Summary

• In March 2026, the Doug Ford government formally replaced Ontario’s Endangered Species Act with weaker legislation that removes protections for some species and narrows protections for others.
• Documents obtained by The Narwhal reveal the dissent and concern raised by provincial staff, municipalities and Indigenous groups during consultations on the change.
• A major concern raised about the legislation is that many project proposals will no longer be posted for public comment, limiting public participation.

As the Doug Ford government prepared to replace the Endangered Species Act with new legislation, the province’s natural resources staff warned of weakened habitat protections, reduced oversight and new gaps in enforcement, according to documents obtained by The Narwhal.  

In March 2026, the Endangered Species Act was officially replaced with the Species Conservation Act, which removes or limits provincial protection from many threatened plants and animals.

Now, 275 pages of records, some publicly available and others only accessed through freedom of information legislation, show provincial bureaucrats worrying about the implications of the changes, as well as municipalities and Indigenous groups voicing dissent — before the government passed the law anyway.

The new act allows most projects, whether related to housing, mining or other industries, to begin as soon as proponents register online, in place of an expert review of permit applications. This approach “may weaken oversight and accountability, as self-regulation can be variable and potentially unreliable,” reads November 2025 feedback from the fish and wildlife policy branch of Ontario’s Ministry of Natural Resources to the provincial Ministry of the Environment, which is primarily responsible for species at risk. “Proponents may also misinterpret or manipulate rules and regulations.”

The natural resources ministry also raised concerns that the Species Conservation Act exempted a number of development actions from the second section of the Environmental Bill of Rights, which requires applications to do work that could potentially harm wildlife to be publicly posted on the provincial environmental registry. Without this, the chance for public review and comment is eliminated.

“The [Environmental Bill of Rights] was created to ensure that the people of Ontario have the ability to participate in decision-making processes,” reads the same feedback sent via email from the Ministry of Natural Resources. “Suggest being cautious if exempting [Species Conservation Act] permits and orders … as this may be seen as a way to avoid transparency, accountability and undermine public trust.”

Neither the Ministry of Natural Resources nor the Ministry of the Environment responded to The Narwhal’s detailed questions about this feedback by publication time.

In April, in response to questions from The Narwhal at a press conference, Premier Doug Ford said such changes are needed to clear the way for industry and development in the province. 

“As I’ve said, we aren’t going to hold up Highway 413, the Bradford Bypass, over a grasshopper — not happening,” Ford said of two highway projects set to cut through the protected Greenbelt and farmland. “We have a mandate to build. We’re going to build, and we’re going to respect the environment at all costs.”

Thousands of public comments about endangered species protections were also ignored: lawyer

Kerrie Blaise, a lawyer with the northern Ontario environmental non-profit Legal Advocates for Nature’s Defence, said these issues remained as the final legislation was passed, despite concerns being raised ahead of time.

That includes dropping the requirement for some permits for projects that could harm species being publicly posted.

“It’s a very sweeping exemption,” Blaise said. “It means we won’t know the name of the companies. We won’t know where it’s happening … the basic details: when, where, how much, what’s the harm? All of those details will be lacking.”

Blaise also registered her dissent before the new act passed. She told The Narwhal that Legal Advocates for Nature’s Defence sent more than 6,500 signed form letters asking the province to reconsider — even repeal — Bill 5, which proposed killing the old act and passing the new one. The organization is now representing two Indigenous interveners challenging the constitutionality of the bill in court. 

Blaise said it was “really great to hear” that natural resources staff spoke up. “I truly believe you have very dedicated individuals with expertise in this field … but their expertise and their knowledge is not being respected,” she said. 

“There are those with knowledge who can actually guide the government in a good way, and it’s really chilling when those individuals and departments within [the government] are themselves not being listened to.”

Blaise added she sees nothing in the final legislation showing that the province addressed the concerns raised by staff or those contained in thousands of public comments.

“If the province was actually looking to respect … what the public was actually saying, we would have a very differently worded Species Conservation Act,” Blaise said.

In the documents, Ministry of Natural Resources staff also warned that excluding federally protected species from provincial protections “could create regulatory gaps and inconsistencies.” This, too, echoes concerns from environmental groups. 

The province has argued a number of species —  including the redside dace, a minnow that became central to concerns over Ontario’s Highway 413 development — are already protected under federal laws. 

The federal government can extend emergency protections to provincial lands, but rarely does so. And in many cases, federal 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. These spaces make up less than five per cent of the range of most terrestrial at-risk species, whose wider habitat in Ontario is now vulnerable. 

The documents show this concern was voiced by Steve Ganesh, commissioner of planning, building and growth management for the City of Brampton. He wrote to the province that, “By limiting ‘habitat’ to a species’ dwelling place and its immediate surrounding area, important areas may no longer be protected that are crucial for foraging, dispersal, migration and climate resilience.”

“This change could leave locally significant and rare populations unprotected and reduce the scientific basis for municipal planning, restoration and mitigation efforts.”

One species of particular concern is caribou, according to Allie Mayberry, a wildlife co-ordinator working with the sustainable development department of Biigtigong Nishnaabeg, a First Nation on the north shore of Lake Superior. Whittling protected species habitat down so severely provides little protection for an already threatened species that relies on large swaths of interconnected habitat to survive, she told The Narwhal.

“There’s a lack of clarity around how caribou habitat is going to be protected moving forward,” Mayberry said. “We’re already working with a baseline of a very disturbed habitat, and now through the new [Species Conservation Act] there’s much less of an imperative to protect what habitat there is left.”

Docs show Treaty Rights and loss of protection for threatened species were a concern

Other municipalities and First Nations had concerns about the legislation change, the documents show. 

A letter from the City of London, sent before the new act’s passage, argued the now-official Protected Species in Ontario List would remove protections for 106 species. “These changes undermine the municipality’s capacity to protect species that are rare, threatened or endangered within the city,” the letter reads, naming 20 species in London’s boundaries that have been removed from protection, along with their habitats. They include the chimney swift, eastern musk turtle and wood thrush. 

The documents show Indigenous groups also argued the new legislation disrespects not just the environment, but their Treaty Rights.

The Species Conservation Act was set to “fundamentally alter how the Haudenosaunee exercise rights guaranteed under the 1701 Nanfan Treaty,” reads a comment from Aaron Detlor, a delegate from the Haudenosaunee Development Institute, which represents the interests of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy Chiefs Council in the development of lands within Haudenosaunee jurisdiction. “These regulations restrict the free and undisturbed use of our territories that are foundational to Haudenosaunee sovereignty and self-determination.”

“Our review of these proposed regulations reveals no credible or equivalent process that could substitute for meaningful engagement on measures that directly affect our Treaty Rights. We see no mechanism by which the Haudenosaunee will have a meaningful opportunity to participate in decisions affecting species protection and our inherent right to exercise hunting and harvesting rights on our territory,” Detlor wrote.

At the April press conference, The Narwhal asked Ford how he would respond to government experts saying the changes could create serious gaps in protection for species at risk. “That’s a priority to make sure we protect all species at risk,” Ford replied. “There’ll always be consultation.”

Chief Duncan Michano of Biigtigong Nishnaabeg noted in a comment about Bill 5 on the Environmental Registry of Ontario that the new act failed to respect First Nations’ constitutional rights, arguing the legislation “fundamentally weakens environmental and cultural protections and reduces consultation requirements,” calling it a “direct violation of the Government of Ontario’s obligations to uphold the honour of the Crown.”

“The consultation process [on Bill 5 and the Species Conservation Act] has been extremely flawed all along,” Mayberry, Biigtigong Nishnaabeg’s wildlife co-ordinator, said. “We’ve participated in a number of different ways and what we’ve been met with is not a two way dialogue in an attempt to hear and meaningfully address any concerns.” 

Mayberry said consultation has “all just been a box-ticking exercise wherein Ontario continues to double down on their preferred approach, and they get the benefit of saying, ‘Well, we spoke to First Nations about this.’ ”

“We’ve taken a piece of legislation that was once considered the gold standard for species at risk protection and recovery in Canada, and now we have just whittled it down to a point that it’s barely even a species protection act anymore,” Mayberry said. “I’m not at all surprised to hear that there’s even concerns internally about this.”

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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.

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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Summary

• Internal documents reveal the Ontario government does not intend to publicly release recovery plans for several endangered species, including the eastern wolf.
• Conservation scientists say species recovery plans are important tools that guide their work and inform decision-making around where to invest resources.
• Recent legislative changes under Bill 5 have removed the requirement for Ontario to prepare recovery plans for endangered species, but the plans in question were already under development when those changes came into effect.

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Ontario’s plans to recover struggling wolf, butterfly and bat populations will not be released to the public, The Narwhal has learned.

Last April, the Doug Ford government announced it planned to amend and then ultimately replace the Endangered Species Act, slashing the requirement to develop recovery strategies that set out the steps to bring endangered species back from the brink. 

Now, a set of internal emails released through freedom of information legislation show the province intends to continue with a few strategies that were underway when Bill 5 passed — and also intends not to share them with the public.

Since 2007, the province has been required to not only publish recovery strategies but to put them into action, under the Endangered Species Act. That ended in June, with the passage of Bill 5, the Protect Ontario by Unleashing our Economy Act.

The emails show a handful of recovery plans were in the works when the Protect Ontario act became law, and confusion inside the Ministry of Environment, Conservation and Parks about what to do next. 

The draft plans represent years of work researching the habitat and current state of the eastern wolf, a butterfly called the northern oak hairstreak and three migratory bat species. 

The strategy for the eastern wolf, for example, has been nearly a decade in the making, with a draft put out for public consultation in 2018 and revised in 2025. The 2018 draft to protect the animal — which has a unique genetic ancestry not found anywhere else in the world — was once available on the Environmental Registry of Ontario, but is not there any longer. 

In the fall, The Narwhal asked the Ministry of Environment, Conservation and Parks, which is responsible for producing recovery plans, whether the strategy for the eastern wolf would be made public. The ministry did not respond to The Narwhal’s questions in the fall, nor to repeated requests for comment on this story made between Jan. 28 and March 5. 

But the emails released through freedom of information legislation chronicle staff in the at-risk species branch of the Ministry of Environment attempting to confirm up the chain the next steps for drafted recovery plans before and after Bill 5 passed. One email thread is in response to a question from a private contractor hired to write one of the strategies, asking how to move forward.

The week after the bill was proposed, on April 17, internal government emails note “the plan is to proceed with the recovery strategy agreements that are underway” up to the stage where drafts are usually posted publicly, but “We are not likely to proceed with the public posting at this time (given changes underway).”

Laura Bowman, an environmental lawyer, told The Narwhal keeping the recovery strategies private tramples the right of public groups, including First Nations, researchers and conservationists, to know how Ontario is managing endangered species. 

It also limits anyone seeking permits and approvals for work that affects endangered species.

“One would think they would want to be making reference to the recovery strategy and what mitigation measures might be appropriate,” she said. “So to keep that internal and not post it seems like a very strange move, even just from that perspective.”

The recovery plans that were in the works when Bill 5 passed were, according to the email, still being circulated for review by other provincial ministries and federal agencies, such as the Canadian Wildlife Service and Parks Canada.

Emails from the at-risk species branch to those departments, seeking feedback on the eastern wolf recovery plan, said the province is still “committed to providing information and guidance on the conservation of species in Ontario” even though recovery plans are no longer legislatively required.

“Under the amended [Endangered Species Act], the ministry has the flexibility to focus the development of conservation guidance when and where it is needed and makes sense to do so,” the email said. 

The Endangered Species Act is being replaced by the Species Conservation Act. Ten months after Bill 5 passed, regulations for that have not yet been announced.

Recovery strategies no longer required in Ontario following passage of Bill 5

The mottled duskywing, a medium-sized brown-speckled butterfly, has a strong preference for a prairie shrub called New Jersey tea. It’s hard to come by in southern Ontario. 

As a result, the butterfly that depends on it was listed as endangered across Canada in 2012 and in Ontario in 2014. Under the Endangered Species Act, a recovery plan for the mottled duskywing was published in 2015.

Ryan Norris, a professor of wildlife biology at the University of Guelph, has been working with a team trying to stabilize duskywing populations in Ontario. In 2020, the team of researchers received federal funding to re-introduce the species to two locations in Ontario. 

“In putting that grant proposal together, we used the recovery strategy as a guiding document for what needed to be done,” Norris said. The strategy provided crucial information about existing populations and the butterfly’s habitat — including tallgrass savannas where fire is needed for plants including New Jersey tea to regenerate.

The team’s efforts paid off at Pinery Provincial Park near London, Ont., where controlled burns have restored the oak savanna, letting New Jersey Tea thrive. In 2022, a mottled duskywing was spotted at the park for the first time in 30 years.

The foremost expert on mottled duskywing — in fact, the scientist who wrote the recovery strategy for the province — led Norris’s team. So they, specifically, could have pulled off their win without the recovery strategy to guide them. But a loss of thoroughly researched public plans limits who can be involved in bringing species back, he said. 

“Imagining somebody else being interested in it, mottled duskywing, and wanting to recover it but not having any background. That would be extremely hard,” Norris said.

It’s an example of the value of recovery strategies, which are themselves seemingly going extinct.  

The strategies also guide government experts as they offer feedback to teams like his or approve funding for species recovery.

Now, Norris is part of a group working to reintroduce another savanna-loving butterfly, frosted elfin, which is extirpated, or locally extinct, in Ontario. The group has applied for funding under the provincial Species Conservation Fund, but had yet to hear back as of early March.

“The recovery strategies acted as a guidepost for them to assess the applications,” he said, as researchers often highlight specific points in the recovery plan and explain how their proposal could address them. 

“So, it’s important for the government. It’s important for the practitioners, the researchers and so forth,” Norris said. “I don’t know why you would get rid of it.”

Eastern wolves and other species with private plans for recovery

On June 9, four days after Bill 5 passed, a coordinator in the at-risk species branch emailed the branch director at the Ministry of Environment, seeking approval to move ahead with provincial and federal agency reviews of the draft recovery strategy for the eastern wolf. After that, the strategy author would consider any comments for another revision. The email notes the same was being done with the recovery strategies for the northern oak hairstreak and migratory bats. 

The email continues, including bolded text, that, “The proposed approach for those strategies is to complete Stage 2, but to withhold any public posting on the Environmental Registry of Ontario until further direction is given … .”

The coordinator’s email said this approach would leave the ministry with a near-final recovery strategy for the species, “which can be used (if needed) as the basis for some new conservation guidance for the species down the road, once the ministry has selected its new streamlined approach to issuing conservation guidance ….”

About a week later, on June 17, that approval came.

Linda Rutledge is an adjunct professor in forestry and conservation at both University of British Columbia and Trent University. She has contributed to reports on endangered species and written on how Bill 5 could impact the eastern wolf’s recovery. She said there needs to be transparency around the province’s decision not to publish the remaining recovery strategies, in part because recovery plans are an important educational tool.

“Without it being publicly available, it makes it feel like the government is really limiting the public knowledge base,” she said, adding that there are more stakeholders than just the public and those working to conserve eastern wolves. “I would think that there would be a lot of industry who would want to know what their impact is going to be on this iconic species.”

Rutledge said an enormous amount of work goes into developing these plans to set a clear path forward. For the eastern wolf, Rutledge said, that path was clearly laid out in the 2018 draft that is no longer public: create a recovery zone.

Right now, the wolves are protected from hunting and trapping only within and immediately around a few provincial parks, including Algonquin, Killarney, Kawartha Highlands and Queen Elizabeth II Wildlands. A recovery zone would provide safe corridors for the wolves to move between them.

“You can’t have a patchwork of protection for a wide-ranging animal like a wolf,” Rutledge said. “They don’t pay attention to park borders or things like that.” When wolves leave those boundaries, they’re at risk of hunting and trapping, as well as roads. 

“So this one single thing the government could do, that is very straightforward, is expand the harvest ban to that recovery zone,” Rutledge said. While some hunter and trapper organizations are resistant, she said there’s a lot of shared interest across the province in seeing the eastern wolf population thrive.

“I think, in the middle, most people really want the same thing, and this is the protection of natural heritage and the ability to appreciate wildlife and the outdoors,” she said.

The idea of cutting red tape, Rutledge said, isn’t a bad thing; she’s experienced bureaucratic barriers in her own work. And she appreciates the concerns around threats to Canada’s economy as a result of U.S. tariffs. But, she said, the lack of clarity and transparency on the decisions being made creates concern.

She hopes the province is working with the federal government to put protections in place for endangered species, including the eastern wolf, even if they aren’t planning to inform the public about them.

“I’m hopeful that the next time Prime Minister Carney and Premier Ford are sharing a drink by the fire at his Muskoka cottage,” she said, “that they hear these wolves howling in the background, and know their move to recognize that the economy isn’t the only thing that’s worthy of their attention and cooperation.”

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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.”

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. 

‘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. 

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. 

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.

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.

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.”

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.

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.

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.” 

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. 

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.”

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.”

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.

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.

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.

Michael Geselbracht was out for a Saturday run in Nanaimo, B.C., when he came across soil piled up in a special area he knew was part of a native Garry oak ecosystem. 

That particular spot — across from a row of houses on View Street, parallel to a railway — had been an improbably dense and thriving meadow of a native plant called slimleaf onion. The patch was something of a terrestrial island, approximately 50 square metres surrounded by introduced grasses and weeds. Still, the onions persisted. They had given an especially impressive show of white and the rarer pink flowers in the last wet spring. 

But in October 2025, thousands of nickel-sized bulbs were turned up by heavy machines and strewn like pebbles across the soil’s surface when the meadow became a construction site. The transformation was part of an effort to develop a multi-use trail corridor along the railway route by a group called the Island Corridor Foundation — a trail that, unbeknownst even to many local conservationists, routed through the rare patch of slimleaf onions.

Slimleaf onion is a blue-listed species in B.C., designated of “special concern, vulnerable to extirpation or extinction.” But it’s also just one of more than 100 plants and animals on the province’s species-at-risk list in the critically endangered Garry oak ecosystem it belongs to.

The biodiverse and fire-adapted Garry oak ecosystem has been tended by Indigenous Peoples for thousands of years. But after 150 years of settlement, less than five per cent of the Garry oak ecosystem remains in a near-natural state. Some also hang on in remnants like the one on View Street, adulterated by invasive plants, mostly forgotten, hard to spot out of season, disconnected from other Garry oak plant communities and, more often than not, totally legal to destroy.

‘No Garry oak ecosystem that has been unimpacted’

Geselbracht spends most days outside teaching kids to love the natural world in the Nanaimo Forest School. He’s helped restore the local Cat Stream for salmon, and has spent more than 70 hours pulling invasive plants like trailing blackberry and English ivy from his neighbourhood.  

Like many Nanaimo residents, he was thrilled with the prospect of more trails — for cycling and for access to more community projects, like the food forest he helped clear from a weedy abandoned lot. It all seemed worth a bit of mud and machines. 

“It’s the connectivity, you know — the more that we have these connected trails, the more people start to use them,” Geselbracht says. 

But he hadn’t expected the route to go through the native plants; he knew something should be done. So he spread the word and texted pictures of the bulldozed area to others in Nanaimo. Some people salvaged bulbs — a pair of cupped hands can hold more than 50. A biologist living in the neighbourhood stopped by with specific suggestions to prevent further harm. The Nanaimo Area Land Trust sent a letter to the city, imploring them to mitigate the damage. “Even when there’s this tiny remnant, you just feel the loss of it, in terms of death by a thousand cuts,” Linda Brooymans, stewardship manager for the land trust, told The Narwhal.

Since the City and the Island Corridor Foundation were alerted to the presence of the onion, workers have put in small culverts to direct water to the remaining bulbs — the plants rely on seasonal wetlands called vernal pools. They also replaced the soil, laid straw in an effort to protect the site and built a fence to protect the area from foot traffic. By January some of the bulbs were sprouting.

But native plant advocate Hunter Jarratt says the fence caused further disruption and, positioned at the back of the patch, won’t do anything to keep people from walking on the plants. Jarratt knew that spot for the rare slimleaf onion and was shocked to find it scraped to bedrock.

Only the spring will tell if the ground will hold water like it did before, how many of the plants will survive and whether the straw or site disturbance will result in a weed boom. No matter what, Jarratt says the slimleaf onion population will never again be what it was in numbers or genetic diversity.

“It was beautiful, and it’s all gone. And what was the reason, you know?”

At the heart of the ecosystem disappearing act is a simple conflict — the inviting flower-filled meadows occur where people want to live. Fire suppression, aggressive invasive plants and the impact of off-road vehicles adds to the threat. 

But there is little legal protection for Garry oak ecosystem remnants — and plants like slimleaf onion often fall through the cracks. 

No environmental assessment needed for trail construction

Advocates worry the slimleaf onion, though rare, is not meaningfully protected by any level of government.

Locally, the City of Nanaimo has bylaws protecting trees, like the Garry oaks themselves, and has included known ecosystems for plants like slimleaf onion in environmentally sensitive zoning, which triggers extra requirements like professional assessment and protection during development. Some municipal ecosystems are protected from development by park areas like Nanaimo’s Lotus Pinnatus Park or Victoria’s Beacon Hill Park. 

Provincial legislation includes mandates for threatened plant species — but only applies within specified areas, like designated ecological reserves or in public forests (Crown land). The often-narrow parameters for designating protection can also lag behind — for example, the Forest and Range Practices Act hasn’t updated its list of protected plants since 2006. In any case, none of the existing provincial rules would apply to the View Street slimleaf onion. 

Neither is slimleaf onion on the list of plants recognized by the federal Species At Risk Act. The plant could potentially benefit tangentially from an ecosystem recovery plan created for five other Garry oak ecosystem plants, though that plan is only automatically enforceable on federal lands — that’s just four per cent of Canada and around one per cent of land in B.C. On private land in B.C.— such as the rail corridor — enforcement is voluntary. On public land, there is “piecemeal legislation” and “non-legal recommendations and guidance,” according to a 2022 audit. 

The federal government has the power under the Species At Risk Act to make emergency protection orders, but rarely does. 

When City of Nanaimo councillors unanimously approved the path extension in July of 2025, none of the laws protecting species at risk applied. And at just over 700 metres of gravel path, the Island Corridor Foundation project — on private land and not zoned as environmentally sensitive — didn’t require a permit or an environmental assessment. 

Charlotte Davis, Nanaimo’s Parks and Natural Areas deputy director, says the small area wasn’t zoned for protection because it wasn’t found during the last assessment — but she’s hopeful imaging advancements will make it easier to find small areas like these in the next one, as early as 2028.  

Davis also notes the project has increased access to safe trail for locals but that more engagement before construction “would have allowed us to be more aligned with the local naturalist community, with whom we share so many values, from the outset.” 

The plant advocates want to protect the slimleaf onion — and other rare plants — even when they grow outside legislated or bylawed protection areas, like the View Street meadow. 

“It wasn’t perfect, but there’s no Garry oak ecosystem that has been unimpacted. This is the best we have left,” Jarratt says.

“How do we control [the disturbance of native ecosystems] if we don’t even have them mapped, or we don’t even know where they are?” he asks. 

But B.C.’s Garry oak ecosystem hasn’t been comprehensively mapped since 1993. The last analysis, noting only five per cent of the ecosystem remaining, came from a 2006 study. 

With population growth and urban development, advocates say that measurement has changed in the last 20 years.

There are proposed projects in known Garry Ook ecosystem around Nanaimo; residential and industrial development in Cable Bay, nearly 200,000-square-foot data centre on East Wellington Road, housing in Linley Valley and a new subdivision in Harewood Plains — city council has asked provincial and federal governments for help protecting the latter. 

Nanaimo zoning bylaws require developers to take extra measures in noted sensitive areas but don’t prohibit new construction.

What is harder to measure are the unmapped survivors on private land — they can be legally built over, perhaps without anyone knowing they were there. “There’s just examples of this kind of stuff happening all the time, everywhere,” Jarratt says.

Vancouver Island railway project hopes to promote sustainability and recreation

The Nanaimo trail expansion is one small part of a larger vision for Vancouver Island’s rail corridor. 

The railway was originally built in the late 1800s by British Columbia’s coal king, Robert Dunsmuir on 800,000 hectares of Coast Salish, Nuu-Chah-Nulth and Kwakwa̱ka̱ʼwakw land. But by the early 2000s, the railway was faltering and the Island Corridor Foundation was formed to keep the corridor intact. 

“We are the little railway that could,” Island Corridor Foundation Chief Executive Officer Thomas Bevan says. A team of just four people, including himself, manage nearly 300 kilometres of rail corridor on Vancouver Island.

The foundation has a vision for sustainable transportation — passenger and freight rail service, alongside walking and cycling paths. Considering environmental and financial concerns as well as the interests of Indigenous groups and diverse local stakeholders — such as native plant advocates — is fraught. As Bevan puts it, nobody’s going to get everything they want. 

Still, environmental concerns figure strongly in the foundation’s mandate, and Bevan says they do what they can, like the $600,000 the group spent clearing invasive Scotch broom and blackberry along 125 kilometres of rail corridor, from Victoria to Qualicum Beach, B.C., in 2024 and 2025. Bevan says they are looking for funding to deal with the regrowth and other areas of the corridor.

Finding out too late

If there had been a voluntary environmental assessment of the trail expansion in Nanaimo, a qualified biologist would have done a survey, perhaps even checked the iNaturalist database where multiple slimleaf onion and other Garry oak plants were logged on View Street. They would have established a baseline for the existing population and potentially found other threatened species. They may have recommended shifting or narrowing the course of the path to avoid the most sensitive habitat. 

Instead, Bevan found out about the slimleaf onion after the fact, and says, as someone who follows Jarratt’s native plant advocacy, he felt awful. 

Going forward, Bevan says the Island Corridor Foundation will work on new policy for sensitive areas and has allocated $10,000 for restoration efforts — potentially weeding or reintroducing native plants. They are seeking a community partner to execute the work. 

Geselbracht, the forest school teacher, imagines a future where all the neighbours know more about the Garry oak ecosystem plants and remnants in their backyard, and help to bolster them — like he wishes he had done sooner.

For four years Geselbracht has been tending Garry oak seedlings with hopes to eventually reintroduce them in the View Street native plant patch, with his students. “If I’d had them doing some planting then maybe, on their walk to school, when they saw the excavator there, they would have said something.” 

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First Nations fish hatcheries on both sides of the Canada-U.S. border are celebrating 10 years of a collaboration to help salmon blocked from migrating by dams and other threats.

Last month, the Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation in Washington transferred more than 6,200 chinook salmon eggs from their Chief Joseph Hatchery to the Okanagan Nation Alliance’s kł cp’elk’ stim’ Hatchery in snpink’tn (Penticton, B.C.), nearly 200 kilometres north.

This year marks one decade since the two tribal hatcheries started working together to restore the fish’s population throughout the Columbia River Basin.

The partnership has seen Colville Tribes send more than 115,000 eyed chinook eggs to the Okanagan Nation Alliance over the past 10 years. One year alone, 2019, saw 40 per cent of those eggs transferred north.

“They don’t have to do that; they don’t have to give us anything,” Tyson Marsel, a biologist at kł cp’elk’ stim’ Hatchery and member of Lower Similkameen Indian Band, said.

“But for them to recognize that this is for the betterment of the environment and conservation, it’s not only helping us, but it’s also helping them.”

As salmon grow in their eggs, the dark spots of their eyes become visible through their shells — a stage early in their development known as the “eyed eggs” period.

Salmon have been a vital source of sustenance for Pacific Northwest Indigenous nations for thousands of years. 

But several salmon species, particularly sockeye and chinook, have seen their runs and populations severely depleted across the Columbia River Basin in the last century. 

As settlers built numerous dams along the waterway, they effectively blocked the fish from migrating up-river and into its tributaries. 

Salmon populations have also been impacted by habitat loss, overfishing and warming water temperatures linked to climate change.

Whether it’s sk’lwist (summer-run chinook) or ntitiyx (spring-run chinook), the fish have for decades become stuck at the Chief Joseph Dam on the Columbia River in Washington, which lacks a fish passage route.

Opened downstream to the dam in 2013, the Chief Joseph Hatchery catches adult fish blocked by the dam to collect their eggs. It’s part of a broodstock, or fish-breeding, program that spawns nearly three million young chinook each year.

“They’ll be collecting millions of chinook eggs in a year,” Marsel said. “Versus us, our best year is 10,000 that we’ve collected from the Okanagan River here.”

The salmon eggs sent from the Colville Tribes’ hatchery roughly doubled the Okanagan Nation Alliance hatchery’s chinook population compared to last year, when it had just 6,500.

kł cp’elk’ stim’ Hatchery stores the transferred roe in an incubator, where water temperatures are gradually increased from 3 C to 10 C over the course of a few weeks, to help support their development.

The fish were expected to hatch around the end of January, and will remain housed at the hatchery until June. Once they weigh between three to five grams, the Okanagan Nation Alliance plans to release them into suwiw̓s (Osoyoos Lake).

The adult fish are expected to return between 2029 and 2031.

Although much of the Okanagan River has been channelized — engineered to straighten the waterway — there’s a more naturally flowing portion north of Osoyoos Lake, in the town of Oliver, B.C.

It’s there that Marsel said the fish like to spawn. 

Even if the fish can make it up-river past Osoyoos Lake, they’ll still reach the Chief Joseph Dam and Colville hatchery downriver.

“Some of our fish that we’ve released from our facility have gone into Chief Joseph Hatchery’s program,” Marsel said.

He added that “every fish counts,” especially when it comes to chinook. The species is a key cultural figure for the syilx Okanagan Nation, being ntytyix (Chief Salmon) of the Four Food Chiefs.

“People don’t realize how rare they are, and a lot of people don’t even know that there’s chinook in the system,” he explained.

While much attention has been paid to sockeye salmon restoration efforts, Marsel said chinook hold a particularly important place in the culture.

“For the syilx Nation and all the people here, it means so much more,” he explained. “Not that sockeye aren’t important, but ntytyix holds a lot more meaning.”

The partnership to help chinook recover by sharing eggs hasn’t just transcended the border, however. It might also be helping transcend some political divisions between First Nations.

In recent years, the newly established Sinixt Confederacy — under the Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation — has at times been at odds with Okanagan Nation Alliance over legal and territorial claims related to the historically displaced Sinixt people, and which tribal council represents their descendants. The Okanagan Nation Alliance has asserted that the Sinixt people have always existed as part of the larger syilx Nation rather than as its own entity.

During the hatchery partnership’s decade, the tensions have resulted in chinook egg transfers being withheld, Marsel said — but he firmly believes the two tribal governments realize working together for salmon outweighs their inter-governmental disagreements. 

“We have this same common goal,” he said. “Working together is what’s going to make it better.”

“To have the collaboration is extremely important, not only for the people but definitely the environment, the salmon [and] everything that thrives off the salmon.”

But long before the two modern-day tribal organizations were formed, Marsel said Indigenous communities in the region always supported and traded with one another.

“We have family down in Colville Confederated Tribes,” he said. “There was trading constantly across that imaginary line that’s now put up.”

“It’s not like this is a new thing where we’re working with Colville Confederated Tribes — but it’s exciting that now we’re working together for a common goal, and that’s conservation.”

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In 2014, the federal government promised to finish mapping the critical habitat that imperilled southern mountain caribou need to survive. It said it would be done by the end of that year. 

Today, nine southern mountain caribou herds have been wiped out and Ottawa still hasn’t released completed critical habitat maps.

Tired of waiting, lawyers for three conservation groups — Wildsight, Wilderness Committee and Stand.earth — filed a lawsuit Feb. 9 in Federal Court over what they describe as an “unreasonable” delay in completing critical habitat mapping. The groups are represented by the environmental law charity Ecojustice.

The suit asks the court to declare the delay unlawful — a ruling that could force the federal government to protect not only caribou but other at-risk species as well, according to the applicants.

“It should not have come to this,” Tegan Hansen, a senior forest campaigner with Stand.earth, said in an interview. 

Protecting caribou habitat is crucial to their survival, Hansen said. Although critical habitat maps do not themselves offer protection, they are a necessary first step toward actual habitat conservation, she explained.

That’s “why it’s so egregious that this delay has lasted so long,” she said.

Southern mountain caribou — a population of woodland caribou encompassing three regional subgroups found in southeastern and northcentral B.C. — were listed as threatened under the Species At Risk Act in 2003. In the wake of a previous lawsuit by conservation groups, the federal government released an overdue recovery strategy in 2014 aiming to achieve self-sustaining herds. That same year, the Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife in Canada, which makes recommendations to the federal government, determined the southern and central groups of herds were so imperilled they should be listed as endangered. 

Conservation groups warn Ottawa can’t meet its stated goal of self-sustaining herds without completed critical habitat maps to guide effective protections.

“At this point, extinction is not accidental; it is a political choice, and this lawsuit is our refusal to accept it,” Lucero González, conservation and policy campaigner at Wilderness Committee, one of the conservation groups behind the lawsuit, said in a media statement.  

Federal Minister of the Environment, Climate Change and Nature Julie Dabrusin did not immediately respond to The Narwhal’s request for comment on the lawsuit.

‘Most herds continue to decline’: biologist

Southern mountain caribou are especially vulnerable to habitat loss and have suffered dramatic declines since colonization.

“Overall, most of the herds continue to decline,” biologist Rob Serrouya, co-director of the Wildlife Science Centre at the research organization Biodiversity Pathways, said in an interview. “They’re a long way from being self-sustaining.”

There are some herds that are increasing, he said, but only because of intensive recovery efforts. These include wolf culls, supplemental feeding and maternity pens to help protect pregnant cows and calves from predators until they’re strong enough to have a fighting chance of surviving on their own.

For most of the southern mountain caribou population, logging and associated road building are the main threats to habitat, Serrouya explained. Caribou evolved to rely on old forests, but the shrubs and herbaceous plants that flourish after logging offer more attractive habitat for moose and deer. As those populations grow, they attract wolves and cougars, increasing the risk that struggling caribou herds will encounter predators.

“If we want there to be light at the end of the tunnel, the goal would be to have habitat improving at a faster rate than it’s being degraded,” Serrouya said. Critical habitat mapping is needed to help ensure that happens, he said.

He warned, however, that even if all critical habitat for southern mountain caribou was protected immediately, intensive management would still be needed for some time until all the habitat that is already degraded recovers sufficiently to support caribou. 

The notice of application for judicial review Ecojustice filed on Monday asks the Federal Court to rule the environment minister’s delay in releasing an amended recovery strategy or action plan that fully identifies critical habitat is unlawful or unreasonable.

The recovery strategy released in 2014 only identified a portion of southern mountain caribou critical habitat. In it, the government outlined a schedule of studies it needed to do to complete critical habitat mapping, and set 2014 as the deadline for those studies. According to the application, that served as the minister’s commitment to complete all critical habitat mapping for southern mountain caribou by the end of that year.

“Species aren’t going to survive and recover in the long run unless the federal government identifies the full critical habitat they need,” Sean Nixon, a staff lawyer with Ecojustice, told The Narwhal.

The minister’s duties to monitor and protect at-risk species’ critical habitat aren’t triggered until that habitat is identified in a recovery strategy, the application says. Meaning, any habitat vital to caribou survival and recovery that has not been identified in critical habitat mapping as part of a recovery strategy remains vulnerable to destruction.

“It ends up being a backdoor route to gut the duties and powers in the act,” Nixon said.

The delays in completing critical habitat mapping aren’t unique to southern mountain caribou. In 2025, the federal Commissioner of the Environment and Sustainable Development, an environmental watchdog, found critical habitat had only been fully identified in recovery strategies or action plans for 32 per cent of species at risk. And just more than half of the studies needed to finalize that mapping were either late or overdue.

The federal government says it’s prioritizing southern mountain caribou recovery, Nixon noted. “To me, it bodes very poorly for all of Canada’s species at risk if a priority species takes more than two decades just for the federal government to complete initial steps under the act.”

“We don’t want to see these animals disappear,” Hansen said. There’s a moral obligation to prevent extinction, but the federal government also has a legal obligation, she said. The lawsuit is a way to hold Ottawa accountable after cooperative attempts to encourage action failed, according to the notice of application. 

For Hansen, there’s a personal side to this fight. “I grew up in Nelson. I learned how to snowshoe tracking the South Selkirks mountain caribou herd,” she said. “And now that herd is gone.”

“There’s a lot of grief there.”

Updated Feb. 9, 2026, at 4:25 p.m. PT: This story was updated to correct the date of the report from the Commissioner of the Environment and Sustainable Development that looked at critical habitat for species at risk. It was published in 2025 not 2023 as previously stated.

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The Ontario government is moving ahead with plans to transfer management of 60 per cent of Wasaga Beach from the province to the town, despite receiving feedback from thousands of Ontarians decrying the proposal as potentially endangering sensitive piping plover habitat and affecting beach access. 

The Doug Ford government received 14,233 comments over a 30-day period last summer, about 98 per cent of which were in opposition to the proposal. Many expressed concerns that erasing provincial protection could mean the loss of sand dunes in favour of hotels, condos and other beachfront development.

“We did not consider any changes to the proposal based on the feedback received, given the Town of Wasaga Beach’s commitments to keeping the beach public, not building on the beach and protecting environmentally sensitive dunes,” the government said in its decision.

Under Ontario’s Environmental Bill of Rights, the government is required to post moves with environmental or energy implications to the publicly accessible Environmental Registry of Ontario to allow for widespread feedback from industry, experts and residents. (The Ford government has, though, exempted several projects and types of notices from the registry, such as the Ontario Place redevelopment and permits to harm at-risk species, under Bill 5.)

Last June, the Ford government posted its decision to amend the Provincial Parks and Conservation Reserves Act, the legislation which created more than 340 parks across Ontario. The amendment would permit the transfer of 60 hectares, or three per cent, of Wasaga Beach Provincial Park, which protects the world’s longest freshwater beach and surrounding natural areas, to the town’s management to help boost tourism and the local economy. 

The transfer includes more than half, or 60 per cent, of the beachfront, which contains all the sand dunes and vegetation that serve as nesting area for the piping plover.

Among the roughly two per cent of respondents that supported the move for the sake of economic development and revitalization, there was also a push for “continued environmental management and continued public access.”

Most of the comments on the registry posting highlighted the consequences of losing this beach environment, or even threatening it with increased development. 

“Once this precedent is set, we risk irreversible environmental degradation, reduced public access and the commercialization of what should remain a protected, public space for generations to come,” one local resident wrote. “Tourism and environmental stewardship are not mutually exclusive, and development must not come at the cost of conservation.” 

“Public land — especially waterfront property as ecologically and recreationally important as Wasaga Beach — should remain in public hands and under provincial protection,” another wrote.  

None of this swayed the province. The amendments to enable the transfer were passed in Ontario’s 2025 budget, released last fall. With the recent decision, the government will now advance the transfer to the town.

This is not the first time the Ford government has disregarded feedback through the Environmental Registry of Ontario. The Auditor General of Ontario has repeatedly called out this government for failing to adhere to its own laws — at times “deliberately” — that require it to meaningfully consult the public through the registry.

In late 2022, for example, the government received more than 30,000 comments about its plans to remove 7,400 acres of land from the protected Greenbelt. In spite of this, “no changes were made to the proposal as a result of public consultation,” the government’s posting on the registry read.

In choosing not to consider any changes based on public feedback, the government’s decision said the lands removed from provincial protection in Wasaga Beach “will continue to be subject to Ontario’s species protection and environmental laws.”

However, shortly before announcing this transfer, the Ford government weakened species protections through its controversial Bill 5, as well as exempting certain postings from the environmental registry. The provincial parks legislation was the last law standing to protect plover habitat in Wasaga Beach.

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A small group of us were returning from a guided tour through the grasslands on a sunny October afternoon when I picked up on the familiar scent of burning wood. Curious, I made my way toward the small peak overlooking the prairie, where a bonfire was lit and a young woman stood in a large metal bucket. It almost looked like she was dancing. A few people were smiling and laughing around her, as she continued her gentle footwork — the traditional Anishinaabe way of processing wild rice. Also known as threshing or jigging, it requires someone to gently trample the wild rice to separate the edible grain from the outer husk. 

The demonstration was part of Prairie Day at the Alderville Black Oak Savanna — a hub of conservation and restoration — where individuals from both within and outside of Alderville First Nation are invited to spend the day.

According to one estimate, only one per cent of the tallgrass prairie ecosystems remain intact around the world, and preserving them is critical to ensuring the survival of rare traditional medicines and rare species at risk. These types of grasslands also serve as a highly effective carbon sink, absorbing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere that would otherwise contribute to global warming. And grasslands store the majority of that carbon in the soil, rather than above ground, meaning it’s less at risk of being released by fire or drought.

Wild rice doesn’t grow in the savanna, but it does just down the road in Rice Lake, and it was once found in waterways across southern Ontario. In Ojibwe civil rights activist Eddie Benton-Banai’s retelling of the oral history surrounding the western migration of the Anishinaabe to the Great Lakes, he wrote that they followed a prophecy about “a land where the food grows on the water.”  However, many of the wild rice beds in southern Ontario, including Rice Lake, were destroyed or damaged by shoreline development, dredging, introduced species and damming. 

Some people, like Alderville community Elder Jeff Beaver, are trying to bring back the practice of harvesting wild rice, or manoomin, which translates to “good seed” and is recognized as a gift from the Creator. Beaver’s research and work to help restore wild rice beds in the Williams Treaties region began decades ago. On Prairie Day, he guided the visitors through wild rice processing.  

From her bucket beside the bonfire, Rageous May-Vokes lifted one moccasin after another, dancing on the rice, separating the husk from the grain that had sustained her ancestors for centuries. She is from Alderville First Nation, but never had the chance to try manoomin from Rice Lake before today. “This experience makes me feel connected back to my community, our teachings and where we originally come from,” May-Vokes says.

In the 1830s, some Michi Saagiig Anishinabeg migrated to the south shore of Rice Lake, about two hours east of Toronto, after being forced by British settlers to surrender their traditional lands around the Bay of Quinte. Upon arrival they noticed that sections of the land had been burned for the cultivation of corn, beans and squash by the Haudenosaunee community that previously lived on the land. The presence of fire on these lands shaped the biodiverse conditions of the ecosystem and gave the land its name: “Pamitaashkodeyong” which means “where it burns and where it travels” or “lake of the burning plains.” That practice was continued by the Michi Saagiig Anishinabeg of Alderville First Nation.

For centuries, under the care of the Haudenosaunee and then the Anishinaabe, the tallgrass prairie thrived due to the traditional practice of burning. But at some point, that practice stopped. Rick Beaver, one of the founders of the Black Oak Savanna, points to colonial expansion, infrastructure development and the Indian Act. “It came into being and we no longer had control over our territories, ” he says. “With that comes the suppression and extinction, in some cases, of traditional practices like burning, language and other customs that are appropriate to harmonize with living on the land, loving the land and acknowledging the connection between all things.” 

Like harvesting and processing wild rice, cultural burns that give way to prairie ecosystems were nearly extinguished.

In a speech at the Prairie Day event, former Alderville Chief Dave Mowat said the Indian Act wasn’t concerned with the environment. “It was just concerned with undermining traditional government systems.”

In 1999, Alderville First Nation was in need of more housing on its reserve land to accommodate a growing population. At the time, the land now known as the Black Oak Savanna was proposed for a new housing development. But Mowat and Rick Beaver, both of whom had grown up on Alderville First Nation, knew the environmental significance of these lands. As children, they ran through these fields. The land carried the Elders’ teachings and stories — and they were determined to protect it. 

Mowat, who held a position in the economic development department of Chief and Council at the time,  supported a preliminary biological survey of the area. Along with a few community members, Beaver, a biologist by training, spent a season surveying the area and sent the findings to the federal department then called Environment Canada. A biologist there agreed the area had ecological value. The land was then registered under the habitat stewardship program for species at risk, which halted construction plans. “It was strange, it was almost like Environment Canada was waiting for us,” Mowat says.

With support from the band council and Environment Canada, the Alderville Black Oak Savanna was founded later that year. When Beaver was hired to lead the restoration efforts as the savanna’s first natural heritage coordinator, he recalled, “the land was a patchwork of savanna prairie.” Parts of the land that were historically prairie had been plowed into agricultural fields. “The band was leasing them out to local farmers to produce hay, corn, oats, soybeans, various grains, wheat, oats, rye,” Beaver says.  

In the absence of fire, and the practice of managing grasslands for traditional food, medicine and wildlife, the prairie and savanna were slowly fading away. The woods were expanding their roots and non-native species were creeping across the farm fields of the dying savanna.

Over the last two decades, fire has been reintroduced to the lands as a way of managing the environment. If you visit the Alderville Black Oak Savanna today, you will witness a thriving tallgrass prairie: heath aster and New Jersey tea, big bluestem and a scattering of black oak trees at the northernmost stretch of their range. As a fire-dependent ecosystem in a place where fire is otherwise immediately suppressed, tallgrass prairie and black oak savanna would not be able to thrive without human stewardship.

The Alderville prairie is the “antithesis of that narrative that people are bad for the environment,” Radek Odolczyk, stewardship and restoration coordinator at the Alderville Black Oak Savanna, says. “It’s a cultural legacy on the land that’s telling you that we can actually improve biodiversity and resilience.”

Work on the Alderville Black Oak Savanna happens all year. When the snow melts and the land begins to thaw, the team starts preparing. First, they designate the areas that are in need of a burn by looking at the health of the plants and data on how much seed they’re producing. “You never get as good of a yield, in terms of seed in a tallgrass prairie, as you do the year after it was burned,” Odolczyk explains. “The thatch that’s accumulated is preventing water from penetrating the grain and getting down to the soil. When you burn, all those nutrients that are captured in dead plant material are released back into the soil.” 

Early in the spring, once the areas in need of burning are identified, Odolczyk goes over the logistics and conditions that will affect the burn. “You’re doing everything leading up to that burn to make sure that it goes the way that you intend for it to go,” he says. Burns take place in the different areas throughout the rest of the spring season, but they never burn more than a quarter of each type of habitat, leaving refuge for various species. After a burn, the team might reseed the grass to help nature along, and they’ll monitor as animals return to the land after a long winter.

As the days get warmer, the focus shifts to managing the presence of invasive, or non-native, species, which “are one of the biggest threats to biodiversity, especially in southern Ontario,” Odolczyk says. European buckthorn, dog-strangling vine, spotted knapweed and Canada thistle are some of the more common non-native species found in the Black Oak Savanna. Burning is the main control method used at the savanna, because many of the non-native species do not have the same historical relationship with fire as tallgrass prairie. However, dog-strangling vine, which has no natural checks and balances in southern Ontario, is adapted to fire, and much harder to control. The team physically removes it or turns to herbicides. 

Spring blooms into summer and plants begin to yield their seeds. The team collects some of the seeds to spread to areas that need propagating, they store some for the next growing season and in other areas let nature take its course. “They’ve been pretty dang successful so far, several million years along,” Odolczyk says.

The Mitigomin Native Plant Nursery was established at the Alderville Black Oak Savanna in 2019, and up and running by 2023. Its coordinator, Gillian di Petta, has focused on experimenting with plant growth to learn what conditions allow the plants to thrive, such as whether plants that have been recently burned produce more viable seeds.

Many of the plants grown in the nursery are contributed to local restoration efforts within the Rice Lake Plains Partnership — a stewardship project involving Alderville First Nation, private landowners, conservation groups and government agencies — or to other local programs. “We have a partnership with Kawartha Pine Ridge District School Board, which is the local school board in our area, and we work with them to put in native plant gardens at specific schools,” di Petta says. Community members are also given access to traditional medicines grown in the nursery.

As the days get shorter and colder, the team begins the process of suppression and succession: to keep the woods from encroaching on the prairie, the team either cuts down certain parts of the forest or girdles the trees — making shallow cuts to the bark, leading trees to die slowly while remaining upright. 

Most of this takes place in the winter because it has less of a negative impact on the ecosystem. “If we were to do this during the growing season, we’d potentially run [over] areas with ATVs. Or if we have to drop a tree, there might be birds nesting in that tree,” Odolczyk says. “The advantage of doing this through the winter is that everything’s dormant and the ground is frozen.” 

The work being done to manage the woods in the winter shapes how the area will thrive in the seasons ahead.

This past summer, the staff of Alderville Black Oak Savanna discovered a red-headed woodpecker at the edge of the grassland restoration area in one of those dead-standing trees. Red-headed woodpeckers are on the list of endangered species in Ontario. They have a high death rate from traffic collisions and development has clawed away at their habitat and food resources. Pesticides have diminished their ability to reproduce. 

Over the years, these birds have made pit stops in Alderville First Nation on their migration journey. But this was the first time Beaver remembers seeing one nesting on these lands. 

“Like any species, if you take the time to understand them carefully, you will understand that they are speaking about the conditions of the earth in very specific terminology and language,” Beaver says of the red-headed woodpeckers. “What does that mean with respect to the land? Well, it means it’s suitable for them.” 

The sighting was a testament to their two and a half decades of environmental stewardship.

When the Black Oak Savanna started out in 1999, Mowat recalls there being very little funding. Beaver was working out of the trunk of his car. “We had no equipment. It was a skeleton operation, but we knew it was important,” Mowat says. “When I reflect back 25 years, what it’s become is quite remarkable.” 

Alderville First Nation is to thank, Mowat says, for the savanna’s expansion from about 37 hectares of land to more than double that today, at 81 hectares.  Over the years, Alderville members would come to the Black Oak Savanna to sell their neighbouring CP land — which refers to Certificate of Possession, a specific type of land tenure that recognizes the lawful possession of the land, and the right to occupy and develop it, but the legal title is still held by the Government of Canada.

The acquisition of land over the years was a slow process, Mowat says, but it gained traction when summer students would come work at the savanna, and then go home and tell their parents about it. “What we really had to rely on was education,” he says. Gradually, the community was convinced of the savanna’s value, and more and more land was added. “We’re lucky that it happened that way because we could have had someone sell five acres and a big shop gets put in right next to the savanna, but that never happened,” Mowat says.

As the natural heritage site continued to expand, so did the need for staff to manage it. Over the years, stewardship efforts have evolved to include a reptile and amphibian stewardship program. Alderville First Nation’s location on the south shore of Rice Lake makes it a hotspot for nesting turtles each year. But as their prime nesting locations are in close proximity to roadsides or farms, many turtles are killed or injured each year.

Sisters Grace and Kassie McKeown have led turtle stewardship efforts across Alderville First Nation for years. Grace is now the herptile technician for the savanna, after first starting out as a summer student nearly a decade ago. Kassie is currently a band councillor.

Every spring, there’s a two- to three-week-long period where turtles come up on the shore to lay their eggs, which hatch in August. Grace and Kassie monitor where the turtles make their nests and deploy nest protector boxes —  square wood frames with chicken wire stapled to the top and semi-circle doors cut into the sides. “If you orient it so that the slots of wood that have the holes face the water, the turtles are encouraged to go in a safe direction.”

This year they were able to protect 50 turtle nests. “Not all turtles are going to be saved or able to reach the age of maturity. It just helps their numbers, helps the odds,” Grace explains. 

Like the early days of bringing summer students to work at the savanna, part of the turtle stewardship effort also involves community outreach and education. “Last season, we held a turtle nest protector workshop. Community members got to build their own turtle nest boxes and take them home. We stayed in contact, so they would let me know if they saw a turtle,” Grace says. The hope is that an increase in education will also increase community participation. 

“The more community involvement, the better this program will be.” 

Having a space that cultivates and fosters the connection that humans have with nature and the rest of creation is a part of Alderville First Nation’s pride: “It’s one of our gems,” Mowat says.

Beaver talks to Elders who miss hearing the sounds of eastern meadowlarks, a bird species threatened by the loss of its grassland habitat and in steep decline as a result. He tells them to come and visit the savanna, where the meadowlarks’ song can still be heard.

“It puts a smile on their faces,” he says.

For Beaver, the Black Oak Savanna is a place where people can find joy in nature. “The Earth is not a resource,” he says. “The Earth is a companion, a parent, a teacher, a consoler and I’m convinced that it loves us innately and deeply.”

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A chihuahua killed in front of its owner. A child approached by a bold predator — even as his parent tried to scare it away. Wild dogs trotting down Toronto sidewalks in the middle of the day, unfazed by nearby humans.

In recent years, the lore of the urban coywolf has filled southern Ontario media reports everywhere from Hamilton to St. Catharines to Kingston. The idea of a more muscular, predacious coyote wandering the streets is understandably transfixing — and terrifying.

But whether what we’re seeing are more than just coyotes — the same ones that have long ventured out for urban walks — has become a complicated, misinformation-laden debate for cities, citizens and scientists. And it’s one that ignores the very real ecological crisis of coyotes and wolves interbreeding.

The coywolf is ostensibly the offspring of a wolf and a coyote. That much is straightforward; what’s harder to pin down is where — or if — they even exist.

Mississauga’s animal service receives reports of coywolf sightings, but the city says these are just eastern coyotes. The City of Burlington notes eastern coyotes share “remnants of DNA” with wolves, which “does not affect their behaviour in terms of how humans can safely coexist.” The City of Toronto rules out the existence of the coywolf, saying it’s just a nickname and coyotes are “the same coyotes that have always been here.”

They’re all kind of right.

While coyotes in eastern Canada did evolve from interbreeding with wolves, domestic dogs and the smaller western coyotes — North America’s original coyote that over time expanded east — scientists have repeatedly pointed out this happened more than a century ago. In other words, these animals are not newcomers, even for southern Ontario. Rather, they’re known widely as eastern coyotes.

Urban coyote issues haven’t exclusively impacted eastern Canada, either. During the COVID-19 pandemic, a wave of visitors to Vancouver’s Stanley Park reported being bitten by western coyotes, according to CBC News. Meanwhile, in Edmonton there have been growing concerns from residents about coyotes, with increased human-wildlife conflict there over the past decade.

In Ontario, the problem has become tied to the notion of an urban half-wolf and the distinct threat it poses. The interactions people have with eastern coyotes, and what they report, tends to be negative, casting a pall, explained Stephanie Rutherford, associate professor at Trent University’s School of the Environment.

“The way in which the term ‘coywolf’ gets deployed kind of amplifies that fear,” she said.

Rutherford, who published a book on Canada’s history with wolves, likes the term because it “points to the in-betweenness of this creature — one that is really created, in part, by humans.”

But when the media and public started adopting “coywolf” around 2013, after one researcher published the term in scientific literature, it created a sort of fantastical “super predator,” Rutherford said.

Coyotes have assumed the role of top predator in cities and other areas where more traditional apex predators such as wolves have been extirpated. While they do pose some threat to humans and their pets, coyotes’ rise in prominence most notably impacts ecosystems farther north, where declines in eastern wolf populations have removed a key hunter from the landscape.

The eastern coyote’s expansive territory is encroaching on this unique breed of wolves in Ontario whose population is declining as their bloodlines mix, and hunting and vehicle collisions take a toll.

Ontario’s Ministry of Environment estimates there are between 350 and 1,000 mature eastern wolves in the province, with a core concentration in and around Algonquin Provincial Park. While the myth of the fearsome coywolf looms large for humans, the nugget of truth in it is the threat they pose to these wolves.

The coywolf is born

Hunters, like urbanites seeing a coywolf on their street, can struggle to differentiate coyotes and wolves. It’s the reason wolf hunting restrictions in Ontario also apply to coyotes.

Chief Doreen Davis of Shabot Obaadjiwan First Nation, a non-status Algonquin nation west of Ottawa, said the difference is in their head shapes and frames, the colour of their fur and the way they point their tails. She also sees striking differences in their nature as predators.

“The wolf takes the sick and the weak, and they have a presence for that purpose,” she said, noting they’re also resourceful with kills and leave few remains. In contrast, she said the coyote leaves evidence of its kill.

Davis, who also goes by Migiziw Wan’nakwad Ikwey (Eagle Cloud Woman), has made countless visits to Algonquin Provincial Park over her lifetime. She said she has been lucky to encounter and interact with a small population of eastern wolves, which she calls “red wolves,” near the Madawaska River and Animoosh Lake — animoosh, also spelled animosh, is Algonquin for “dog.”

Once, Davis witnessed wolf pups yapping on a quiet park road, their parents standing guard on opposite sides, when a buck emerged from the bush and the pups chased after him. In recent years, she said she has seen fewer wolves.

As settlers turned forest to farmland and hunted thousands of grey wolves in the 19th and early 20th centuries, eastern North America opened for western coyotes. They had settled around southern Ontario by 1919, according to one study, where they encountered eastern wolves, also called Algonquin wolves.

Genetically speaking, eastern coyotes are about two-thirds western coyote and one-third eastern wolf and also grey wolf, which tends to live farther north. Up to 10 per cent of eastern coyotes’ genetic makeup comes from domestic dogs.

“The eastern coyote, as we know it today, was born in the early 20th century,” Brent Patterson, a large mammal researcher with Ontario’s Ministry of Natural Resources, explained. He has studied Algonquin’s wolves since 2001 and feels it’s largely inappropriate to label eastern coyotes as coywolves.

Eastern coyote specimens going back to the 1950s exhibit little change over time, suggesting coyotes across Ontario make up “one large homogenous population,” Patterson said, whether in Timmins, Cornwall or Windsor. “There’s no evidence that they’re changing, either physically or genetically,” he said. “It’s a stable hybrid. It’s been the way it is for 75, 80 years.”

Lavania Nagendran, a PhD candidate at the University of Toronto who researches canid behaviour and morphology, and has studied dozens of eastern wolf and coyote specimens, said while eastern coyote skulls range between western coyotes’ and wolves’ in size, some characteristics are more “wolf-like.” This includes wider cheekbones and larger jaws.

“These traits tend to be correlated with [larger] or stronger jaw muscles, which could be linked to larger prey.”

But eastern coyotes generally still prefer rodents and urban food sources, according to Nagendran. Overall, she said, eastern coyotes are more coyote than they are wolf.

“The distribution of these ‘coywolves’ is ubiquitous across [south and central] Ontario and Quebec and the Atlantic provinces,” Dennis Murray, a canid researcher at Trent University and the Canada Research Chair in Integrative Wildlife Conservation, Bioinformatics and Ecological Modeling said. “It would be virtually impossible to find a pure-bred coyote east of Manitoba.”

Yet, the idea of a coywolf as a distinct species from what eastern Canada is used to seeing has trickled out of misunderstanding. The use of the term “coywolf” traces back to 2010, when wildlife biologist Jonathan Way, in Northeastern Naturalist, proposed using it to broadly describe eastern coyotes. His argument is that all eastern coyotes are hybrids, and that calling them coyotes ignores the wolf and dog attributes of their DNA.

“Coywolf,” Way said in an email to The Narwhal, “summarizes the animal in a nutshell.” However, the existence of a 50-50 hybrid of coyote and wolf “is not true and never has been.” Way said he has always meant eastern coyotes and coywolves are the same animal, and emphasized that “coy” coming first in his portmanteau implies the animal is more coyote than wolf. But somewhere along the line, between social media and media reports, including a documentary broadcast by the CBC in 2013, it spun into a new creature entirely — a beast whose real threat was largely ignored.

The problem for wolves in Ontario

In Algonquin Park and the surrounding area, some three hours north of Toronto, eastern wolves remain top dog, according to John Benson, a professor of vertebrate ecology at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Benson spent from 2007 to 2013 studying Algonquin’s wolves for his PhD. He said the safety of the park is probably the main reason they still exist in Ontario.

“From a conservation standpoint, I think we should be concerned,” Benson said. “The appropriate recovery goal for eastern wolves would be to expand the population, numerically and geographically, out from Algonquin.”

Thanks to preserved mature forest — though some logging does still happen in Algonquin — and protection from vehicles and hunting, eastern wolves not only survive there but are unlikely to hybridize, Benson said.

In general, coyotes avoid denser wolf populations like you’d find in Algonquin, Murray of Trent explained. But as wolves venture outside the protection of the park, their numbers dwindle as they’re picked off by hunters and cars, Patterson explained.

In a study published in 2024 that examined 18 years of data, Benson, Patterson and others analyzed 220 eastern wolves and found they struggle to survive anywhere outside the protection of Algonquin and the area immediately surrounding it. Among wolves living or roaming outside of Algonquin, the study found almost one in three died of human causes such as hunting or vehicle collision. Eastern wolves need at least 100 square kilometres per breeding pack, Patterson said, and can easily run into coyotes, cars or hunters within that.

As wolf density decreases — Patterson said their numbers in Algonquin have declined since the mid-2010s — coyotes are less deterred and mixing between the two is more likely. 

Benson, Patterson and colleagues are now modelling decades of data to simulate population viability and hybridization outside Algonquin. Within five years, they hope to know what conditions can best support eastern wolves.

The federal government recently uplisted the eastern wolf from a species of special concern to threatened, under its Species at Risk Act. With that comes the requirement for a federal recovery strategy, written in collaboration with Ontario and Quebec.

Trans-jurisdictional conservation can be challenging, Benson noted. Quebec’s Environment Ministry does not currently consider eastern wolves a distinct species, but rather a genetic group under the larger grey wolf species, a spokesperson told The Narwhal in an emailed statement. A new study looks at the genetics of eastern wolves in Quebec and also pushes for their protection in the region just over the provincial border from Algonquin.

And while the federal government has influence over habitat protection and may be able to support eastern wolf re-expansion — it must publish its recovery strategy by June 2026 — Patterson said recovery efforts really fall on the Ontario government as regulator of provincial parks and wolf hunting.

When the province listed eastern wolves as threatened in 2016 under the Endangered Species Act, a provincial draft recovery strategy was developed and posted for public comment. It received a “very large volume of feedback,” according to Patterson, who suggested that may have stalled things. Last January, he said efforts were underway to finalize that recovery strategy with management recommendations. Once the strategy was out, Ontario would have been required to release an action statement, under the Endangered Species Act, formally committing the government to its protection. But with the passage of Bill 5, the Protecting Ontario by Unleashing Our Economy Act, the province repealed the Endangered Species Act and replaced it with weaker legislation that removes the requirement for recovery strategies to be developed, and for the subsequent response statement to be released.

Ontario’s Ministry of Natural Resources and Ministry of Environment did not confirm whether the eastern wolf recovery strategy would still be finalized following the passage of Bill 5.

Benson said more protections against hunting present the best chance for wolves’ longevity. Currently, Queen Elizabeth II Wildlands and Kawartha Highlands provincial parks south of Haliburton, Ont., and Killarney Provincial Park farther north near Sudbury, have the same wolf and coyote hunting restrictions as Algonquin, while other areas see seasonal restrictions.

Across the province, harvesting numbers for coyotes and wolves combined notched 300 in 2023 and 279 in 2024. Fur remains a prime driver of canid harvesting, according to wildlife biologist Matthew Robbins of the Ontario Federation of Anglers and Hunters.

He said expanding eastern wolf hunting restrictions becomes challenging because it means people have less access to coyotes as well, even if they had no intention of harvesting eastern wolves.

Robbins added that, in protected areas, eastern coyotes have filled pockets where eastern wolves haven’t returned despite being shielded from harvesting, suggesting wider protections or hunting restrictions might not bolster wolf populations.

If Ontario seeks more protections for eastern wolves, Robbins said the federation wants to see specific conservation goals that are grounded in science and cost-benefit considerations for communities. “Wolves and other native predators are a critical piece of our ecological puzzle, and I think most hunters and trappers do value them for that,” he said. “At the same time, we also prioritize active and evidence-based management.”

Patterson said the hope of greater restrictions is that wolves will establish large enough breeding packs in these interim protected areas to become self-sustaining and expand their population — without genetic introgression by coyotes. As proposed in his study, he’d also like to have zones between these protected areas deemed off limits for hunters, particularly along Georgian Bay and between Killarney and Algonquin, to offer a safe corridor for wolves.

But “there’s no guarantee it would work,” Benson admitted. “I don’t think anyone could say for sure that increasing eastern wolf survival [by] reducing human-caused mortality would allow them to resist hybridization.”

Could coyotes be the new wolf?

Most of a modern eastern wolf’s genome — about 63 per cent, on average — is still from historic eastern wolves. The other third has become a more recent mix from coyotes and grey wolves.

Wolves play ecological roles coyotes can’t replace, like predating large game such as moose. While eastern coyotes are effective deer and beaver hunters, they can survive on hares, rodents and garbage, Benson said. Should eastern coyotes fill the ecological role of wolves, there will be hard-to-predict effects on prey and ecosystems.

“I do think it’s a mistake to say that eastern coyotes would play that same role, so that we could sort of just let hybridization take its course,” Benson said.

If eastern wolf numbers rebounded, Patterson anticipates “human-wildlife conflict would probably decrease, because wolves live in lower abundance” than coyotes, and are less likely to prey on livestock such as sheep. As for the streets of Toronto, and surrounding cities, the coyote will likely remain king.

In the end, the coywolf is still a coyote first — different from the eastern wolves that preceded them in southern Ontario. For some, that’s an important distinction.

While members of Shabot Obaadjiwan harvest coyotes and sell their hides at powwows, Chief Davis said, under Algonquin law, hunting wolves has generally been forbidden.

“If the red [eastern] wolf is somewhere where it’s becoming overpopulated, then yes, there needs to be some sort of a control mechanism put in place,” Davis said, emphasizing the importance with any animal of maintaining balance.

But she is inclined to let nature take its course.

“I’m one that believes in evolution,” Davis said, pointing out that even humans have changed from migrating and intermixing around the world. “I don’t think we have any real say in this. I think it’s going to happen, and all we can do is record history. Record what was there, just like when we talked about the dinosaurs, just like when we talked about all the species that have left us, and remember them.”

Maybe the eastern wolf will acquire its own mythology, in a reversal of the rumoured coywolf — often imagined but rarely seen.

“Maybe we won’t lose the red wolf,” Davis added. “Maybe there’ll still be pockets of it somewhere, like this little group I see in Animoosh.”

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