boats. “It could be really rough in the North Atlantic, but boats can come in here and they’re protected.” 

But Walsh is worried residents will be seduced by industry without knowing what they’re really signing up for.

“I don’t know if it’s because the fishery collapse just took the wind out of everybody’s sails and they’re just waiting for the saviour to come along, which is oil and gas,” she mused. “[The company] can make it seem safe. They can make it seem a lot of things. I think this will be the end of the harbour and any natural thing for us. … There will be no whales coming in anymore, no puffins, no fishery, no boats, no anything.” 

“I don’t know that the community really understands it.”

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Details about the potential LNG project are vague, but the company has said plans could include a 380-kilometre pipeline along the ocean floor, trenched for part of that distance to protect it from icebergs, connecting untapped offshore gas reserves to the village. There, a floating liquefaction facility could supercool the gas, reducing its volume for marine transport to overseas destinations. Kataria said the facility, if built, would process and export up to 10 million tonnes of LNG per year. The company acknowledged an LNG project would bring change to the community and said if anything were to move ahead, public consultations and stakeholder engagements would be held.

“We are only approved for a marine base and I think it’s important to qualify that in order to avoid any future confusions,” Kataria said. “We are certainly there to service the offshore growth in the industry.” 

How the LNG project fits into the picture is that those same offshore areas are home to “a lot of gas reserves which nobody is going after,” he said. “We are connected with the industry, and we feel that there is gas which can be monetized.”

‘We don’t know what’s going to happen’: locals question how Fermeuse LNG would impact community

On the north coast of B.C., the massive LNG project was under construction for about five years, employing locals and flooding the community with thousands of out-of-town workers. It now employs around 300 people and will provide the community with $9.7 million in annual taxes for the first five years of operations.

Kitimat residents have experienced months of disruption to their daily lives since LNG Canada started flaring activities in late 2024. Flaring is the burning of excess or waste gas, a normal part of operating a liquefaction facility. In Kitimat, flaring has at times exceeded 90-metre-tall flames, about the height of London’s iconic Big Ben, in part due to an ongoing equipment issue. 

That causes light pollution, noise and emissions, as well as releases air pollution. Flaring at LNG facilities releases carbon monoxide, nitrous oxides, fine particulate matter and sulphur dioxide, all of which can have impacts on human health. For its part, LNG Canada in Kitimat says flaring is “safe, controlled and provincially regulated.” But that hasn’t stopped residents there from being concerned.

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Walsh said she’s afraid ceding the harbour shores to an industrial hub for LNG and oil development would be a death knell for the villagers’ way of life.

“My father’s from here, his father and his father before that,” she told The Narwhal on a phone call. “We are literally closing the door on our way of life in this harbour if we let this industrial LNG come in.”

Brenda Aylward lives on the other side of the harbour from Walsh, where she raises sheep and grows vegetables while caring for her aging mother.

“It’s a fifth-generation farm and I’ve been involved pretty much my whole life,” she said. It’s a small farm-to-table operation she’s planning to expand — and she wonders what the impacts of an industrial project in the harbour would have on her livestock.

“I have fields that border the ocean,” she said, explaining the farm is just a few kilometres from the proposed industrial site. “Livestock are quite skittish, to noise and to light. Sheep are the most affected because they are the most skittish livestock.”

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She said she has questions about how LNG operations and related marine traffic could alter the flock’s grazing and breeding patterns. Research from animal behaviour expert Temple Grandin has shown stress in livestock can cause agitation, increased thyroid activity and spikes in cortisol.

“[Will] I have my lambs when market time comes?” Aylward wondered. “We don’t know what’s going to happen there.”

Fermeuse Energy did not directly address questions about potential impacts and said there will be an opportunity for community members to get answers.

“We certainly understand that there will be questions from the residents of the area,” Stephen Tessier, a spokesperson with the company, wrote in an emailed statement. “We (Fermeuse Energy) are still in the discovery stage and we need to have a handle on actual product and political will in Newfoundland and Labrador in order to proceed.”

Tessier said before the company submits an application, it will conduct engineering and environmental studies.

“Once that happens, there will be public consultations and stakeholder engagements where the residents can ask questions, clarify their doubts and choose to support the project,” he wrote. “We look forward to working with the towns and residents as this project moves forward.”

One of Aylward’s neighbours, Jenny Wright, has similar questions about potential impacts to the community.

“We live right on the water,” she said. “We bought a traditional old Newfoundland home and my husband is a house builder and he’s renovated every last piece of it.”

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She suggested the community should be looking at different options to create jobs beyond oil and gas.

“We are right on the East Coast Trail,” she said, referencing a 336-kilometre network of paths and trails, adding the region would be wise to capitalize on a growing tourism sector. “We can develop an economic plan here that is sustainable, like other towns in Newfoundland and Labrador have done, like Petty Harbour, who own their own fishery, have a co-operative plant and developed and promoted small businesses being around there — and then started a non-profit to educate people on the fishery.”

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‘We depend on a clean coastline, clean water and a quiet environment’

Before the cod moratorium — an indefinite closure to the fishery implemented by the federal government in 1992 — came into effect, Fermeuse had a fish plant, too, and the harbour still supports an active fleet.

“Pretty soon — the end of March, early April — is the time for the crab boats going in and out,” Wright said. “Our first signs of spring are the fishery is up and going again. And then, of course, the whales that will come in shortly after that.”

She fears an influx of industry in the harbour would change everything.

“I’m exhausted with hearing everybody when they hear the word LNG go, ‘Oh, this is great, oil and gas is going to save us — it’s going to bring back jobs and all the young people, they’re going to come home and we’re going to flourish again.’ We’ve just done this over and over and over again, and we’re not learning from it.”

Walsh has been trying to get information about what the company wants to do — to little avail, she said — and help her community understand what’s at stake.

“Nobody can visualize it,” she said. “I don’t think they understand what it’s actually going to be like, physically, how the harbour will change. LNG is big money — a company can spin it whatever way they want. They can make it shiny and beautiful and never tell you the downsides.”

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Kitimat’s story, some residents say, is a cautionary tale some places like Fermeuse can learn from.

“Expect all the promises they make never to materialize,” a Kitimat community member, who The Narwhal is calling James Smith to protect his family from repercussions, said. “And realize they often spend more effort trying to control the narrative than being transparent. You’re dealing with shiny on the outside, rotten to the core.”

Smith sent The Narwhal images of his property taken at night during recent overnight flaring activity.

“[My] house was lit up like daylight and shaking from the noise,” he wrote in a message accompanying the photos. “On top [of that] there was an ear-piercing whistle.”

Aylward, the sheep farmer, shuddered to think of her community changing so dramatically. 

“It’s devastating to think that something like that will come to this tiny little place,” she said. “We depend on a clean coastline, clean water and a quiet environment, for our food production and our lives. We do not want or need this here in our community.”

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‘We already have the buyers’: Crown LNG says Fermeuse is well positioned to get gas to waiting markets 

Kataria agrees building an LNG facility in the harbour would mean significant change for residents of the fishing village.

“It is wrong of me to say that their life’s not going to change,” he said. “If you were looking at a peaceful water view, it is not going to remain the same. People’s expectations that the view is not going to change or the noise levels will not change or the traffic will not change, I think is wrong — because it will change. Industrialization will bring all those things.”

He said while the LNG development is in early stages, bringing industry to Fermeuse means jobs for a community that lost its base economy more than three decades ago.

“If I have the year right, it is 35 years plus [that] there has been no economic upswing in that community,” he said. “Let’s say it was a community of 1,500 people, or 2,000 people, gone down to 300. Do they need jobs? Do they need a change? I don’t know.”

“I think everybody understands that there is a give and take,” he added. 

Kataria said he’s optimistic about Prime Minister Mark Carney’s statements in recent months in support of LNG exports, but he hasn’t seen the political will to support an official proposal yet. 

If things do move forward, he said the main destination for exports from Newfoundland would be Europe, which continues, for now, to import fossil fuels to replace Russian gas since President Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine in 2022, but he also wants to tap into India’s “insatiable demand” for LNG. He noted the company could leverage an international loophole to get the gas there.

“There is a mechanism in place on international trading, where we could actually sell the cargo on the high seas to people taking it to Europe, and people bringing it from the other part of the world into Europe. We can take it from there and just hand it over to India.”

These kinds of high seas cargo swapping, or ship-to-ship transfers, are governed by rules set out by the International Maritime Organization — but the process is also used by the likes of the Russian shadow fleet, a cabal of shady shipping operators making vast sums of money by obscuring the origin of oil that would otherwise be heavily sanctioned.

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“We already have a licence for importing 7.2 million tonnes in India,” Kataria said, adding the company is currently working on approvals to build a five-million tonne import facility in Scotland. 

“We are LNG terminal developers,” he explained. “We are not coming to Canada to … build a project and wait for somebody to come and buy the product from us — we already have the buyers. We’re coming there because we need it. It’s the other way around.” 

Lloyd Parrott, Newfoundland and Labrador’s energy and mines minister, told The Narwhal he considers natural gas a “key priority” for the province but he’s waiting on an official proposal for an LNG plant in Fermeuse.

“The department has not received a formal request for support for the Fermeuse energy project,” Parrott wrote in an emailed statement. “Our government will always make time to meet with companies to discuss potential projects that have the potential to provide benefits to Newfoundlanders and Labradorians.”

In Kitimat, Smith warned the promise of benefits may not be enough to offset the impacts of living beside an LNG plant.

“The noise, pollution, traffic and burden on the infrastructure is not worth it,” he said.

For her part, Walsh doesn’t want Fermeuse turned into an industrial hub.

“I just don’t want my community destroyed,” she said. “We’re at a crossroads. We’re caught up in this now. And I just don’t think it’ll be for the betterment of us, the people who live here.”

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A large herd of bagwaji-bizhikiwag (wood bison) call Chitek Lake Anishinaabe Provincial Park in Manitoba home — and their community recently grew even larger.

On Feb. 18, the herd welcomed 10 new bulls and cows to their territory nestled between Lake Winnipegosis and Lake Winnipeg — more than 300 kilometres northwest of Winnipeg.

They’d traveled 12 hours in a massive cattle trailer across provinces, from Elk Island National Park in Alberta.

Wood bison, once on the brink of extinction, have seen their populations climb thanks to recent conservation efforts. And even though the species wasn’t historically known to live in this herd’s area, the vast isolation of the park’s boreal forest, fields and lakes helps keep them safe from disease as their numbers come back. 

Skownan First Nation serves as a steward of the free-ranging herd, which is currently at nearly 200 animals, said Rychelle Catcheway, the nation’s operations director.

“It’s a very proud and meaningful [and] fulfilling role to know that our bison were nearly extinct or on the endangered species list and now to see their numbers come rise back up,” said Catcheway.

“This was years in the making.”

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Catcheway said several years ago, the First Nation submitted a request to the Elk Island bison transfer program. Last fall, she said, they began a series of meetings “to discuss how many animals they were able to give us … and to see if we had the capacity to take them in.”

Moving wood bison between herds is not an easy task, as each animal can weigh up to a full tonne.

It required many steps, starting with Skownan and Elk Island National Park signing a memorandum of understanding outlining who bore responsibility for sorting, tagging, handling, loading and transporting the animals. 

But it also required helping the newest members of the herd integrate. As the 10 transferred bison were unloaded in Manitoba, at first one of the cows refused to leave the transport trailer. 

So Catcheway stepped in. She made eye contact with the scared animal through a hole in the trailer’s side. And then she told the bison that she’d arrived in her new home. 

Finally, Catcheway’s spouse Paul Marion, who serves as the nation’s herd manager, lured the timid mammal out using a bell and hay.

Now, the bison are able to recognize the couple’s truck. But if it’s driven by someone unfamiliar, they can get “spooked,” Catcheway noted. 

She said she’s become closer with the new buffalo, remembering moments where a calf and bull walked right up to her window as the couple were stopped in the middle of the herd. 

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‘Small but very tangible act of reconciliation’

The move wasn’t the first one between the animals’ original national park in Alberta and their new home on Skownan First Nation’s bison ranch.

In fact, about 40 years ago, Elk Island National Park sent Skownan several of its initial herd when the Manitoba program first started.

At that time, the federal government had declared the large bovine species as officially “endangered”; by 1988, wood bison were downgraded to “threatened” status. 

Today, the species is still listed as of “special concern,” with between 5,000 and 7,000 mature individuals spread between nine wild subpopulations.

Without many natural predators to hunt bison, their populations have been able to slowly bounce back, explained David Bruinsma, a Parks Canada resource management officer at Elk Island National Park.

But six years ago, Environment and Climate Change Canada issued a warning that wood bison face “imminent threats to their recovery,” particularly from domestic cattle-borne diseases, “oil sands mining” and hydroelectric dams and vehicle strikes.

“The effect of threats make achieving the recovery objectives of the species highly unlikely or impossible,” the department’s report concluded, “such that immediate intervention is required.”

Without many natural predators to hunt bison, their populations have been able to bounce back, explained David Bruinsma, a Parks Canada resource management officer at Elk Island National Park.

The Alberta park hosts two distinct herds — one wood bison, the other plains bison.

“There’s limited amount of grass and other forage in the park for them,” Bruinsma said.

“Every so often, we have to remove surplus bison from the park to prevent overgrazing … and then transfer them to conservation projects and Indigenous communities.” 

Such transfers usually occur in wintertime because it’s easier to lure the bison with feed when the ground is covered with snow. Additionally, the calves will have been weaned by that time. 

Bruinsma said Parks Canada is trying to increase how many bison it transfers to Indigenous communities, calling it a “small but very tangible act of reconciliation” that “supports ecological and cultural restoration” of the species considered sacred to many First Nations in the region. 

Herd additions aim to increase genetic diversity on province’s first Indigenous Use park

The wood bison sent to Skownan came fitted with coloured ear tags to differentiate them from the rest of the herd, Catcheway said.

The five males, known as bulls, are old enough to breed at three years old and up, and have green ear tags. The five females, or cows, range from yearlings to roughly four years old, and wear yellow tags.

The 10 animals were introduced to add genetic diversity to the local breeding population, Catcheway explained.

“There’s a possibility that the females might be bred already, so we’ll be looking forward to seeing if they have any calves this May,” she said.

Their new provincial park home sits on the traditional lands of the Skownan Anishinaabe. In 2014, it became the first area the provincial government designated as a Traditional Indigenous Use Park. 

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The 1,000-square-kilometre protected area draws hunters, fishers and gatherers from local Indigenous communities and beyond. 

“That took years making it into a provincial park,” Catcheway said, “to prevent logging and to keep the land for generations to come.”

The bison roam within a 50-square-kilometre enclosure of the park.

But being free to wander, some have left the area, often scattering north within the province. It’s estimated that there are about 300 wild buffalo whose lineage originated from Skownan’s bison ranch. 

“Last year, we had one of the wild bison actually come right into Skownan,” Catcheway recalled. “A lot of people were in awe.”

‘I find they have their own personalities’

Catcheway and Marion drive 40 minutes each way to feed the bison during winter months.

“It’s a pretty big area for them to roam,” she said. 

“Free grazing during the summer — wintertime is when we feed them and they stay in the feedlot.”

Marion prepares the hay and salt blocks for the animals.

“They like alfalfa,” she noted. “We gave them barley last year, and they were pretty excited to have that — different hays, grasses.”

She told IndigiNews they start to feed the herd as soon as “the snow first starts flying.”

By the time the snows melt, they’ll have consumed “about 500 bales” before they can graze freely in springtime.

Marion’s late father, Raymond, passed on the responsibilities to care for the herd to the couple.

“On warmer days when Paul goes to feed up, it’s nice to see the calves running around and jumping,” Catcheway said.

“Sometimes, there’s some older females that are stubborn, give us a hard time, say if we’re having a round up or anything. I find they have their own personalities.”

First Nations are ‘reclaiming their role’ in conservation

Bison are an important food source for many Indigenous communities, and are also used in Sundance ceremonies, such as the dragging of buffalo skulls after dancers are pierced, Catcheway said.

Recently, Skownan hosted Manitoba Keewatin Okimakanak, a northern chiefs organization, at a bison harvest. 

After being shown ways of using all parts of the harvested animal, the guests and hosts then held a feast. “Taking care of the land and conserving endangered species is our responsibility,” said Skownan band councillor Nelson Nepinak in a press release. “Our priority is herd health.”

The First Nation added that, as Indigenous people are increasingly recognized internationally as environmental stewards, the Skownan Wood Bison program “demonstrates how nations are reclaiming their role as caretakers of the land,” the press release stated, “while building resilient futures for generations to come.”

The small community of nearly 1,800 people has “learned a lot of lessons from the bison,” Catcheway said proudly — for instance, how to protect fellow community members like bison do in a herd.

“They learned how they function in their community,” she explained. 

“They’re really protective of each other — just like how community members are here in Skownan. They’re there for each other.”

The Narwhal’s reporters are telling environment stories you won’t read about anywhere else. Stay in the loop by signing up for our free weekly dose of independent journalism.

Summary

• The Rainbow, Jordan and Frisby valleys in British Columbia’s rare inland temperate rainforest are home to endangered species and ancient trees.
• Two logging companies hold licences to log in the old-growth valleys, while the government agency BC Timber Sales has operating areas there.
• A 2019 proposal to permanently protect 10,500 hectares in the three valleys as a provincial park has gained renewed interest as Revelstoke city council announced in February that it supports increased conservation of the critically endangered inland temperate rainforest.

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Toby Spribille trickles water onto a rare dark grey lichen that looks like a crumpled piece of paper someone set on fire and left to smoulder. It’s a bright summer day in the Rainbow Valley rainforest, in British Columbia’s southern interior. Sunbeams slant through ancient cedar trees as tall as 20-storey buildings. Moss unfurls across the forest floor like bright green shag carpet. But the small, shrivelled lichen on a stunted hemlock tree is what Spribille, a scientist, is eager to show us: smoker’s lung lichen. “It looks a little bit like the pictures on the warning packages of cigarettes,” he says with dark humour, noting the lung lichen is perfectly healthy even though it’s almost black.

As Spribille mimics rainy weather with his water bottle, the lichen begins to uncrumple, as if it’s waking up and stretching. Despite its name, smoker’s lung lichen thrives only when the air is pure. Spribille is amazed to find the lichen, which is at risk of extinction in Canada and other countries, so far south. He peers at the lichen’s underside: ashy black with irregular white polka dots. The specimen, he declares, is “utterly spectacular.”

Spribille, who teaches at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, is one of the world’s leading lichenologists. He’s tall and sturdy, with a greyish blonde ponytail, black-rimmed glasses and the authoritative enthusiasm of David Attenborough narrating a film. Late one night in 2017, Spribille had been surfing Google Earth the way some people binge Netflix. For hours, he searched for somewhere he could study lichens in B.C.’s globally rare inland temperate rainforest. Lying in scattered valleys in the Columbia and Rocky mountains, the rainforest is home to trees more than 1,000 years old and harbours an extraordinary diversity of species, including the world’s only deep-snow caribou. 

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But all Spribille saw in valley after valley were checkerboards of logging clearcuts and fragments of forest too small to support many sensitive species.

Then his cursor landed on a dark green U-shaped valley about 40 kilometres north of Revelstoke, B.C., a resource and tourism town in the Columbia Mountains. As Spribille zoomed in, he saw the trees had conspicuously large crowns; he guessed they were cedars at least half a century old. Silvery streams meandered through the valley, which had no clearcuts and no roads. “Oh my word, this must be quite the valley,” he remembers thinking. “I just couldn’t believe it.” The valleys on each side, folded into the mountains like green origami, were also unlogged and unloaded, a rarity in a landscape fractured by decades of industrial forestry.

The discovery of three adjacent intact old-growth valleys has led to increasing calls to halt logging and protect the area once and for all. For Spribille and others, it’s clear the valleys are utterly unique.

When Spribille and other biologists took a small motor boat across the Revelstoke hydro-electric reservoir the following year and hiked into two of the valleys, Rainbow and Frisby, they found ancient forests so luxuriant they seemed to be from primeval times. Grove after grove of enormous red cedar trees stretched unbroken for kilometres. Seas of feathery ferns lapped at their waists. Supersized skunk cabbage leaves brushed their chests and thickets of spiky devil’s club towered over their heads.

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Streams fed by mountain icefields cooled and moistened the valleys, boosting biological diversity. One mycologist found 112 species of mushrooms in the Frisby Valley — in just five hours. On a single trip, a botanist documented 49 species of mosses and 182 species of vascular plants. Biologists found habitat suitable for two dozen bird, reptile and mammal species at risk of extinction — wolverine, grizzly bear, short-eared owl and western painted turtle among them. 

Spribille and a colleague documented hundreds of lichen species, including rare and at-risk species with evocative names like Methuselah’s beard and cryptic paw. “We also found species new to science,” Spribille says. “They haven’t been named yet.”

Spribille’s latest research trip to the Rainbow Valley, in July 2023, was organized by the Valhalla Wilderness Society, a non-profit group that aims to protect Canada’s vanishing inland temperate rainforest and its wildlife. These incredibly rare rainforests grow far from the ocean and exist in only three places on the planet: Russia’s far east, southern Siberia and here, in British Columbia.

In 2019, Valhalla put together a proposal to permanently protect 10,500 hectares of rare and undisturbed ecosystems in the Rainbow Valley and adjacent Frisby and Jordan valleys as a provincial park. But the inland temperate rainforest valleys, which sit on Crown land, remain unprotected and are open to industrial logging.

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Two forestry companies, Downie Timber Ltd. and Stella-Jones Inc., hold operating licences in the valleys, according to the B.C. forests ministry. The provincial government agency BC Timber Sales, which manages about one-fifth of the province’s allowable cut, also has operating areas in the three valleys. 

Neither of the forestry companies responded to The Narwhal’s emails and phone calls, while the B.C. Forests Ministry says there are no plans for BC Timber Sales to log “at this time,” with both private and government-run operations currently avoiding harvesting here. 

But the ministry also says the province has not recommended the three valleys for park protection. That’s led to a renewed push to protect the area. 

“I cannot single-handedly influence British Columbia forest policy,” Spribille says, adding he doesn’t see that as his job as a scientist. “But one of the things I can do is highlight areas where there are jewels still intact.” The Rainbow and Frisby valleys are two such ecological gems, he says. “There’s no reason on earth why we should go in and log.”

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Spribille says it’s likely rare and endangered lichens, and possibly species new to science, will also be found in the Jordan Valley. Satellite imagery shows the Jordan Valley has the same attributes as Frisby and Rainbow; it’s cooled by icefields, has large tree tops indicative of ancient trees and is unlogged and almost entirely unroaded. But unlike Rainbow and Frisby, which scientists can easily hike into from the Revelstoke reservoir, the Jordan Valley’s old-growth inland temperate rainforest is hard to access.

While provincial support to protect the region remains elusive, Valhalla’s efforts were recently given a boost by Revelstoke city council, which passed a resolution in February pointing out the inland temperate rainforest is under-represented in protected area networks and saying it supports increased conservation efforts for the Rainbow-Jordan wilderness and the inland temperate rainforest. Ktunaxa Nation council also supports Valhalla’s proposal to protect the three valleys.

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Revelstoke council noted local governments throughout B.C. “bear direct responsibility and expense for responding to the downstream impacts of deforestation,” acknowledging old-growth forests provide benefits like climate regulation and mitigation, fresh water and biodiversity conservation — and reduce the risk of hazards such as wildfires, flooding and landslides. At the annual Union of BC Municipalities meeting in September, Revelstoke will ask other municipalities to support increased protection for the Rainbow-Jordan wilderness and the inland temperate rainforest.

B.C. rainforest is home to world’s only deep-snow caribou 

A century ago, Canada was home to an estimated 1.3 million hectares of inland temperate rainforest. Today, less than five per cent of the core, old forest still stands. So little of the ancient rainforest remains that scientists and ecologists warn the ecosystem is close to collapse.

That collapse has already begun. The International Union for Conservation of Nature — the global authority on the status of the natural world and measures necessary to safeguard it — lists B.C.’s inland temperate rainforest as “critically endangered,” posing existential risks to wildlife. Biologists are building fake old-growth trees to save endangered rainforest bats, while pregnant deep-snow caribou are helicoptered to mountain-top pens until their newborn calves are old enough to stand a better chance of survival in the fractured landscape. 

B.C.’s deep-snow caribou get their name because in late winter they eat hair lichens they reach by splaying their feet to walk on top of metres-deep snow. But as Canada’s inland temperate rainforest has disappeared, so have the caribou that depend on the rainforest for shelter and food. “Not enough has been protected,” Amber Peters, a biologist who works for the Valhalla Wilderness Society, tells The Narwhal. Peters, who guides a reporter and photojournalist through the Rainbow Valley, has a no-nonsense attitude and an amiable yet commanding presence. She carries a can of bear spray clipped to the front of her backpack, near a two-way radio and an emergency satellite communication device.

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As Peters picks her way through a patch of devil’s club toward a sun-splashed grove of giant cedars, she stoops and peers at something on the ground. “This is some scat that we just found and it looks like caribou poo,” she says as the rest of us catch up. “And that would be amazing.” She sets down her pack and pulls out a clear plastic bag, kneeling on the ground as she gingerly moves aside devil’s club stems lined with tiny spikes as sharp as needles. “It’s my most glamorous scat-collecting moment,” she jokes.

The scat, which resembles chocolate-covered almonds, is well-camouflaged among oat ferns, foam flowers, bunchberry and small clusters of brown needles shed by the cedars. It’s too old to show the grooves that indicate caribou scat; Peters will take it home and freeze it until genetic analysis can be done. “Why is this amazing?” she continues. “Because as far as we know, there are only six [animals] left in the Frisby-Boulder-Queest herd. So to find them in this park proposal area would be really important.” 

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Eight deep-snow caribou herds in southeast B.C. have winked out over the past 20 years, including the Frisby-Boulder-Queest herd, which biologists say is too small to survive. The remaining ten herds are on the cusp of extinction.

“A major part of this ecosystem is the deep-snow mountain caribou, which we have nowhere else on earth,” Peters says. “And these animals are showing us what’s happening to the ecosystem with their decline. That’s why we call them an indicator species, or a canary in a coal mine.”

When the group takes a lunch break, Valhalla cofounder and co-director Craig Pettitt lies back contentedly next to an enormous cedar tree, half-hidden by ferns. The vegetation is so dense it muffles sounds; the fluting song of a nearby Swainson’s thrush seems very far away. Pettitt, a former parks ranger, wildland firefighter and ski-touring company owner, has seen large swaths of ancient cedar trees clearcut in the inland temperate rainforest, including in critical habitat for deep-snow caribou herds. “The whole past philosophy has been to cut them all down because they aren’t worth anything for lumber,” he says, referring to old cedars that are often hollow. 

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The cedars, which are often used for fence posts and garden mulch, make excellent wildlife habitat when they are left standing or topple over from age or in a windstorm. Bears den in their root bowls, bats roost in crevices in thick, sloughing bark and birds nest in their foliage. When the cedars fall, they become bridges across streams and creeks for animals like bears and bobcats, as well as nurse logs that create microhabitats for insects and plants. Pettitt says the B.C. government’s primary focus on lumber values doesn’t take wildlife into account. “They don’t look at species diversity.”

Logging isn’t imminent, but clear protection plans aren’t either: government  

Despite the BC NDP government’s promise to safeguard old-growth forests at the highest risk of biodiversity loss, Peters says the government’s response to Valhalla’s park proposal has been lukewarm at best. Last September, Peters, Pettitt and two other Valhalla representatives met with B.C. Minister of Water, Land and Resource Stewardship Randene Neill and other government representatives. 

Peters says Neill told them to contact B.C. Forests Minister Ravi Parmar to discuss the park proposal, and that they tried, twice, but were first deferred then ignored. In an emailed response to questions, the Forests Ministry says it is aware of Valhalla’s “rich and unique” proposal for a provincial park and values the group’s work in identifying, mapping and researching the region. The ministry says it looks forward to engaging and partnering with First Nations and other governments and “working with all.” It notes the province has not recommended the three valleys for provincial park protection, saying the government looks forward to engaging and partnering with First Nations and other governments and “working with all” to explore conservation opportunities “as they arise.”

The Sinixt, Ktunaxa, Okanagan (Syilx) and Secwépemc all consider parts of the Rainbow, Frisby and Jordan their territories. “Because of these very complex overlapping First Nations territory claims, we leave that to government-to-government negotiations to resolve,” Peters says. “Our role is to bring the ecological significance of the area to the public.”

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In an emailed statement, Ktunaxa Nation council notes Valhalla’s park proposal aligns with the recommendations of B.C.’s old-growth strategic review, saying “conserving rare, old-growth ecosystems is essential to ensure ʔa·kxam̓is q̓api qapsin (all living things) continue to thrive in ʔamakʔis Ktunaxa for generations to come.” Marilyn James, Autonomous Sinixt Smum iem matriarch, says protection “is mandatory to study and preserve what these ancient forests have yet to reveal.” James points to the value of the three valleys for old-growth forests, at-risk species and species new to science. “These are areas that need to be preserved, that are the very root and foundation of not only creating corridors, but critical habitat for very threatened, red-listed species,” she says in an interview.

Jarred-Michael Erickson, chairman of the Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation and the Sinixt Confederacy, says he will need to have a conversation with his full council before deciding whether to support protection for the three valleys, adding the tribes “tend to support” initiatives to protect caribou and the inland temperate rainforest. The Sinixt Confederacy was created by the confederated tribes following a landmark court decision recognizing the tribes’ rights in Canada. (The Narwhal also reached out to Okanagan and Secwépemc nations, which were not able to respond before publication time.) 

The Rainbow-Jordan wilderness park proposal is one of three park proposals Valhalla has developed to protect important areas of the inland rainforest that remain open to industrial logging and other development. “We’re focusing on the richest remnants that are still intact of this very rare ecosystem type,” Peters explains, “but also on creating landscape connectivity and including these valley bottom, very old and ancient inland temperate rainforests which have almost totally been left out of our parks system.”

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Although the B.C. government worked with Valhalla and First Nations to create a large conservancy about 50 kilometres southeast in 2023, that’s not enough to prevent ecosystem collapse, according to Peters and other biologists. The Rainbow, Frisby and Jordan valleys are especially valuable because they represent intact and connected ecosystems, from mountain top to valley bottom, making the area more resilient to the impacts of climate change, Peters says. “There are really steep mountainous areas that mean that you don’t get really hot, beating sun in the valleys. And so they’re cooler, and they maintain a deep snow pack later in the year, and they maintain moisture. They’re incredibly important.” 

In an emailed response to questions, the B.C. Ministry of Water, Land and Resource Stewardship says voluntary old-growth logging deferrals in the valleys “are not permanent protections” and additional planning work is underway to develop long-term solutions. The Rainbow-Jordan park proposal and Valhalla’s other two park proposals are not currently recommended for protections but “may be considered as part of future recommendations,” the ministry says. The ministry also points to a collaborative habitat planning initiative for caribou that includes parts of the inland temperate rainforest. The initiative seeks to identify habitats that could benefit from increased conservation efforts, “ranging from improved management to protection,” the ministry says, noting specific areas have not yet been identified.

Rare and endangered lichens found in three unlogged sister valleys 

Back in the Rainbow Valley, Spribille bounds from lichen to lichen and plant to plant, peering at the lichens through a magnifying lens with an LED light that hangs from his neck on a lanyard. He stops near a shiny, four-leafed plant and announces he’s just found a plant that hasn’t previously been documented in the Frisby and Rainbow valleys. The plant, a herb commonly known as boreal bedstraw or northern wild licorice, is a species of concern in B.C. Until that moment, Spribille says the southernmost known locality of the plant was the Seymour Valley, some 60 kilometres away. 

He pulls out a hammer and chisel from his pack and crouches down beside a large boulder with a thick overcoat of vibrant green mosses. A bare patch of the rock looks like it’s covered in small black dots. With the magnifying glass, Spribille sees “a world of its own,” which he later describes as a “miniature landscape of tiny mosses and lichens that have their own peaks and valleys and fruiting features and a thousand different hues of green.” He chips off a small piece and pops it into one of the brown paper lunch bags he carries for samples, labelling it with the GPS coordinates.

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Then Spribille’s eye lands on a cluster of orange tufts on the rock. Magnified, they look like the tops of truffula trees from the Dr. Seuss book The Lorax. The tufts aren’t rare, and they aren’t lichens, Spribille explains. They’re a special group of algae called trentepohlia, or golden hair. Their genomes and the way they replicate DNA — “some of the very basic stuff about how they do life” — is unusual, Spribille says. “They’ve got very, very strange biology.” The golden hairs can photosynthesize — converting sunlight into energy — but they can also feed themselves by breaking down decaying organic matter, the way fungi and bacteria do. No one has ever been able to sequence or annotate their genomes. Spribille chips off a sample to bring back for one of his students to study.

On earlier research expeditions in the Frisby Valley, Spribille found rare greater green moon lichen — which depends on old-growth forests with pristine air quality — and cryptic paw lichen, a federally threatened species strongly associated with old-growth cedar and hemlock forests. Cryptic paw, which has fruiting bodies that face downward like the pads of a dog’s paw, is part of a group of species mostly found in rainforests in the southern hemisphere. In Canada, it grows only in B.C.

In the Frisby Valley, hiking near waterfalls that divide the upper and lower parts of the valley, Spribille and a colleague were stunned to see large colonies of Methuselah’s beard lichen, also known as old man’s beard. The pale green lichen, which drapes from tree branches and shrubs like Christmas tinsel, is threatened or lost from most of its historic range. Only small fragments had previously been found anywhere in the inland temperate rainforest.

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After spending time in the Rainbow and Frisby valleys, Spribille sometimes reflects on the 15 years he lived in Europe, where many ancient forests have disappeared. Germany’s Black Forest has become a mythological place, even though many of its habitats are gone. “I went to places that they considered their trophy remaining old-growth forests and they’re so sad. They have been completely, in some cases, reduced to very small, postage stamp sizes, or with the superimposing pollution on them they’ve lost all their lichens of any kind of conservation significance.”

British Columbia still has a chance to protect old-growth rainforests and rare habitats and lichens with conservation significance, Spribille says. He believes there might be species new to science in the three valleys that biologists haven’t had a chance to see. What they’ve found so far on brief research trips continues to astound and excite him. “I feel it’s our responsibility to report back to society about what the public needs to know.”

Without pausing for breath, he says, “there’s some stuff on that rock that I’m gonna grab real quick,” and dashes off.

Updated on March. 3, 2026, at 12:52 p.m. PT: This story has been updated to correct an error in a photo caption that misidentified Valhalla’s cofounder and co-director. He is Craig Pettitt not Craig Peters.

The Narwhal’s reporters are telling environment stories you won’t read about anywhere else. Stay in the loop by signing up for our free weekly dose of independent journalism.