Nine months after listing the interior fisher population as endangered, the B.C. government has approved winter trapping of the elusive forest animal even though a scientist warns it could wipe out fishers in some areas. 

“A red-listed population of this size, with a negative population growth rate … should not be trapped,” biologist Larry Davis, a member of the B.C. fisher working group, told The Narwhal. 

“These animals are a low-density species. So many areas have been impacted by [forest] harvesting and fires that removing even a few more animals from these areas will probably result in local extirpations.”

B.C. has no endangered species legislation, allowing species at risk of extinction to be killed outside of protected areas. Out of 1,336 species at risk currently recognized by the province, only four are legally protected under B.C.’s Wildlife Act — the burrowing owl, American white pelican, Vancouver Island marmot and sea otter. 

B.C.’s hunting and trapping regulations for 2020-2022, which came into effect on July 1, noted the interior fisher was red-listed earlier this year, meaning the genetically unique population is in danger of disappearing. The regulations said fisher trapping seasons were under review and could be amended prior to the start of trapping season on Nov. 1, but no changes have been made. 

Fisher, which are about the size of a housecat but stretched out like a limo, require mature trees for denning and shelter. Only five species of tree in B.C. have cavities suitable for female fisher to birth and raise their kits while avoiding predators. 

The interior fisher population has suffered steep declines, largely due to habitat destruction as a result of accelerated logging for the mountain pine beetle, which has eliminated fisher denning trees such as cottonwoods and balsam poplars. 

Only 300 to 500 interior fishers remain, according to Davis.

“If an area’s already been impacted by extensive harvesting and wildfires, the remaining fisher population is likely to have a hard time sustaining itself — and even removing a few more individuals will make that more difficult,” he said.

B.C. doesn’t protect endangered species

The fisher trapping season coincides with a Nov. 16 letter sent to Premier John Horgan from 17 scientists, urging the newly elected NDP government to create “long overdue” endangered species legislation and to invest in protection and recovery efforts needed to reverse biodiversity loss across the province. 

“Provincial leadership is sorely needed,” the scientists wrote. “With every passing year, it becomes more and more difficult to reverse species declines.”

B.C., the most biodiverse province in Canada, has the greatest number of species at risk of extinction, with 1,336 species on the red and blue lists. Another 1,037 species meet provincial status requirements for red and blue listings but have not yet been added.

Red and blue listing in B.C. is currently an empty exercise, however, because species at risk of extinction receive no unified legal protection in the province. 

Unlike six other provinces that have endangered species legislation, B.C. relies on an uncoordinated mish-mash of legislation to protect plants and animals, including the Forests and Range Practices Act, the Oil and Gas Activities Act, the Environment and Land Use Act, and the Wildlife Act. 

When the NDP came to power in 2017, Premier John Horgan instructed Environment Minister George Heyman to enact an endangered species law, in keeping with an election promise made by the party. But the government subsequently reneged on its commitment. 

Tara Martin, one of the scientists who signed the letter to Horgan, said she and other scientists worked with the province and other stakeholders to advance the promised legislation. 

“We were hugely disappointed that nothing came of it,” Martin said in an interview. “Essentially, the province walked away from their commitment, with no statement as to why.”

Southern mountain caribou, northern spotted owls and the interior fisher are only a few of the many hundreds of species at risk of extinction in B.C. Illustration: Sarah Hammond / The Narwhal

Lack of endangered species legislation ‘negligent’

The push for B.C. endangered species legislation comes as scientists around the world warn we are witnessing the sixth mass extinction event in the planet’s four-billion-year history. Scientists estimate as many as half of all species may be headed toward extinction in the next 30 years, in large part due to habitat destruction.

Martin said species continue to be added to B.C.’s list of at-risk species and ecosystems.

“This is negligent. This is really unacceptable. We’re losing many opportunities that come with having a biodiverse region. We’re so fortunate to live where we do, and we are not heeding the responsibility that we have for protecting these species and ecosystems,” she said.

“We’re down to less than three per cent of our old-growth forests left. We’re seeing caribou herds disappear. We saw 19,000 cubic metres of endangered white bark pine harvested without penalty.”

Martin and the other scientists told Horgan that B.C.’s wildlife populations are decreasing in abundance, “with many species approaching extinction” due to unsustainable land use and development.

“We’re all losing,” Martin said. “We’re losing our life support system. We’re losing our natural heritage. We’re losing our economic opportunities. And we’re really impacting future generations by taking away opportunities, by not putting in legislation to safeguard our species and ecosystems.”

A taxidermied caribou cow from an extirpated herd in a back room of the Royal B.C. Museum. Caribou populations have been winking out of existence in B.C. due to over development, industrial logging, road building and other human incursions into wilderness. Photo: Carol Linnitt / The Narwhal

Failing to protect B.C.’s species and ecosystems also violates the rights of Indigenous peoples to have access to species for food, social and ceremonial purposes, the scientists said in their letter. “Not protecting biodiversity in the province is antithetical to the B.C. government’s commitments to reconciliation,” they stated.

Trapper Wayne Kirsh said he is frustrated by the B.C. government’s lack of action to protect fisher habitat. “I don’t think the trapping is going to hurt the fisher, compared to the loss of habitat,” said Kirsh, who trapped interior fisher for decades. 

Kirsh and his wife Leilah stopped harvesting fisher on their trapline, in the Nazko region southwest of Prince George, as fisher disappeared following industrial logging. The couple tried, unsuccessfully, to persuade logging companies and the provincial government to leave behind denning and nesting trees.

“When you have a trapline it’s kind of like having a farm. You have to farm it because if you don’t, in a couple of years, you have nothing left to trap,” Kirsh said in an interview.

In 2016, the Kirshes filed a complaint with B.C.’s forest practices board, an independent watchdog for forestry practices, saying forestry companies were harvesting heavily on their traplines with no designated cutting areas.

The forest practices board upheld the complaint, saying the provincial government failed to use legal tools available to protect fisher habitat.

Kirsh, who worked in the forestry industry for 37 years, said logging practices in interior fisher habitat “haven’t changed one bit. They’re just going in there and raping the habitat.”

“Why don’t they leave some habitat? … It’s not the trapper who is screwing things up,” he said. “Fires are one thing, but logging is the number one killer. They’re not leaving their denning trees and they’re not leaving the spruce with the witch’s broom.”

Fisher use witch’s broom, a dense mass of shoots on a tree branch that resembles a nest, for resting sites and to shelter from the elements.

David said about 170 fishers are trapped each year in B.C., which has a second fisher population in the Peace region that is blue-listed, meaning it is vulnerable to local extinction.

The Kirshes’ stopped trapping fisher for fur in the Nazko in 2014, in a voluntary effort to help the struggling population. In 2015 and 2016, the couple live-trapped 19 fisher for a reintroduction project in Washington state’s Cascade Mountains. Photo: Leilah Kirsh

Trapping guidelines note ‘increased concern’ for fisher

Biologist Eric Lofroth said it’s not typical for a red-listed species like the fisher to be harvested. 

The impact will depend on where interior fishers are trapped, said Lofroth, adding that government-approved trapping “is certainly not going to be of any help” in recovering populations. “Whether it’s going to result in the extirpation of fisher from any particular part of its current distribution is hard to know.”

He said new data — that he and other scientists have collected — indicates the interior fisher population has a lower reproductive rate than the boreal fisher population in the Peace, possibly due to food availability. Fisher prey on shrews, mice, voles, snakes, squirrels, snowshoe hares and grouse. They also consume mushrooms and berries but not, despite their name, fish.

“The number of females that den on an annual basis and the average litter size is much lower in the central interior than it is in the boreal population,” Lofroth said, noting that a paper on the new data is awaiting peer-review. “That has a real bearing on potential population growth rates.”

The province’s new hunting and traplines guidelines regulations said there is “increased concern” for fisher populations in areas of the Thompson, Cariboo, Omineca and Skeena Regions that have experienced large habitat changes due to forest harvest and salvage of beetle and fire-killed forests. 

“Where habitats are compromised, trapping poses a compounding threat to population persistence,” say the regulations, which encourage trappers to reduce the incidental capture of fisher by modifying marten boxes, which attract fisher.

Davis said he has spoken with a few trappers who are not planning to trap fisher this year due to low fur prices related to the COVID-19 pandemic. “That at least gives us a glimmer of hope that those populations of fishers won’t be heavily impacted with the trapping this winter.” 

“There are areas out there that could be refugium for fishers, whereas in other areas trappers are still active.” 

The fisher working group, supported by the B.C. government, has built close to 1,000 boxes to give out to trappers who harvest marten but who also catch fisher in their traps, Davis said.  

“We are rolling that out right now, trying to get these boxes out to trappers, just to test them, to see if they’re comfortable using them.” 

The boxes have an entry plate with a hole designed for the skull size of martens, which are smaller than fishers. “There’s a difference in the width of their head so they’ve designed the box to have a hole that would fit a large male marten but shouldn’t allow a female fisher to enter, and for sure a male fisher would not be able to enter,” Davis said.

In response to a forest practices board report based on the complaint from Wayne and Leilah Kirsh, the B.C. forests ministry said it would develop a provincial fisher management plan. In June, the ministry told The Narwhal the plan is underway, with a “targeted” completion date of 2022.

Endangered species legislation was not mentioned in the 2020 NDP election platform. Instead, the party vaguely pledged to “work with neighbouring jurisdictions to cooperatively develop and invest in new strategies aimed at better protecting our shared wildlife and habitat corridors.”

B.C. has no laws that specifically prohibit harm to species at risk (other than prohibitions around hunting) or laws that provide mandatory protection for the habitat that species vulnerable to extinction require for their survival and recovery. Nor do B.C. laws require recovery planning or implementation for species at risk.

The scientists are requesting a meeting with B.C.’s next environment minister, who will be named on Nov. 26 when the new provincial cabinet is announced, to discuss how the new government can safeguard endangered species and ecosystems.  

“We feel that Horgan has a clear mandate to govern, and a responsibility to re-engage in this really important effort to bring about species at risk legislation for the province,” Martin said. 

The B.C. government is not answering media questions during the interregnum period following the Oct. 24 election, unless questions pertain to health and safety or statutory requirements.

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.

The best way to trap a Vancouver Island marmot is with peanut butter — and not the healthy kind. Marmots use beaver-like incisors to chow down on an alpine meadow buffet of more than 40 species of grasses, herbs and wildflowers. The starfish leaves of alpine lupins are a favourite dish. But place a teaspoon of peanut butter, preferably containing sugar and hydrogenated fats, near a marmot that is fattening up after six or seven months of hibernation and it will quickly eschew the salad bar.

For wildlife veterinarian Malcolm McAdie, feeding dozens of captive marmots at the Tony Barrett Mount Washington Marmot Recovery Centre, where marmots are bred and released into the wild, is a daily preoccupation. One entire room at the centre is devoted to food preparation. The marmot youngsters, McAdie jokes, are “eating us out of house and home.”

The Vancouver Island marmot, Canada’s most endangered mammal, is only found in the wild on Vancouver Island mountains. The heaviest member of the squirrel family, marmots are about the size of a large house cat, have dainty ears like their chipmunk cousins and sport chocolate-brown fur with splashes of cream. Like other marmot species, Vancouver Island marmots are highly social; they live in colonies, rub noses in greeting and play fight like boxers.

The Vancouver Island marmot is about the size of a large house cat and is Canada’s most endangered mammal. Photo: Ryan Tidman

Marmota vancouverensis were so plentiful a century ago that the Victoria Times newspaper described “swarms” at the head of Nitinat Valley and a “brace” of marmots hunted in the Beaufort Range. But by 2003 — following clearcut logging, road building and other human disturbances, giving predators like cougars easy access to marmot colonies — only 27 Vancouver Island marmots were left in Canada’s wild.

Following intensive recovery efforts, the wild population has increased eight-fold, to just over 200 animals. Today, Vancouver Island marmots are found on more than 20 mountain sites compared to five sites in 2003, one with a solitary marmot. Yet they remain one of the rarest mammals in the world.

As the former executive director of a local land trust, Adam Taylor had largely focused on trying to save snake, slug and bat species from extinction by protecting their vanishing habitat. When Taylor became the executive director of the Marmot Recovery Foundation in 2015, he was motivated, in part, by the opportunity to use the charismatic marmots as a poster child for raising awareness about efforts to save all endangered species.

“It feels like we have a real shot,” Taylor says, “to take a species that is critically endangered, clearly at the absolute brink of extinction, and actually restore it to a reasonably healthy population.”

Adam Taylor, executive director of the Marmot Recovery Foundation, says it’s easy to feel like it’s hopeless to recover endangered species. Photo: Cheyney Jackson

In May 2019, scientists around the world warned of a global biodiversity crisis, saying nature is declining at rates unprecedented in human history. Close to one million animal and plant species are now threatened with extinction, many within decades, according to a comprehensive United Nations report, which called for transformational changes to protect species and ecosystems.

“We are in a period where it’s going to be pretty grim. We are going to lose species,” Taylor says. “And it is easy to believe that it’s hopeless, that we simply can’t recover these species and that there’s no point in even trying. And I think it’s important that we have these success stories we can point to — that both uplift us within the conservation community and that we can use as exemplars to talk about the value of conservation programs, that they do really have the potential for success, that they’re not doomed to failure.”

By 2003, there were just 27 Vancouver Island marmots left in Canada’s wild. Now the wild population has increased eight-fold to just over 200 animals. Photo: Ryan Tidman

British Columbia, which markets itself as “super, natural,” is home to more than 2,000 species at risk of extinction, more than any other province or territory in Canada. Yet, unlike most provinces, B.C. does not have a standalone law to protect endangered species. Such a law might have reversed the fortunes of the Vancouver Island marmot much earlier by protecting its critical habitat before the species was almost wiped out, in addition to providing earlier resources for recovery efforts.

Recovering a species on the brink of extinction is not easy, and it’s not cheap either. From hatching northern spotted owls in a laboratory as forest sounds play in the background to sedating pregnant caribou and flying them in helicopters to a breeding pen high in the Misinchinka mountains, substantial amounts of money are going toward complex efforts to recover endangered species in British Columbia and around the world.

Vancouver Island marmots are bred in captivity, where they are acclimatized to predators by rolling taxidermic cougars and wolves past their enclosures to test their response. They are given names like The Dude and P-Man, or litters are named by theme: one year it was Gord, Rob, Paul and Johnny, after members of the band the Tragically Hip. The marmots undergo surgery to implant radio transmitters in their abdomens, allowing each one to be tracked. Their heartbeats are monitored and their teeth are checked. And then comes the day when they are released into the wild.

On a cool rainy morning in late June, I meet Taylor and recovery team member Quinn Andrews in a deserted ski hill parking lot on Mount Washington, on central Vancouver Island, to witness the release of three young marmots — Dora, George and Jabber — onto a ski hill. Taylor gives me hand sanitizer and a spray bottle of disinfectant for the soles of my hiking boots, which I have already cleaned, along with my clothes, as instructed.

Boot disinfectant has always been required for anyone associated with the recovery team who is in the marmot colonies to avoid inadvertently bringing in invasive species seeds and to protect the marmots from any potential unknown disease. Even before the COVID-19 pandemic, McAdie and other marmot handlers wore disposable gloves and face masks in the recovery centre, a two-storey wood and concrete building with adjoining indoor and outdoor marmot pens, staff sleeping quarters, quarantine rooms and a surgery room. But the pandemic has heightened safety precautions — especially since hamsters, a distant relative of the marmot, have tested positive for the disease — and now staff wear face masks in close proximity to wild marmots as well.

Quinn Andrews, a member of the field crew for the Marmot Recovery Foundation, hoists a caged marmot through a meadow on Mount Washington. Photo: Ryan Tidman

“The Vancouver Island marmot has gone through an extraordinary genetic bottleneck,” Taylor says, referring to a dramatic reduction in population numbers that threatens genetic diversity and the long-term survival of a species. “When that happens, it does leave a species vulnerable to disease … We don’t know that there’s any risk to marmots, but it’s not a chance we want to take.”

Our destination, a half-hour hike up a steep dirt road, is a grassy pasture sandwiched between the “more difficult” Invitation and Fantastic ski runs. The slope provides just the sort of habitat that marmots need  — a subalpine meadow with plenty of opportunities to excavate burrows and escape tunnels in the uneven terrain and rocks on which they can lounge, keeping careful watch for predators.

Taylor points to a plywood box nestled into the mountainside, which is about to become temporary accommodations for the yearlings, who are among 14 marmots released from captivity in the summer of 2020. Under the box, which will be removed in a few days, is a tunnel quarried by wild marmots. “The goal is to ease the marmots into their sudden exposure into life in the wild,” Taylor says. “They come out, and they find a burrow that is not currently being used by other marmots.”

McAdie, arriving by truck with two other team members and the marmots, carries a plastic bag of shavings and hay, taken from the marmots’ enclosures, downhill to the box. The vet dips nutrition biscuits — the same Marzuri Leaf-Eaters fed to primates in zoos — into a jar of peanut butter, placing them around and on top of the hutch and on a nearby tree stump. Recovery team members hurriedly pick wild lupins, sparkling with beads of rain and dew, to add to the welcome basket in the new abode.

Moving slowly, the vet and two other team members hoist big cages onto their backs. Seen from a distance, masked and wearing dark clothing, moving carefully down the slope in the misty rain, they could be mistaken for cattle rustlers about to pull off a heist. Every few seconds, one of the marmots pierces the silence with a loud whistle. The characteristic call, which earns the marmot its nickname “whistle pig,” indicates Dora, George and Jabber are not entirely happy with the situation.

Malcolm McAdie, Greg Mevlin and Quinn Andrews prepare to release two Vancouver Island marmots at Mount Washington. Photo: Ryan Tidman

One by one, the cages are joined to a removable plywood tunnel that connects to the hutch. If a marmot won’t leave its cage, someone tickles its feet. “They don’t like that very much,” Taylor says. “But some of them are really stubborn and they won’t go in even with the feet tickling. So, you have to take the ultimate irritation measure, which is to blow on their bums … that always seems to convince them.”

But today it’s just some foot tickling for Dora, and some foot tickling and a little cage jiggling for George and Jabber. Dora, named after Dora the Explorer from the children’s animated television series, is released first because males are more likely to block the entrance for others. The staff retreat 30 or 40 metres. McAdie checks his phone. After 15 minutes, allowing the animals time to absorb the strange smell of their new box and the familiar scent of old bedding, the plywood door is unscrewed and we wait for the trio to emerge into the brightening day.

Sometimes it only takes a minute or two for the first nose to poke out. But Dora, George and Jabber are not the Three Marmoteers, it turns out. It also doesn’t seem that Dora will live up to the reputation of her namesake. “This might be a record,” McAdie says after almost an hour. He walks back up to the box to check on his charges, spotting them huddled at the back.

Finally, the telltale white ring that encircles a Vancouver Island marmot nose shimmers at the door. Then a chin pokes out, and immediately retreats. Over and over, the nose pops out and pulls back, like a swimmer slowly dipping into cold water. And then a head emerges, followed, a few seconds later, by two front paws. Finally, the marmot dashes out to a biscuit dipped in peanut butter. Is it Dora? George? Jabber? We’re too far away to tell. A second marmot begins a jack-in-the-box routine at the hutch door, while the first one continues its peanut butter surveillance mission, seemingly unaffected by the morning trip up the mountain.

The Marmot Recovery Foundation raises marmots in captivity and then releases them into the wild. Photo: Ryan Tidman

Vancouver Island marmots are the heaviest member of the squirrel family and sport chocolate-brown fur with splashes of cream. They live in colonies, rub noses in greeting and play fight like boxers. Photo: Ryan Tidman

The three youngsters have come from the Mount Washington marmot recovery centre, a 12-minute drive down the bumpy road. Yet they have travelled a great distance to get this far. Dora and George were born in the spring of 2019 at the Toronto Zoo, which, along with the Calgary Zoo, breeds marmots for the recovery program. The duo was among nine marmots, all slated for release this spring, who were flown last fall to Vancouver. McAdie met them at the airport and brought them to Vancouver Island by truck and ferry so they could acclimatize at the Mount Washington facility in time for hibernation.

Jabber had a much shorter distance to travel; he was trapped by the recovery team in a clearcut last year and transported to the recovery centre by helicopter. Left in the cutblock, Taylor says Jabber and his future offspring would almost certainly have been picked off by cougars, which use the cover of growing trees to more easily stake out the marmots.

Historically, predation was not an issue for Vancouver Island marmots. But high-elevation logging and road building have fragmented habitat around marmot colonies in alpine meadows, isolating populations. “It’s not like anyone went in and logged a marmot colony,” Taylor says. “They’re tree-free by nature … But we did make a lot of disturbances around these colonies. So you have these little pockets of habitat.”

Marmots who disperse, as the species does naturally, can’t find their way to another colony through the disturbances. They end up in odd places. The recovery team once trapped a marmot that had taken up residence in a woodshed in Qualicum Beach. In 2013, they pulled a marmot named Morgan out of downtown Nanaimo. They were even called in 2015 to get a marmot that had been found wandering on the beach by the Bamfield Marine Sciences Centre.

The Marmot Recovery Foundation is working to establish marmot colonies in close proximity to provide stepping stones for the population to rebound. Photo: Ryan Tidman

Marmots on the move like to burrow in clearcuts, which mimic their treeless alpine and subalpine slopes but make them a far easier target for predators when trees start to grow back and provide cover. When you factor in the small dam in Strathcona Park next to Mount Washington, which created a reservoir in the middle of the park and severed marmot networks, and add climate change, which allows trees to grow at high elevations, the end result is less habitat for marmots and fewer avenues for dispersal.

“At some point in time, we started building all sorts of roads on Vancouver Island,” Taylor says. Some support logging operations, but many are for residential development and mining, he notes. “Historically, it would have been a pretty high energy cost for predators to get into marmot habitat and a pretty low return. Marmots were never a primary food source for wolves or cougars.”

The recovery team hopes that re-establishing enough marmot colonies close to each other will provide stepping stones for natural dispersal. There are now at least 12 colonies throughout the 700 square kilometre Nanaimo Lakes region. The exception to the stepping stone approach is a colony the team established on Steamboat Mountain, releasing captive-bred marmots with the opposite approach. “If everything goes south, if there’s a disease that’s introduced that wipes out the population in the Nanaimo Lakes region, we need to have a colony that’s geographically and reproductively isolated,” Taylor says.

“Historically, it would have been a pretty high energy cost for predators to get into marmot habitat and a pretty low return. Marmots were never a primary food source for wolves or cougars.”

The journey for marmota vancouverensis, as a species, has been much longer and more difficult. And it’s come with a hefty price tag.

The recovery foundation’s annual budget is between $750,000 and $800,000, depending on the year. In the past 10 years alone, the foundation has spent almost $8 million on marmot recovery efforts. Extrapolating, the price tag to save Vancouver Island marmots since the foundation was created in 1998 is somewhere in the order of $15 million. And that doesn’t include money to breed and raise marmots in zoos and fly them to B.C.

Each year, the B.C. government matches the funding contributed to the recovery foundation by two forestry companies that log near marmot colonies — Island Timberlands and TimberWest. This year, each of the three parties will contribute $70,000. The rest of the foundation’s budget comes from foundations and individual donors — some donors join the Adopt-a-Marmot Club — while Mount Washington Alpine Resort donates land for recovery efforts.

Money is far from the only investment in the marmot’s recovery and well-being. A stud book keeps track of lineage, aiming to ensure genetic diversity. Throughout the year, staff and vets from the zoos and recovery foundation meet with Vancouver Island University biology professor Jamie Gorrell, who sequences marmot DNA and advises which male marmot should be paired with which female.

Zoo staff weigh in with observations about individuals that might impede the ideal genetic match. “We sort out some of the practicalities of that,” Taylor explains. One female marmot named Rizzo, for instance, only likes a male named Oban. “It’s great that she’s got the genetics, but she’s literally going to eat her partner unless it’s Oban. Can we mate her with Oban again or are we starting to worry about over-representation?”

Malcolm McAdie oversees captive breeding and marmot care at the Mount Washington marmot recovery centre. Here he holds a hibernating Vancouver Island. Photo: Ryan Tidman

There are also concerns about how captive-bred marmots will adapt to an environment with predators. To see if they recognize predators and take appropriate action — whistling an alarm to other marmots and hiding in burrows — the Calgary Zoo wheels taxidermic cougar, wolf, marmot and domestic goat mounts past marmot cages, monitoring a video camera for the animals’ reactions. Mounts are pulled along a track in front of the marmot enclosures at the zoo’s off-site breeding facility, south of Calgary.

“We set it up so they’re on top of their hay bales, so they’re up high and they can see, and they’re eating, so they’re relaxed, so that we know they’re in a good behavioural state,” says Natasha Lloyd, conservation research manager for the Calgary Zoo, which has sent a total of 131 marmot pups to Vancouver Island for release. “And then we bring this taxidermied stimulus across to them, and we leave it for one minute and pull it out.” The marmots did indeed recognize the predators and act appropriately, she says.

Over the past few years, the zoo has repeated the study, expanding it to include a golden eagle, a great horned owl, a magpie and a goose. Lloyd said the results are still being analyzed, but broad trends show captive marmots are still able to distinguish predators from non-predators and take immediate action to protect themselves.

Working together, the zoo and the recovery foundation have also determined that captive-bred marmots stand a much higher chance of surviving when they are released onto Mount Washington for a year before they are moved to more remote colonies such as those in the Nanaimo Lakes area. They call it the “stepping stone” approach.

“We’ve found that year of learning really helps,” Lloyd says. “Because it’s a ski hill and there’s human presence around, we believe that the predation levels are lower, but there are still some predators around. So it gives the marmots a bit of an easier time to learn how to discern predators, how to avoid predators. And because marmots are such a social species, the other marmots out there, the wild marmots, give alarm calls and help them understand what to do.”

Mount Washington also has plenty of marmot burrows and hibernacula, giving newly released marmots more time to learn how to excavate. “If they’re yearlings or younger individuals, they can be adopted into a wild burrow and hibernate together, which is a really great learning experience for them too,” Lloyd says.

A record 17 pups were born at the Calgary Zoo this year, while eight were born at the Toronto Zoo. And 12 pups were born this spring in four litters at the Mount Washington facility.

Surgeries to implant radio transmitters in captive marmots are carried out at the recovery centre in June, with marmots given two weeks to recover before being released. On a mid-June morning, McAdie prepares to implant a transmitter into a young marmot named Diego — Dora’s brother from the same Toronto Zoo litter.

Diego lies on his back on a blue surgical sheet in the yellow surgery room at the recovery centre. His front paws stick up in the air, a plastic mask around his nose to supply a carefully controlled concentration of anesthetic. McAdie listens to Diego’s heartbeat and lungs with a stethoscope, measures his testicles and inserts a rectal thermometer to provide a digital readout of the marmot’s temperature throughout the surgery. He lifts Diego’s floppy head and peers into his mouth. “That’s a nice-looking marmot,” he says. “Incisors are intact.”

Diego has a radio transmitter implanted in his abdomen at the recovery centre in June. Photo: Marmot Recovery Foundation

The vet holds an EKG sensor between Diego’s paws to check for any potential heart ailments and wraps a pulse oximeter sensor around the marmot’s left hind leg to check his oxygen saturation and heartbeat. He takes a blood sample from Diego’s other back paw, wiping on disinfectant first, and wraps a doppler sensor around that paw to get an audio signal from his heartbeat for another pulse reading during the procedure.

Then he shaves the middle of Diego’s abdomen, a patch smaller than a credit card. His assistant, Jordyn Alger, vacuums up the stray fur. McAdie swabs red surgical soap on the patch, the first of at least three scrubs.

A surgical kit is unwrapped to reveal two sterile blue drapes containing surgical instruments, including a scalpel. McAdie disinfects his hands anew, right up to his elbows. Alger keeps watch over Diego’s vitals, pulling on one of his front paws to stimulate respiration.

The vet unfolds a transparent drape, cutting a hole in the middle and slips the drape over Diego.

“OK, making the incision,” he says, bending over the patch. He inserts the transmitter and sews Diego up, finishing with a layer of tissue adhesive, the surgical equivalent of crazy glue. The marmot will be eating again by the next day, the vet predicts.

McAdie releases Diego two weeks later, on Gemini Mountain in the Haley Lake Ecological Reserve, along with another marmot born at the Toronto Zoo, named for the basketball player Kawhi Leonard.

Like his sister Dora, Diego will be monitored all summer by staff who travel to marmot colonies with hand-held antennae, switching the frequency to check on different marmots. The transmitters respond to temperature, sending pulses that tell recovery team staff whether a marmot is alive, dead or hibernating.

Mike Lester uses an antenna at Mount Arrowsmith to check on the marmots in the area. The pulse rate of the transmitter indicates the body temperature of the marmot. Photo: Ryan Tidman

The vet has become somewhat of a Sherlock Holmes when it comes to marmot mortalities, which are low on Mount Washington, where marmots hibernate in deep snow below snowboarders and downhill skiers. Dora, George and Jabber have an 80 per cent chance of surviving their first year in the wild, he says.

Arriving at the scene of a death, McAdie looks for signs of a struggle, scat, fur, bones and the radio transmitter, which indicate how the marmot was consumed. Cougars, which have been responsible for 85 per cent of the marmot deaths in the past decade, make a kill and then drag the marmot to a more secluded area with vegetation. The cougar won’t eat the marmot right away.

“They’ll prepare it,” McAdie says. “They use their incisors and barber the hair off.” Leaving a ring of marmot hair, cougars will also remove the gastrointestinal tract and larger bones like parts of the skull before eating the meat. Cougars tend to kill multiple marmots in short order, which is why Jabber was airlifted to safety from a clear cut, along with a female and her four kits.

Wolves, on the other hand, will consume the entire marmot on the spot. They’ll also often leave a calling card of stool in the vicinity and will sometimes leave tooth marks in the resin coating the transmitter. Bears, which only rarely kill Vancouver Island marmots, are sloppy. “They’ll leave the hide and the skeleton and will consume all the internal organs,” McAdie says.

In the early 2000s, predation by golden eagles was also cause for concern. Golden eagles were only a vagrant species on Vancouver Island until Eurasian rabbits were introduced, affording the raptors an easy food source and prompting the establishment of golden eagle populations. Golden eagles can’t lift a marmot, which typically weigh between four and seven kilos. They’ll use their talons to drag the marmot along the ground, letting gravity sever the spine, and will eat only the organs. “Generally, there are signs of the eagle striking the marmot and signs of a bit of a struggle,” McAdie says. “Quite often they’ll leave a few feathers [and] quite often before they fly they’ll defecate as well so they’ll leave some whitewash.”

Scientists believe that marmots arrived on Vancouver Island up to 100,000 years ago, crossing from the mainland on land connections about the time the first modern humans, Cro-Magnons, emerged in Africa. Marmots were hunted by First Nations in the late summer for robes and food. Prehistoric marmot remains have been found at eight locations on Vancouver Island, all outside the marmot’s current area of distribution, suggesting a much larger historical range. One paleontological find in a cave near Nimpkish Lake, just south of Port McNeill, was radiocarbon dated to 10,000 years ago. Other undated remains have been found in caves near Tahsis.

In June, scientists published a paper that examined almost 30,000 species of terrestrial vertebrates to determine which are on the brink of extinction. They found 515 species with fewer than 1,000 individuals, species they said “likely will become extinct soon.”

Taylor read the paper with concern. He agreed with its conclusion that swift action is imperative to prevent more species from becoming extinct. But among those 515 species the scientists said are likely to become extinct soon is the Vancouver Island marmot. When it comes to the marmot, Taylor says, “we’re going to prove them wrong.”

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Chocolate brown fur, a pointy face and rounded ears give fisher the appearance of an old-fashioned teddy bear. Yet biologists call it “the ninja of the forest.” A fisher is about the size of a housecat, but stretched out like a limo, and it’s one of the fastest land animals on the planet when it comes to short bursts of speed. It’s also known for its ferocity. A fisher will attack and eat a porcupine two or three times its size, zipping in to bite the porcupine’s nose and dashing away to avoid a tail of quills that strikes like a lightning bolt. 

If you’re planning to go out in the woods, though, don’t expect to see this little-known member of the weasel family. Even scientists who study fisher rarely see them in the wild. If they do, according to B.C. government biologist Rich Weir, it’s “like winning the lottery.” You’re also unlikely to see a fisher in a zoo; they make poor animals to exhibit because they tend to hide from onlookers all day. 

In late March or early April, when it comes time to give birth, the female fisher looks for a tree with an opening just wide enough for her to squeeze into, to avoid predators like lynx and coyote. The tree must have sufficient heart rot for an internal cavity about 30 centimetres in diameter, with room for up to four kits, which are born deaf, blind and only partially covered with fine hair. 

In British Columbia, only five tree species out of 40 in the province — cottonwood, trembling aspen, balsam poplar, lodgepole pine and Douglas fir — will suffice. The tree must be at least 125 years old if it’s an aspen; a Douglas fir will have to be at least 250, and likely much older. And there will need to be a minimum of two such trees for each pregnant fisher, because a new mother will grab her young by the scruff of their necks and move house to avoid parasites and predators. 

A young fisher sits on a log. When born, fisher are blind, deaf and only partially covered with fine hair. Females give birth to a maximum of four kits in each litter and usually there are only two to three youngsters. Many fisher kits will not survive their first year. Photo: Shutterstock

In December 2014, Wayne and Leilah Kirsh skidooed into their cabin on Deepdown Lake in the rolling hills of the Nazko region, southwest of Prince George. They always looked forward to their sojourns in the wilderness. By day, they checked their trapline for fisher and other furbearers, enjoying the peaceful solitude of the woods. By night, warmed by a wood stove, they watched sunsets tinge the snowy lake peach. 

The couple had always been careful not to trap more fisher than local populations could sustain. The Nazko, where they harvested 25 to 35 fisher annually, boasted some of the highest densities of fisher in all of B.C. But that winter, alarmingly, it seemed there was nothing left to trap. The odd weasel, a nuisance coyote or two — that was all. 

The fishers were gone. On top of Wayne’s grief for his lost way of life, he was also just plain mad. 

His trapline, circling 1,800 square kilometres of forests, meadows and wetlands, was awash in a brown sea of logging cut blocks. Some clear cuts were eight kilometres long, the equivalent of 100 city blocks. Forestry companies, in a pell-mell rush to harvest trees damaged by the mountain pine beetle — while also trucking out large, healthy spruce and fir — had left virtually nothing in their wake. Just stumps and debris, Wayne says. 

 “As far as you could see, there was not one tree standing.” 

Wayne and Leilah Kirsh used to trap fisher in B.C.’s Nazko region, but as the forest around their trapline was clear-cut, the animals disappeared. Photo: Leilah Kirsh

The couple had tried everything they could think of to convince the forest companies and the B.C. government to protect the fisher’s habitat. Wayne figured that people would listen. After all, he’d been a mill worker for 37 years, driving a forklift and loading railcars. So he walked uninvited into local mill operations, imploring companies to leave behind sufficient denning and resting trees, in accordance with B.C. forestry regulations. He and Leilah pleaded with local MLAs. 

In a 2014 letter to then-forests minister Steve Thomson, the couple warned, “If these proposed logging blocks are allowed to continue at the on-going rate there will be NO suitable habitat for fisher and it will, without a doubt, become a red-listed species in this province.”

Thomson emailed back, saying the government was “working to understand” how land-use objectives for managing fisher were being met. 

“Nobody gave a rat’s ass about it,” Wayne says. 

B.C. failing to protect species at risk of extinction 

The Kirshes are far from alone in their concern about a dramatic loss of wildlife in B.C., the most biodiverse of Canada’s provinces and territories, and the one with the highest number of species at risk of extinction.

For years, Canada’s most western province has marketed itself as “Super, Natural, B.C.” But, as the story of the fisher shows, the B.C. government is failing to protect the myriad species that inhabit the province’s many ecosystems, from the coast to the mountain tops and from grasslands to old-growth forests, with worrisome consequences for biodiversity. Last year, a landmark UN report found that nature is declining at an unprecedented rate and extinctions are accelerating, with almost one million species at risk of disappearing globally.

Almost 1,340 species are now on B.C.’s red and blue lists of species at risk of extinction. Another 1,037 species meet the provincial status requirements for red and blue listings but have not yet been added, in part because more information is needed. The Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife in Canada has found that additional B.C. species, including more than one dozen unique salmon populations, are experiencing alarming declines. Yet those species, too, have no provincial at-risk status. 

Wayne and Leilah are sitting on the living room couch at their small cattle ranch near Quesnel when I call. They don’t use Zoom or Skype, so we talk on the phone, the two of them on speaker, jostling good naturedly for airtime. 

Wayne looks like a quintessential trapper, a “Grizzly Adams,” according to Leilah. He’s lanky and blue-eyed, with a long grey beard. When Leilah, who is dark-haired and handy with a chainsaw, tells people she’s a trapper they usually stare in disbelief. 

Trapper and cattle rancher Wayne Kirsh takes a break at the back of his truck in B.C.’s interior. Photo: Leilah Kirsh

Leilah Kirsh kept track of each furbearer she and her husband trapped during their years on the Nazko trapline. Photo: Leilah Kirsh

The Kirshes’ trap line cabin at Deepdown Lake in B.C.’s interior. Photo: Leilah Kirsh

Trapping is both a hobby and a way to earn a little extra cash by selling furs. From a cupboard, Leilah pulls out the hard-cover journals she kept during the couple’s years on the Nazko trapline. On lined paper, sitting in the log cabin after dinner and chores, she had neatly recorded each furbearer trapped, along with the temperature, date and location. 

In December 2003, along a run that took no more than a half-day to cover by skidoo, the Kirshes picked up three fishers, far less than they expected based on the harvest from previous years. Seven years later, in early December in the same area, they trapped only one fisher — but this time on a full day run. Retracing the route the following year, in 2011, they came up empty handed.

“We’d go from getting fisher every day to getting fisher once in a blue moon,” Leilah says, likening fisher to a miniature wolverine, but with a bushy tail and musky smell.  

“It’s not just about the trapping,” she says. “There’s nothing out there for anyone else to enjoy: the general public. They’ve logged right down to the lakes. You don’t really see a lot of wildlife, not like we used to.” 

Marten, red fox, moose, wolverine, eagle, whisky jack, great horned owl — they were gone too.

“They’ve logged right down to the lakes. You don’t really see a lot of wildlife, not like we used to.” 

The government-run B.C. Conservation Data Centre collects and shares scientific data and information about species and ecosystems in the province. Each year, the centre assesses hundreds of species and several dozen ecosystems, assigning them a number from S1 to S5 (the ‘S’ indicates it is a subnational designation.) A S5 means populations are secure. A S1 indicates the species or population is critically imperilled. 

Scoring a one or two will springboard a species onto the red list, meaning it should be in the equivalent of a hospital’s intensive care unit because it’s in danger of winking out in the province. A two or three earns a spot on the blue list, signalling that scientists are concerned about a species and are keeping an eye on it, much like a regular medical check-up for a pre-existing condition that might worsen and become life-threatening.

This past year, it was the fisher’s turn for assessment. When conservation data centre manager Damien Joly saw the results in March, he steeled himself for some difficult conversations. 

Joly, a biologist with a background in wildlife disease, had been manager of the data centre for two years. He’s a firm believer in what he likens to “the separation of church and state.” Science is one matter, policy another. “We just take the data,” he says. “We focus on the science and come up with an objective assessment of the status of the species.” 

Joly’s staff had spent months pouring over the data, in collaboration with other government biologists; now Joly would have to explain to government employees how the data centre arrived at its results. It would be up to the Ministry of Forests, Lands and Natural Resource Operations to determine what policy steps would have to be taken to recover fisher populations.

For the first time, B.C.’s two blue-listed fisher populations — the Columbia population in the interior and the boreal population in the northeast — had been assessed separately. 

New data showed the populations, cleaved apart by the Rocky Mountains and deep snow, which the fisher’s relatively small feet have difficulty navigating, were genetically distinct. Scientists were surprised to discover the interior population had mitochondrial and nuclear DNA not found in fisher populations anywhere else. 

The female fisher looks for a tree with an opening just wide enough for her to squeeze into, to avoid predators like lynx and coyote. The tree must have sufficient heart rot for an internal cavity about 30 centimetres in diameter, providing enough room for up to four kits. Illustration: Sarah Hammond / The Narwhal

Biologists had previously assumed that interior fisher populations would get help from their boreal cousins further to the east and north, which are more robust in number. “But we’ve found there really isn’t that connection at all,” Weir says, “and it’s left us going ‘holy crap.’ The central interior population, because it’s isolated, is much more vulnerable.” 

In April, with interior fisher population numbers low and threats high, the conservation data centre assigned fisher a new status, in keeping with international standards for assessing species at risk.

The interior fisher is now on B.C.’s red list — just as Wayne foretold.

Red and blue listing in B.C. is currently an empty exercise, however, because species at risk of extinction receive no unified legal protection in the province. 

Unlike six other provinces and the United States, which shares transboundary and migratory species with B.C. — including caribou, songbirds and spotted owls — British Columbia has no stand-alone endangered species law. Instead, it relies on an uncoordinated mish mash of legislation to conserve plants and animals, including the Forests and Range Practices Act, the Oil and Gas Activities Act, and the Environment and Land Use Act. 

Although the governing NDP made an election promise to enact endangered species legislation — a pledge upheld in Premier John Horgan’s mandate letter for Environment Minister George Heyman — it subsequently reneged on its commitment. That leaves B.C. with a mounting “extinction debt” that scientists say the province will soon be obliged to pay, in a reckoning that will remake our natural world into something far less diverse, abundant and wondrous. 

Ask biologists who study small carnivores about the fisher and they light up with stories about rare encounters with the little-known mustelid, whose relations include otter, weasel, ferret, badger and, more closely, the much larger wolverine.

Weir, who has been studying fisher for more than 30 years, can count the number of times he has seen one in the wild on one hand: five. Larry Davis, an independent wildlife biologist from 100 Mile House, has also seen a fisher in the wild just five times — in 35 years.

Fisher prey on shrews, mice, voles, snakes, squirrels, snowshoe hares and grouse. They also consume mushrooms and berries but not, despite their name, fish. If fishers vanish from the ecosystem, Weir says “things get out of whack pretty quickly.” 

B.C.’s lack of action to protect endangered species ‘troubling’: auditor general

Less than a century ago, sockeye salmon were so plentiful in the Adams River near Kamloops that Secwepemc Elder Mary Thomas recalled seeing people run across the water on their shiny backs. Wood bison were so prolific in northeast B.C., near Fort St. John and Dawson Creek, that they bestowed the area with its local name of Buffalo Prairie. Herring were so numerous that mile-long bays in Gitxaała Nation territory, on B.C.’s north coast, churned with flashing silver. 

Forty species of butterfly were considered “abundant” on Vancouver Island. The Cowichan River would turn black and snowy with the wings of thousands of dead admirals and whites and, in August, butterflies floated in the sea around Victoria and washed up in drifts one or two inches deep. In 1894, entomologist George Taylor described a single patch of blossoms “covered with blues and fritillaries, with an occasional sulpher and two or three magnificent species of swallowtail.” 

Elders from West Moberly First Nations in the Peace region recall caribou so bountiful in the early 1960s they were “like bugs on the landscape.” 

Ninety years ago, there were so many caribou in the Wells Grey area it took two and a half hours for them to pass: “Thicker and thicker they came,” wrote Vancouver Island author Hilda Glynn-Ward, “until the whole pass was a mass of moving mole-grey forms from which a forest of branched antlers sprouted, clashing and clicking together as they pressed onward.” 

Caribou were so plentiful in B.C.’s Peace region in the 1960s that Elders from West Moberly First Nations described them as being “like bugs on the landscape.” Illustration: Sarah Hammond / The Narwhal

Today, many wild salmon populations in B.C. have collapsed. Wood bison and plains bison are in danger of local extinction. Herring populations are in peril. All 20 Victoria-area populations of Taylor’s checkerspot butterfly, which brightened grasslands with its distinct orange, black and white wing patterns, have vanished, along with many other butterfly species. Northern spotted owls, a species found only in southwestern B.C.’s old-growth forests, recently became functionally extinct. 

B.C.’s southern mountain caribou herds are snuffing out like candles. Two more herds were declared functionally extinct last year and a dozen herds each have less than 25 animals remaining. The Burnt Pine caribou herd in the Peace is locally extinct, and the six other herds in the region are critically endangered. At last count, in 2016, only 121 caribou remained in the once mighty Wells Gray south herd, which today is one of the largest southern mountain caribou herds left in the province.

These species are but a handful of the red and blue-listed fish, birds, mammals, plants, amphibians and insects on the B.C. Conservation Data Centre’s species and ecosystems explorer. You can spend hours scrolling through the database’s 22,098 species and ecological communities, which are named for the dominant species in a unique combination. The ecological communities have names like coastal strawberry-beach bluegrass-bent-leaf moss, a newly described community, found on Rose Spit in the Haida Gwaii archipelago, that also includes the seashore lupine, seacoast angelica and rice-root fritillary. 

If you click on the red and blue lists, you’ll see 718 plant species. They range from the three-forked mugwort, corrupt spleenwort and least bladdery milk-vetch to the dulcet tones of the alpine anemone, scarlet ammannia and sweet-flowered fairy-candelabra. 

Check the lists for amphibians, and up pop the blotched tiger salamander, the wandering salamander and the northern leopard frog, along with five other small vertebrate species that need water to survive and are in some measure of trouble. Wondering where all the butterflies went? There are 85 butterfly species at risk of extinction in the province, bearing names like Arctic blue and immaculate green hairstreak. And what about insects, given reports of a global insect apocalypse? There are 137 insect species that could wink out in B.C., including eight bee species. The rare dwarf spruce tarantula, found nowhere else but in the Carmanah and Walbran valleys, is also believed to be at risk of extinction. But not enough is known about it, so it remains unlisted. 

The northern leopard frog is named for the dark spots on its legs and back. It was once North America’s most widespread and abundant frog species. Massive declines began in the 1970s and the northern leopard frog is now at risk of extinction in B.C. Photo: Andre Beaucher

The blotched tiger salamander is one of the largest terrestrial salamanders in North America, growing to up to 30 centimetres in length. Found in the southern mountain region of B.C., the blotched tiger salamander is at risk of disappearing from the province. Photo: Shutterstock

Like to fish? There are 52 fish species vulnerable to extinction in the province, including bull trout and white sturgeon. And what about birds, which so many more people are watching as the COVID-19 pandemic keeps them at home and muffles city noise? There are 103 bird species on B.C.’s red and blue lists, including the country’s namesake Canada warbler, a boreal songbird with a bright yellow neck and body that is experiencing significant declines from activities that include mining, logging and hydro dam-building.  

Even a super-sized Noah’s Ark would be hard-pressed to squeeze in a pair of each of the 68 mammal species at risk of extinction in B.C. Listed alphabetically, by their scientific names, they begin with animals like wood bison, plains bison, Roosevelt elk and sea otter and move down the letters to include, somewhere in the middle of the alphabet, bighorn sheep, Dall’s sheep and Stone’s sheep. Bookmarked near the far end of the letters are American badger (taxidea taxus) and grizzly bear (ursus arctus). 

Roosevelt elk were once widespread in southern B.C. But development has greatly curtailed populations on mainland B.C. Most of B.C.’s remaining Roosevelt elk population is found on Vancouver Island. Photo: Linda Tanner / Flickr

Wood bison, the largest land mammal in North America, are found in northeastern B.C., where they are at risk of extirpation. Photo: Louis Bockner / Sierra Club BC

A Dall’s sheep eyes the camera. Along with Stone’s sheep and bighorn sheep, Dall’s sheep are at risk of winking out in B.C. Photo: Shutterstock

“Endangered species are by and large not protected in the province,” says UBC biologist Sally Otto, who sits on Canada’s species at risk advisory committee. “We can destroy habitat that is critically needed for species, or we can even kill those species that are endangered.” 

As one example, Otto points to the B.C. government’s sanctioning of logging of white bark pine, a highly endangered tree that stabilizes steep slopes and relies on one bird species, the Clark’s Nutcracker, to naturally disperse its seeds.  

“When I tell people there is not an endangered species law … they’re shocked. They are trusting the government to make sure our endangered species are protected, not realizing they aren’t.” 

“When I tell people there is not an endangered species law … they’re shocked.”

In 2013, former B.C. auditor general John Doyle issued a report saying the provincial government was failing to conserve biodiversity. Doyle described biodiversity as critical to the health and well-being of British Columbians, saying “it provides the products and services that support life, including the air we breathe, the food we eat, the water we drink and many of the resources vital to our economy.” 

The report listed the five major threats to biodiversity: habitat loss, invasive species, overexploitation of natural resources, pollution and disease, and human-induced climate change.

Doyle concluded that the B.C. government had failed to use its own habitat protection tools to conserve species. He pointed out that his office had identified similar issues in an audit 20 years earlier, saying he was “disappointed” about the lack of progress.

Many species and ecosystems in the province were in decline, Doyle said, as a chart in his report put the number of at-risk species at 1,525 (compared to almost 2,400 today). Some species, like the white-tailed jack rabbit, once found in the southern Okanagan in the interior, had already become extirpated, or locally extinct.

“Habitat preservation is critical to the conservation of biodiversity, and [the] government’s lack of implementation and monitoring is troubling,” Doyle wrote.  

Then the auditor general took more of a carrot-like approach, as opposed to a stick. With 94 per cent of the province publicly owned or in Crown land, Doyle said the provincial government had a pivotal role to play in ensuring biodiversity was conserved “now and into the future.” 

B.C. even had an opportunity to become an international leader and bolster its reputation on the world stage by ensuring that, by 2020, it had reversed the decline in biodiversity, Doyle suggested.

But his calls went unheeded. 

In May 2019, as scientists around the world warned of a global biodiversity crisis, saying nature was declining at rates unprecedented in human history, Otto and 17 other scientists published a paper warning that increasing numbers of species and ecological communities in B.C. are threatened with extinction. 

The scientists outlined recommendations for endangered species legislation. Such legislation, they said, should allow for an independent oversight committee to list species, help organize recovery teams and monitor progress, using Indigenous knowledge and natural and social science to prioritize actions to save species — species like the fisher — from local or global extinction.

“Until we shore up our legal obligations at the provincial [level], we basically don’t have a way to protect species at risk and their critical habitat in the way that we need to,” says Otto, a zoology professor with UBC’s Biodiversity Research Centre.

“Endangered species are by and large not protected in the province,” says UBC biologist Sally Otto, who sits on Canada’s species at risk advisory committee. Photo: Brent Craven

In the science community, the weight of one threat to a species piled atop other threats is known as “cumulative impacts.” Otto describes cumulative impacts as akin to not paying attention to individual purchases you make on your Visa card.

“You just go ‘oh this is only $5 and I’m going to buy that, and this is only $50 and I’m going to buy that,’ and you pay zero attention to the sum total on your credit card,” she says. “Well, obviously, that’s how you run into credit card debt.”

In the case of the fisher, that credit card debt is outlined in a new B.C. government conservation status report detailing factors responsible for the mustelid’s decline. Industrial logging is a primary factor. The mountain pine beetle epidemic, which exacerbated the loss of forest habitat, is another.

It’s not just denning trees the fisher needs, but resting trees like spruce, where it hides in witches’ broom. Fisher also use tree cavities to sleep, escape from cold weather and eat prey, which includes squirrel, vole, shrew, snake, snowshoe hare and grouse.

Fisher use tree cavities to nest, den, sleep and escape from cold weather and predators. There are only five species of tree in B.C. that meet the requirements for a fisher den. Photo: Shutterstock

“When the mountain pine beetle hit and they started getting the wood for next to nothing, that’s when they just started hammering it,” Wayne, the trapper, says. “They don’t leave wildlife corridors, [there are] no strips of timber. And if they do leave any, next to a little creek, it’s so little that the first wind comes along and blows it down.” 

Over-trapping is another factor in some areas, with access made all the easier by logging. Hydro-electric development — such as the Site C dam, which will flood the riparian zone along the Peace River where boreal fisher den — is also cited as a reason for fisher decline. Agriculture and other land uses that destroy forest habitat, along with the widespread use of poisons for harvesting and predator control, are less significant factors.  

All that credit card debt adds up to biodiversity debt. One project at a time is evaluated and decision-makers say, “oh, that’s not going to have much of an impact, it’s only $5, it’s only affecting this teeny little area,” Otto says. “But when we do that over and over again the sum total is putting us into debt.” 

Eventually, biodiversity debt becomes extinction debt. Extinction debt, Otto says, is like knowing somebody who is so sick they’re almost certainly going to die. 

“They’ve got stage four cancer, there’s no treatment possible. They’re still alive, but it’s very, very hard to turn those cases around. We have a lot of that in British Columbia, where the populations haven’t yet slipped out, but they’re too small and too fragmented to prosper.” 

“They’ve got stage four cancer, there’s no treatment possible. They’re still alive, but it’s very, very hard to turn those cases around.”

Take the endangered plants that biologist Brian Starzomski has devoted much of his career to studying. Many of these plants, I’m surprised to learn, are found near the ocean within several kilometres of my home in Victoria, which lies in the rain shadow of Washington State’s snow-tipped Olympic Mountains, giving the city a climate more on par with California than with, for example, North Vancouver, which receives more than two times the rainfall. 

On an early morning in May, as the sun slants through low cloud cover, I meet Starzomski at Victoria’s Harling Point beside the historic Chinese cemetery, a patchy area with tall grass and small unmarked grave stones, some leaning away from the windswept shore. 

Brian Starzomski and reporter Sarah Cox stroll through a Victoria neighbourhood, en route to viewing rare plants. Photo: Carol Linnitt / The Narwhal

Just offshore lies the rocky squiggle of the Trial Islands, an ecological reserve with a lighthouse and four large radio antennae. The small islands, closed to visitors, are thought to have the highest density of endangered species found anywhere in Canada. That puts them on par with the Point Pelee area, the southernmost tip of mainland Canada, which juts into Lake Erie. 

Point Pelee specializes in migrating birds, also protecting a sliver of what remains of southern Ontario’s original habitats. The Trial Islands showcase rare plants, including a highly endangered golden paintbrush that no longer grows around the cemetery and, most likely, according to Starzomski, nowhere else in Canada. 

Along a narrow strip of land between the cemetery’s corral-style wooden fence and the ocean — a place the size of a couple of neighbourhood coffee shops — Starzomski falls to his hands and knees, pointing to the ground.

“This is it for remaining habitat for a lot of rare plants in Canada,” he says. “It looks like this.” 

This corralled off area in Victoria protects rare plants. “This is it for remaining habitat for a lot of rare plants in Canada,” Starzomski says of the area. “It looks like this.” Photo: Carol Linnitt / The Narwhal

Small, indistinct plants cling to sea-washed rocky crevices, while others find purchase in and around vernal pools, the ephemeral ponds of water that appear each spring. For Starzomski, these uncommon plants are much more bedazzling than the giant rhododendron blooms that colour the streets of Victoria this time of year. These are not charismatic megafauna, like the endangered orca pods sometimes spotted from this tranquil outcrop. It’s a world of mini-flora whose hidden charms are only unveiled as Starzomski points to plants I’ve no doubt stepped on during previous visits to the shore.

There’s the rare bear’s-foot sanicle, also known as footsteps of spring, whose leaves mimic the pattern left by a bear’s steady footprints. Its showy, bright yellow flowers hug the ground. The Scouler’s popcornflower — whose teeny white flowers appear as spilled popcorn in that Lilliputian world, is the more common relative of the slender popcornflower, which has been extirpated from Victoria, persisting only in a small number of poorly known populations near the city and on a few southern Gulf Islands. One remaining population, with a few hundred plants, occurs on a Saturna Island hillside, where it is carefully tracked by Parks Canada. 

Victoria’s owl-clover, an endangered plant that grows in Garry Oak ecosystems, which are themselves at risk of extinction. Photo: Brian Starzomski

The leaves of a bear’s-foot sanicle mimic the pattern left by a bear’s footprints. Photo: Brian Starzomski

Macoun’s meadow-foam, whose diminutive white petals herald the start of spring, has finished blooming for the year. And just about the rarest of them all is Victoria’s owl-clover, a plant that comes up “like a little pop can,” says Starzomski, with lemony flowers sprouting at the end of stalks, somewhat like a desert cactus in bloom. “It’s unlike anything else you’ll see anywhere. It just doesn’t look like any garden plant that you know of. It’s beautiful and weird.” 

Victoria’s owl clover grows in a few spots around its namesake city and in one location in Washington state’s nearby San Juan Islands. It’s found nowhere else in the world. The plant is “right on the edge,” of extinction, Starzomski says. There might be several thousand individuals left, he grants, but they’re found in an area smaller than 10 high school classrooms — an area that is shrinking all the time.

“Here we are in Victoria, B.C., one of the most beautiful places in the world,” Starzomski says. “And the vast majority of British Columbians are interested in the environment. We’re concerned about big trees and orcas and caribou. This is a species that’s just as important and interesting and it’s in our backyard. Yet we have a hard time finding the will to save it.” 

University of Victoria biologist Brian Starzomski at Harling Point in Victoria, B.C. The point is home to some of Canada’s most endangered plant species. Photo: Carol Linnitt / The Narwhal

Prior to colonization, Victoria’s owl-clover and the other highly endangered plants along the shore flourished in the Garry Oak ecosystem that dominated the southern tip of the Saanich Peninsula. A famous map, drawn in 1842, shows open oak savannah blanketing much of what is now Victoria. 

Today, as little as three per cent of the Garry Oak ecosystem remains. The rest has been destroyed, degraded, damaged, paved over, plowed under or otherwise turned into urban and suburban Vancouver Island. Garry Oak habitats themselves — with trees soundly anchored in deep soils where they grow spaced apart, unlike the thick oak forests of eastern North America — are red-listed, to Starzomski’s abiding concern.

 “In the spring, in April and early May, it’s just glorious purple and blue underneath filled with camas that would have historically been harvested and managed by the First Peoples of the peninsula,” he says. “[A Garry Oak ecosystem] has the most amazing wildflower show of anywhere in the country in the spring. It’s just simply probably the most beautiful and one of the most biodiverse places we’ve got in all of Canada.”

Camas flowers bloom in an increasingly rare Garry oak meadow. Photo: Alanah Nasadyk / Flickr

As we talk, the sound of hammering rings out from the residential area that circles the cemetery, where a new house is under construction. The south Vancouver Island population is set to jump by about 90,000 people within two decades. Without rapid protection for these rare plants, Starzomski says they will soon vanish.

“We’re destroying habitat really fast,” he says. “We need a species at risk act for those species that are most at risk. Without a specific act to manage them, they are going to be extirpated in B.C. or go extinct.”

U.S. does much better job of protecting endangered species

The federal Species at Risk Act, commonly known by its acronym SARA, only covers land that is within federal jurisdiction. In B.C., that’s only about one per cent of the land base, including the nine-hectare ecological reserve across from us on Trial Island.

The federal act rarely helps at-risk species because provinces wield control over land-use decisions, says Andrea Olive, an associate professor of political science and geography at the University of Toronto who studies endangered species laws. 

The federal government decides if species should be red or blue listed federally, and it can map critical habitat for species such as the Victoria owl-clover or caribou. 

“If those species wander into a national park, or if they wander into a post office or a military base then the government can protect them,” Olive says. “But so long as they’re on provincial land or private land, there’s nothing the federal government can do.” 

“So the provinces have to step up. They simply have to. And they’re refusing to.” 

If endangered species are on federal land, they can be protected under federal laws. But species on provincial or private land currently have no over-arching legal protection in B.C. Photo: Carol Linnitt / The Narwhal

Even the six provinces that have passed endangered species legislation frequently make exceptions for industry, Olive points out. Ontario’s endangered species law, for example, excludes all hydro, oil and gas, and wind energy development, a testament to the influence of industry and the light weight that protecting biodiversity is accorded on the scales of decision-making. 

But despite the limitations of existing provincial endangered species legislation, Olive believes it is important for B.C. and the other laggard provinces (Alberta, Saskatchewan and PEI) to enact laws to save at-risk species.

“At the end of the day, you need to be able to hold the government responsible. I also think a law signals to the public that we take it seriously.” 

In the U.S., the toothy Endangered Species Act, passed in 1973, protects all species across the country regardless of who wields jurisdiction over the land — governments, corporations or private landowners. 

“It applies to all land, everywhere, at all times, the same way,” Olive explains. “They have one agency that’s given the mandate to enforce that law.”

“At the end of the day, you need to be able to hold the government responsible.”

The U.S. law, perhaps not surprisingly given its scope, has reaped success stories for a large number of endangered species. By 2012, 110 species had seen “tremendous” recovery under the act, according to the U.S. Centre for Biological Diversity. They include the black footed ferret, whooping crane, short-nosed sturgeon, American crocodile, California condor, Atlantic green sea turtle and El Segundo blue butterfly.

“When your law recovers the American eagle, that’s going to win over the public,” Olive notes.

Unlike Canada’s Species at Risk Act, the U.S. law puts the welfare of endangered species above other interests, including industrial interests. In the case of the spotted owl, for instance, the law compelled logging to be curtailed in the owl’s critical habitat in Pacific northwest forests. 

The B.C. government, in sharp contrast, recently approved 312 new logging cut blocks in the range of the spotted owl, including in the Fraser Valley where biologists sighted the last three individuals thought to be left in Canada’s wild. 

The B.C. government continues to issue logging licences in the habitat of endangered spotted owls. Illustration: Sarah Hammond / The Narwhal

More species will disappear in absence of B.C. endangered species act 

Starzomski says an endangered species act would offer tools that could help protect the critically endangered plants at Harling Point. Those tools could be as simple as a few enclosures and signs that inform people about the plants and caution against stepping on them. Legislation could also furnish funding to remove highly invasive species like scotch broom, the bane of B.C.’s coastal native plant species, which creeps ever closer along hillsides. 

Two small enclosures — about the size of several desks side by side — already mark vernal pools at Harling Point. But, in many years, Victoria’s owl-clover grows outside the enclosures. Dogs, which carry seeds from invasive species in their paws, can easily duck through the rails, as can small children who want to splash in the pooled water.

Without a B.C. endangered species act, Starzomski says the prognosis is poor for the rarest species on southern Vancouver Island and in the south Okanagan, another epicentre for development. He gestures to a tiny patch of bear’s foot sanicle clinging to rocks near the ocean.

 “Just as soon as these rocks go, it’s going to take all of them with it. It’s not that it’s bad habitat. It’s just that there’s nowhere else for it to go.”

The rare bear’s-foot sanicle clings to a rock in Victoria. Photo: Brian Starzomski

The Dawson’s caribou is another species that had nowhere else to go. Found only in Haida Gwaii, an archipelago off B.C.’s north coast, Dawson’s caribou vanished quietly in the 1930s, likely due to over-hunting and insufficient habitat. 

The remains of the Dawson’s caribou are housed at the Royal BC Museum, a concrete slab of a building in Victoria’s inner harbour with a catacomb of natural history collection storage rooms and neatly labelled shelves, drawers and vaults that hold biological treasures of immeasurable research value: giant jars of strange sea creatures and pinned collections of rare butterflies and bumblebees among them. In a dusty back room, stuffed stone sheep, caribou, mountain goats, grizzly bears, beavers and porcupines are wedged between wheeled displays of antlers and slightly odoriferous whale vertebrae.

Birds and mammals collections manager Lesley Kennes pulls four Dawson caribou antlers from their latest resting place, in a metal cupboard labelled ‘horse pelvis,’ where she has stored them for my visit. The antlers look like burnished wood, with slender tines. Around each is wound a string attached to a packing label with hand-written lettering.

“Rangifer tarandus Dawson,” says the label on the heftiest antler, which belongs to a male and comes with a piece of skull. In capital letters, the label also says ‘type,’ meaning that the specimen acts as a name bearer for the species. It gives the location where it was found: Graham Island, near Masset, on what were called the Queen Charlotte Islands when the specimen was brought to the museum in 1882. 

The last of the antlers arrived at the museum in 1912, Kennes says, pulling out a weathered hardcover log book with hand-written entries in precise penmanship. “What you’re looking at is a population that was isolated,” she says. 

The antlers from a member of the now-extirpated Dawson’s caribou, collected around the year 1882 and stored at the Royal BC Museum. Photo: Carol Linnitt / The Narwhal

Lesley Kennes, birds and mammals collections manager at the Royal BC Museum, displays a collection of Dawson’s caribou antlers. Photo: Carol Linnitt / The Narwhal

Kennes and journalist Sarah Cox inspect a stuffed caribou cow in a back room of the Royal BC Museum. Photo: Carol Linnitt / The Narwhal

An octopus fills a large jar on a wide shelf in the museum’s backroom collection of sea creatures that includes varieties of crab and sea stars. Photo: Carol Linnitt / The Narwhal

Jars of tagged snake specimens are stored among thousands of species as part of the Royal BC Museum’s extensive collection. Photo: Carol Linnitt / The Narwhal

B.C., Canada fail to enforce existing rules to help endangered species 

Canada is lackadaisical when it comes to enforcing environmental laws that could protect species at risk, according to Starzomski. 

“When was the last time you saw a conservation officer or a parks employee or someone else who was actually out enforcing a law about not walking on rare species, or not fishing a rare species — for example in a rockfish conservation zone?” he asks. 

Since Canada’s Species at Risk Act was created in 2002, the federal government, wary of stepping on the province’s toes and sparking interjurisdictional conflict, has only stepped in twice to protect endangered species, issuing Cabinet orders that overruled provincial decision-making. Both species —  the sage grouse and the western chorus frog in southwestern Quebec — were found only on small tracts of land.

B.C., too, fails to enforce provincial regulations to protect endangered species, just as Doyle noted seven years ago. 

In 2016, after more than a decade of inaction from the government, Wayne and Leilah Kirsh filed a complaint with the B.C. forest practices board, an independent watchdog for forestry practices. In their complaint, the Kirshes said forestry companies were harvesting heavily on their traplines, with no designated cutting areas.  

“There seems to be no consideration or concern being given to maintaining furbearer habitat, ungulate habitat, or bird habitat, or [for] any other animal, bird, or aquatic species …,” the couple wrote. “Because of over harvesting forest practices, we feel that this has harmed the fisher population to the point they are becoming extinct in our area.”

In a box on the complaint submission labelled “What solution would you like?” the Kirshes said they would like wildlife to have “some habitat to survive” so all user groups — including trappers, hunters and guide outfitters — could continue to enjoy the outdoors and preserve their livelihoods.

“It is our concern that all user groups will become extinct ourselves when there are no forests or animals left,” they wrote.

“If we could get back to forestry that was on regular rotations, where you have staggered amounts of forest, fisher would probably do okay.”

In 2018, the forest practices board released the results of its investigation into the Kirshes’ complaint.

The board upheld the complaint, saying the B.C. government did not use legal tools available to protect fisher habitat. “While individual licensees made some attempts to retain fisher habitat in their cutblocks, without a coordinated plan, these efforts were insufficient,” the board concluded.

For the Kirshes, the ruling came too late. They stopped trapping fisher for fur in the Nazko in 2014, in a voluntary effort to help the struggling population. In 2015 and 2016, the couple live-trapped 19 fisher for a reintroduction project in Washington state’s Cascade Mountains. The following summer, their wood frame cabin by Deepdown Lake was razed by a forest fire.

The Kirshes stopped trapping fisher for fur in the Nazko in 2014, in a voluntary effort to help the struggling population. In 2015 and 2016, the couple live-trapped 19 fisher for a reintroduction project in Washington state’s Cascade Mountains. Photo: Leilah Kirsh

A fisher the Kirshes trapped for a reintroduction program in Washington State. Photo: Leilah Kirsh

“I won’t go back,” Leilah says. “I don’t think I could go back now. It’s too painful. You have your heart set on what you want your life to look like, and that part of it is not going to happen.” 

She says the couple, who have since purchased a trapline near the B.C.-Yukon border, an 18-hour drive from their home, was motivated to protect fisher populations “not just for us.” 

“It was for the entire province of British Columbia. We really wanted the government to look after our natural resources. We thought they could do a lot better.” 

The wildlife biologist Davis says if changes are made to forest practices there’s no reason why B.C. can’t have both forestry and fisher. 

“Anything that permanently removes productive habitat for fisher is a big threat,” says Davis, who contributed to the B.C. Conservation Data Centre’s fisher assessment.

“If we could get back to forestry that was on regular rotations, where you have staggered amounts of forest, fisher would probably do okay. They’re not like a spotted owl where they need immense tracts of old forest. They actually hunt snowshoe hare, found in younger forests. As long as you had elements of older forests, like some big old trees left over that fishers could use, I think forestry and fisher could co-exist.”

In 2019, in response to the forest practices board report, the B.C. forests ministry said it would develop a provincial fisher management plan. The plan is underway, the ministry said in an email to The Narwhal, with a “targeted” completion date of 2022.

“When you have a species that is in a critical state … the species cannot wait for us to decide what to do, and have it take us 20 years to figure out what to do,” Leilah says.  

“They need it done now, before it’s too late.” 

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There’s a little known essay by Sigmund Freud that details his walk through a garden with an unnamed poet and a philosopher (whom some suspect to be Rainer Maria Rilke and Friederich Nietzsche).

The scene is pastoral, a summertime flush of petal and leaf adorns their surroundings.

And it’s bumming the poet out.

He “felt no joy in it,” Freud wrote in his essay, On Transience. “He was disturbed by the thought that all this beauty was fated to extinction.”

The poet could not overcome his awareness that all that is will eventually be lost. That recognition opened up a chasm between his experience of the world and his ability to feel its delight.

“All that he would otherwise have loved and admired seemed to him to be shorn of its worth by the transience which was its doom.”

These words, written in 1915 during the crush of the First World War, speak presciently to the heart of last week’s news that earth’s species are spiralling out of existence at ever-escalating rates of extinction. This new scientific assessment caused an emotional shudder the world over.

How can we possibly begin to grasp the significance of this moment, the first great extinction event to be witnessed and caused by human hands?

What the hell do we do with that?

In his essay Freud makes an important observation that is as relevant for navigating the world today as it was when embroiled in the horrors of war a century ago: fully submitting to a thing’s impermanence doesn’t diminish its worth — it intensifies it.

“I did dispute the pessimistic poet’s view that the transience of what is beautiful involves any loss of its worth,” Freud writes. “On the contrary, an increase!”

Facing the impermanent world

In September, on assignment for The Narwhal, I followed directions to the base of a wide gated driveway in a heavily treed neighbourhood in rural Langley, B.C.

There, I met up with The Narwhal’s B.C. legislative reporter, Sarah Cox, and we were greeted by two young female scientists who escorted us onto a second property that lay a kilometre away, past three more secured gates.

We were making our way to the undisclosed location of the world’s only captive breeding facility for the critically endangered northern spotted owl. With just a handful of birds remaining in B.C.’s wild, drastic measures have been taken to prevent the creature’s full and final disappearance from Canada.

Incubation chambers, robotic eggs and meticulous documentation of owly romance are all a part of this very human endeavour of species preservation.

Strangely though, the other very human activity that has led to the species’ arrival on the brink — mainly habitat destruction through logging — continues unabated in spotted owl habitat in British Columbia.

There are more than 1,800 species at risk of extinction in B.C. alone, more than any other province or territory in the country. From the mountain crab-eye fungus, to salmon, to southern mountain caribou, to the killer whale — species great and small are in a death spiral.

While the scientific community has raised the alarm on many of these species, in some cases for decades, very few have received formal listing as at risk under Canada’s federal Species at Risk Act, legislation that only came into being in 2002. It’s a slow and painful and politicized process to have a species formally recognized as at risk.

Some won’t outlast the wait.

For those lucky, or maybe unlucky enough to be caught at the brink, action can be taken to rehabilitate populations in some cases. The spotted owl’s captive breeding program relies on pairs of owls, which mate for life, to bond and breed. This can take years of awkward courtship. The wait for note-taking scientists can be excruciating. But they continue on, with the hope of releasing laboratory-bred individuals back into B.C.’s forests one day.

There is no guarantee for the spotted owl. It’s a fundamental recognition that feeds into this program’s work: the spotted owl is impermanent. Its existence now holds no promise of existence in the future.

But that’s obvious, right? How could we think of a species in any other way?

The natural world just is

Except we didn’t always think this way. For the vast majority of human existence there’s been a fundamental assumption that the world is permanent.

The original Greek term for world and being was one and the same: physis. It was one fundamental term to describe what is, what exists. It was also the word for nature.

Embedded right into the language that informed so much of our thought in the Western world is this sense that the natural world just is. Human life and thought and activity is what takes place on this more fundamental base layer that’s just, you know, there.

This general sentiment — that the natural world is more or less an infinite and permanent strata for human goings on — is also what paved the way for what’s become modern-day capitalism with its perpetual growth fetish and apparent inability to contend with the planet’s finite resources.

Nearly a half-century’s worth of ecological thought has arisen in rebellion to this notion of nature’s immutable permanence. But it was the first images of earth seen from space, the pale blue dot, that finally crystalized a sense of earth’s finitude in the broader public imagination.

Earth, seen here as a tiny speck in a scattered light ray from the sun, was photographed by the Voyager 1 spacecraft on Valentine’s Day, 1990 at a distance of more than 6.5 billion kilometres away. Photo: NASA

“Look again at that dot,” Carl Sagan famously wrote of the image. “That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives … There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.”

But our general coming to terms with the finitude of planet earth has been harder to accomplish than many thinkers in the last century were able to grasp.

A revolt against mourning

A part of this can be attributed to how deeply entrenched our structures and systems and worldviews have become since, pretty much, the Industrial Revolution.  

It’s a dirty slate problem: with no clean slate available, we’re faced with the challenge of charting a new course from within the old. And that’s proven harder than we might have imagined.

But beyond the embeddedness of our fossil fuel reliance, deforestation, consumption and accumulation that underlies so much of our invisible everyday life in the western world, Freud points to a deeper, emotional resistance to the idea that this world may not be forever.

Photo: Peter Rudwell. Cinemagraph: Carol Linnitt

When faced with the impermanence of the things we love, Freud writes, our instinct is to respond in one of two ways: despondency or denial.

But by challenging us to face the world’s impermanence, Freud charts a path for a third way.

Back in the garden with his poet and philosopher friends, Freud is perplexed by their sadness in response to the beauty of their surroundings.

Sure, he thinks, “A time may indeed come when the pictures and statues we admire today may crumble to dust … or a geological epoch may even arrive when all animate life upon the earth ceases.”

But these inevitabilities don’t diminish the value of art or life, do they? So what could account for the despair of his companions?

“Some powerful emotional factor was at work which was disturbing their judgment,” Freud discovered. “What spoilt their enjoyment of beauty must have been a revolt in their minds against mourning.”

They were experiencing, Freud discovers at last, anticipatory mourning. The poet and philosopher were feeling despair at the loss of something — even before it was lost.

The idea of anticipatory mourning has become a touchstone concept in deciphering the complex feelings associated with ecological grief. Stress, fear, anxiety, alienation and solastalgia are common responses to the disfiguring and erosion of the world as we know it in the Anthropocene, or the ‘age of man.’

Scientists describe dramatic declines in biodiversity as one of nine critical breaches in the earth’s planetary boundaries alongside climate change, pollution, loss of freshwater and ocean acidification.

The world-as-we-know it is radically transforming. While the Holocene, the geologic epoch in which the entirety of human history has taken place, was characterized by its stability, the Anthropocene is a time of fundamental instability, unpredictability and change.

Even now as the world’s official bodies deliberate on what to call our new epoch — the Anthropocene? The Capitalocene? The Catastrophozoic era? — it’s becoming more clear that the gut instinct reactions of despondency and denial won’t get us far.

But just as the view of earth from space prompted a radical conceptual shift in our understanding of this planet, so too can our evolving understanding of extinction offer a radical renewal of our sense of what it means to be human in this shared world.

But in order for that to happen, we must overcome the resistance we mount to our own mourning.

Mourning is something of a riddle, Freud says. And yet it’s critical to understanding where and how we invest our love (our, ahem, libidinal energies).

Imagine for a moment, you’re watching your children play in the front yard. An errant ball makes its way to the street and your daughter runs after it. A car is coming her way. With your voice stuck in your throat you begin to cry out as the car swerves, only just sparing her life. In the moments and maybe days that follow you are highly attuned to your child’s impermanence, maybe your entire family’s impermanence. Maybe too, your own.

It is a nauseating moment of recognition. But that foretaste of loss allows you to see with raw clarity how truly mortal, fleeting life is.

It’s the acknowledgement of that mortality that allows you, for a moment in time, to properly regard your daughter for the transient creature she is. She is a garden in bloom.

To see her or that garden in any other way is to not see them at all.

The Extinction Report offers us a similar moment to hold the world’s riches in this proper regard.

In his essay, Freud writes that the war “showed us how ephemeral were many things that we had regarded as changeless.”

What becomes crucial is our ability to attune ourselves to the world in its ephemeral state.

For otherwise, have we really ever loved the world at all?

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.

With only a handful of spotted owls left in B.C.’s wild, a national conservation group is demanding that federal Environment Minister Catherine McKenna step in and produce a long-overdue habitat action plan to help save the iconic species from Canadian extinction.

In a letter sent to McKenna on Wednesday, the environmental law charity Ecojustice, acting for the Wilderness Committee, called on the minister to take action following decades of “mismanagement” by the B.C. government, which has prioritized logging in the owl’s habitat over legally required protections, according to an expert report.

“We’re saying ‘enough is enough,’” Ecojustice lawyer Kegan Pepper-Smith told The Narwhal. “This is about ensuring another step towards adequate protection for the owl.”

The demand letter comes as biologists at an experimental Lower Mainland breeding facility for the northern spotted owl tend three newly hatched chicks, in the hopes of adding to a captive population they hope will one day be robust enough to allow for the release of individuals into the wild. The successes and challenges faced by the breeding centre, the only one of its kind in the world, were documented last year in a feature published by The Narwhal.

The letter to McKenna follows the release of an ominous UN report on biodiversity that found nearly one million plant and animal species around the world face extinction due to human activity.

The report — compiled over three years by 145 expert authors from more than 50 countries — concluded that nature is declining globally at rates unprecedented in human history, with grave impacts for people everywhere.

Spotted owls are now functionally extinct in Canada’s wild, where an estimated 1,000 of the raptors once lived in southwestern B.C.’s old-growth forests of Douglas fir, western hemlock and western red cedar. For 12 years, the B.C. government has steadfastly avoided identification of the owl’s critical habitat, required by the recovery strategy. Photo: Jared Hobbs

“The health of ecosystems on which we and all other species depend is deteriorating more rapidly than ever,” said Sir Robert Watson, chair of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) that put together the report.

“We are eroding the very foundations of our economies, livelihoods, food security, health and quality of life worldwide.”

Among other notable findings, the report concluded that the current rate of extinction is double to hundreds of times higher than the average over the past 10 million years. That rate is accelerating, with many at-risk species facing extinction within decades.

Scientists say we are in the midst of the planet’s Sixth Great Extinction. Close to 700 vertebrate species have already been driven to extinction by human actions since the 16th century, according to the UN report, released on Monday.

The primary threat to the spotted owl is the loss and fragmentation of its habitat —  mainly comprised of old-growth forests of Douglas fir, western hemlock and western red cedar — in southwestern B.C., the only place it is found in Canada.

Commercial logging, regulated and approved by the B.C. government, is the principal cause of habitat destruction and fragmentation for the raptor, which feeds on flying squirrels. Spotted owl populations in the province have plummeted from an estimated 500 pairs historically to only a few individuals in the wild at last count.

“The unfortunate reality is their old-growth habitat has overlapped with the epicentre of human settlement and old-growth harvesting throughout B.C.,” said Pepper-Smith. “As the forests have gone so have the owls.”

The spotted owl has been listed as endangered under the federal Species at Risk Act (SARA) since 2003, requiring Ottawa to take action.  

A 2006 federal recovery strategy for the spotted owl committed to producing an action plan within a year that would fully identify the raptor’s critical habitat and activities likely to cause destruction to it.

But documents made public through a subsequent court case reveal that the B.C. government told the federal government it would produce that habitat action plan, Pepper-Smith said.

“And here we are 12 years later. We know now that was never completed. There was no critical habitat identified for the owl. And, in fact, the B.C. government has maintained much the same approach as they did in the 1990s and throughout the 2000s — piecemeal, inadequate protection throughout the spotted owl’s range.”

Pepper-Smith said the demand letter had not been sent earlier because both organizations have been working on other pressing issues.  

“The unfortunate reality is that we both, as non-governmental organizations, have limited resources.”

In an emailed statement, the federal environment ministry pointed out that the spotted owl is a provincially managed species and said the B.C. government committed in 2006 to developing and implementing a spotted owl recovery plan.

“The government of Canada will work with the government of B.C. to determine the next steps in the protection and recovery of the spotted owl based on the best available information,” the ministry said.

B.C. has the greatest number of species at risk of extinction in all of Canada, yet is one of the few provinces without a stand-alone law to protect endangered species.

The provincial government promised to introduce a law to protect B.C.’s 1,807 species at-risk, and instructions to enact endangered species legislation were included in Premier John Horgan’s

2017 mandate letter to B.C. Environment Minister George Heyman.

But following a recent backlash about draft agreements to protect B.C.’s imperilled southern mountain caribou herds — based in part on fears that habitat protection will lead to job losses, particularly in the forest industry — the government is backpedalling on its pledge, leaving scientists gravely concerned.

In response to the Ecojustice letter, the B.C. government said it has allocated $400,000 in annual funding over the past five years “to help this important species recover.”

The funds have supported the captive breeding program, field research and inventories, and new technologies for monitoring and conducting habitat assessments, according to an emailed statement from the ministry of forests, lands and natural resource operations.

The ministry said 303,850 hectares of forests are protected within provincial and regional parks, Greater Vancouver watersheds and wildlife habitat areas. About 66 per cent of that land consists of old and mature forests, which the government described as “preferred by the spotted owl.”

Charlotte Dawe, conservation and policy campaigner with the Wilderness Committee, stands in the Karen Creek clearcut. The Karen Creek watershed is located just east of Hope, B.C., and just off the Coquihalla Highway, within a Wildlife Habitat Area designated by the B.C. government to preserve spotted owl forest habitat. Photo: Wilderness Committee

The expert report, written by B.C.’s leading spotted owl biologist, Jared Hobbs, found that spotted owl recovery in B.C. is still technically and biologically feasible. It noted, however, that the province “will face several significant logistical, societal and economic challenges.”

Hobbs, a scientific advisor for the B.C.’s spotted owl recovery team from 2002 to 2006, found that recovery actions need to be implemented more “conservatively” with regard to timber harvest in spotted owl habitat and with “strict adherence to scientific principle.”

They also need to be implemented “without delay for improved habitat protection” if the province is committed to successfully recovering spotted owls in B.C., his report said.  

Joe Foy, co-executive director of the Wilderness Committee, pointed out that the U.S. has allocated four million hectares for spotted owl protection.

Canadian protection efforts have been “dismal” by comparison, Foy said, noting that only 218,350 total hectares of suitable habitat has been protected and the B.C. government continues to allow logging in old-growth forests suitable for spotted owls.

“This despicable state of affairs must stop now,” Foy said.

The UN report found that human actions have significantly altered three-quarters of the land-based environment and about two-thirds of the marine environment, with grim consequences for all life on earth.

Nature managed by Indigenous peoples and local communities is under increasing pressure but declining less rapidly than elsewhere, the report discovered.

The authors found that the global response to the biodiversity crisis is insufficient and that “transformative changes” are needed to restore and protect nature. However, they said it is not too late to make a difference if opposition from vested interests can be overcome for the greater public good.

The Wilderness Committee requested that McKenna let it know by June 30 of steps taken to produce a habitat action plan and that the plan be developed by the end of this year.

“Obviously we’d like her to see the urgency of this matter and react quicker than that,” Pepper-Smith said. “But we understand that there are other species out there who require action.”

He said it would be “completely unacceptable” for McKenna’s ministry to defer to the B.C. government once again.

“The evidence is in the forests with how few owls remain out there.”

Update Thursday, May 9 2019 at 4:08pm pst: This article was updated to include comment from Environment and Climate Change Canada that was not submitted before publication time.

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In mid-January, B.C. government officials trucked the last survivors of an endangered mountain caribou herd into a pen near Revelstoke. The elaborate rescue operation, which included two helicopter rides for the tranquilized animals, marked the official disappearance of the South Selkirk caribou herd from the landscape it had inhabited since the end of the last Ice Age.

David Moskowitz, a Washington-state based author and photographer, followed the demise of the transboundary herd. His new book, Caribou Rainforest: From Heartbreak to Hope, explores the rare and threatened rainforest that was home to the South Selkirk population and on which many imperilled caribou herds and a myriad other species depend.

Moskowitz is on a tour to highlight this iconic animal and remarkable landscape, starting with an event in Victoria on February 9.

The Narwhal asked him about his connection to caribou and his hopes for the future.

The interview has been edited for brevity. All photos and captions by David Moskowitz.

A subalpine forest and wetland in the Monashee Mountains, typical summer habitat for mountain caribou.

Why did caribou appeal to you as a book topic?

The book is an exploration of an ecosystem, with mountain caribou being the ambassador for the ecosystem. The goal of this book was to put the inland temperate rainforest on the map in a bigger way. The caribou rainforest, as we’re calling it, is a globally unique ecosystem that many, many people don’t even realize exists.

Can you describe this ecosystem?

The caribou rainforest is the only significant remaining inland temperate rainforest on the earth. It’s the headwaters of the Columbia and Fraser rivers and little bit of the south end of the Peace River and the upper end of the Hart ranges. It’s essentially a stacked series of mountain ranges in the interior of British Columbia and the Pacific Northwest.

Temperate rainforests are much rarer than tropical rainforests, and temperate rainforests that form in the interior of the continent are found nowhere else in the world in any significant quantity except right here in the Pacific Northwest. It is literally one of the most unique terrestrial ecosystems on planet Earth.

A climber on the north ridge of Mount Sir Donald, in the Selkirk Mountains, one of North America’s classic climbs.

How did you arrive at the title for the book?

It was our goal to put the ‘Caribou Rainforest’ ecosystem on the map in the same way that places like the Great Bear Rainforest, the Amazon, the Serengeti, or the Florida Everglades are places that people far and wide recognize as ecologically unique, stunning ecosystems worthy of protection.

I feel like the ‘Caribou Rainforest’ is a name that people can connect to with their minds and their hearts. Ultimately it’s our sense of connection to the places we depend on for our survival that will save those places and ourselves.

Sunset light over the Illecillewaet River in the Selkirk Mountains.

What are the biggest threats facing the inland temperate rainforest?

Climate change is a growing threat to the integrity of this ecosystem. Habitat fragmentation due to logging and road-building has probably had the biggest impact on this ecosystem. Mineral development has also been an issue. Because this ecosystem is so wet it rarely has burned in the past. So there are places that have been undisturbed since the end of the last Ice Age. It was the vast tracts of old-growth forest that allowed for species, and for mountain caribou in particular, to survive and develop a very unique lifestyle, [one that] that caribou have nowhere else in the world. Caribou need old-growth forests.

Patchwork, high-elevation clear-cuts like the ones shown here in the Hart Ranges fragment the refuge habitat that mountain caribou depend on.

Old-growth logging in the Selkirk Mountains.

Are the logs being hauled off to local mills and creating employment?

Logging in the inland temperate rainforest in British Columbia is an industrial practice. British Columbia is currently managing this ecosystem as a factory model. Part of the driver is local employment but it’s not the primary driver. The primary driver is corporate profit. Lots of the ways this wood is processed are designed for efficiency of profit rather than local employment.

This ancient forest in the Selkirk Mountains was clear-cut shortly after this photo was taken. The metal straps around the cedar tree keep the trunk from splitting when it is felled. The hemlock trees went to a pulp mill to make paper products.

You’re American, so what is it in particular that has inspired and intrigued you to spend so much time in the Canadian part of the inland temperate rainforest?

Roughly 80 per cent of this ecosystem is north of the border. I [went] from the top to the bottom of it, east to west, so that just means a lot of time in Canada.

I was interested in mountain caribou and so I went to find and photograph these animals. I knew a little about them and thought they were cool. I knew the mountain ranges where they lived were beautiful. So I thought it would be a fun adventure. And pretty quickly, within the first few weeks of fieldwork, I realized how endangered they were and how deeply connected they were to this very unique ecosystem. We are continuing to liquidate this ecosystem at a pretty alarming rate, despite decades of theoretical conservation measures.

It was just mind-boggling. I was driving up the road into beautiful caribou habitat and seeing the habitat coming down the road on logging trucks. We are logging old-growth forests in endangered species habitat in two of the most affluent and theoretically progressive countries on the planet.

Grizzly bears in the southern portion of the ecosystem, such as this one in the southern Selkirk Mountains, are considered threatened in Canada and endangered in the United States.

Downie Creek flows out of the northern Selkirk Mountains.

When you started this project there were about 25 animals in the South Selkirk herd, and now the herd is extirpated [locally extinct]. What was it like to witness that decline?

The South Selkirk herd was my entrance point into this story. My team spent a lot of time trying to track down and photograph these particular animals because it really did highlight the international nature of this story. Following their plight through years of fieldwork has been very engaging and pretty challenging.

People have asked me if I was surprised or shocked about the fate of those animals. What I’ve said is that it was extremely predictable. As soon as I got the broad brushstrokes of this story it was really apparent that that herd was heading towards disappearing. Without some massive effort to do something different, there was just no way that anything else was going to happen there. The fact that many people are surprised about that speaks to the fact that to some degree our culture has its head in the sand as to what’s happening in the world around us.

When we really take a candid look at what’s happening, not just for caribou but for many other species and ecosystems as a whole, that’s what’s coming. The sooner we can look at that with clear, honest eyes and really sort out that business-as-usual is not going to get a different result the better off we’ll be.

A group of mountain caribou traverses alpine slopes in winter in the Hart Ranges.

Has the disappearance of the South Selkirk herd resonated in the U.S.?

That was the last caribou herd in the contiguous United States. It’s really a milestone in the Anthropocene. If you look at it through an ecological lens it’s just another day to some degree. But when you look at it through a human cultural political lens it really is a marker.

The fact that it has garnered interest because of that really speaks to the nature of the issues that we face today. There’s a complete disconnect between ecological processes and human cultural processes.

The remains of a bull moose that was killed and fed on by a pack of wolves in the Selkirk Mountains in Washington State.

That herd has been going across the border between Canada and the U.S. for millennia, long before the border existed. Can you speak to that and what it symbolizes?

The herd lived in the southern Selkirk mountains. And the southern Selkirk mountains go across two states in the U.S. and take up a chunk of British Columbia and Canada. For them that was just their home. So, if we drew a map of the world as caribou see it, it would look very different than the one that humans see.

One of my goals in the book was to try to help give humans the perspective of caribou and ancient rainforests, to help people see the world through the eyes of things beside humans, and through the eyes of humans other than those we naturally connect to through our own cultural histories.

A lot of what’s happening in this ecosystem really lays bare the issues that we’re facing around the world. That includes things like the challenges you have to protect a single species when the ecosystem itself that it depends on is endangered.

Mountain lions are plentiful and mobile day and night in the Selkirk Mountain range.

Do you think that the day will ever come when caribou are back in the contiguous United States?

It’s not outside the realm of possibilities. I know for a fact there are many people south of the border — including Indigenous peoples from the Kalispell and Kootenai tribes that have treaty rights to have these traditional animals on their home range — who will force the issue with the U.S. government, that are going to be pushing for that. But I don’t think it’s by any means a guarantee. The future is dark and murky for all of us.

One of the last mountain caribou, whose home range straddles the international border between the United States and Canada in the southern Selkirk Mountains

Venerable coral lichen (Sphaerophorus venerabilis) is one of several species of lichens that exists only in oldgrowth rainforest stands.

Where do you find hope in all of this?

The ending of the book really focuses on that particular question. The reality of it is that all of us, all these different creatures in this ecosystem are all after the same things. We all want a safe and rich and healthy environment to raise future generations of our family and our kin.

When we recognize — and this is something I really got after talking to numerous Indigenous groups in the region — that we need to expand that nature of family, and expand that notion of who are the community members and family members that we need to tend to, there’s an infinite well of love and hope and desire to make things better.

I really want to inspire people, to engage people, to help people understand how beautiful this is and also to help us look at the challenges we face today without getting overwhelmed or shutting off to the pain and tragedy of what’s coming so that we can stay engaged and can move forward to take action to create an alternate future.

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They call her Grace. She was born last spring in a maternity pen for endangered caribou in the Columbia mountains north of Revelstoke, B.C. It was a difficult year for the Rearing Caribou in the Wild project; three females died during or soon after giving birth and two calves were euthanized after sustaining injuries.

The deaths were hard on volunteers and scientists who had spent almost five years working on the $2.4 million pilot project to try to save the Columbia North caribou herd in the Kootenay Boundary region from local extinction. Fearing additional mortalities, and facing unseasonably hot weather, they released the remaining 17 cows and 11 calves in June instead of in July as planned.

But more tragedy struck.

On June 29, when Grace was less than two months old, her mother was killed by wolves, and then other predators moved in. “The calf was observed on game cams around the pen and up the hill…being chased by a black bear and a grizzly bear,” says Darcy Peel, acting director of the B.C. government’s caribou recovery program.

Biologists feared the worst for Grace, named after the mountain where her mother had been captured. “But then she showed up at the [pen] gate,” Peel told The Narwhal. “The decision was made to bring her back into the pen, because she was not reconnecting with caribou…She went back in on August 9.”

Grace has lived in the pen by herself ever since, a solitary symbol of the nation-wide crisis that has befallen the species engraved on the Canadian quarter.

A mother and calf released from the Revelstoke maternity pen in July of 2016. Photo: Revelstoke Caribou Rearing in the Wild / Facebook

The Revelstoke Caribou Rearing in the Wild pen where Grace now lives in solitude. Photo: Revelstoke Caribou Rearing in the Wild / Facebook

Human disturbances, including clear-cut logging, mining and oil and gas development, have given natural predators like wolves easy access to caribou whose habitat has been destroyed or fragmented right across the country, with disastrous consequences for once-robust herds.

Plans are now underway to tranquilize the lone survivors from two other imperilled herds in the Kootenay Boundary region — the South Selkirk herd with only two females left and the South Purcell herd with four animals — and helicopter them to the pen, about a 90-minute drive north of Revelstoke.

The hope, Peel explains, is that those six survivors and Grace will eventually be released to find their way to about 145 animals in the Columbia North herd, the region’s largest remaining subpopulation of southern mountain caribou.

Grace, now about seven months old, is “doing really well” in the pen, says Peel. “She’s growing. She’s thriving.”

Triage

But even as the province leads the rescue mission, a B.C. government pilot study warns that caribou in the region are so perilously close to local extinction that penning projects and other management strategies are unlikely to recover populations, no matter how much money is spent.

Out of eight caribou subpopulations in the Kootenay Boundary area, five are now functionally extinct, according to information the provincial government provided to The Narwhal.

“We have left it too late,” says UBC scientist Tara Martin, who helped lead the 2017 pilot study, a joint initiative of the B.C. environment ministry and the ministry of forests, lands and natural resource operations.

“We have prioritized industrial development over the last 50 years and we haven’t been prioritizing conservation of caribou.”

Martin, a professor of conservation decision science in UBC’s forestry faculty, is at the forefront of a new approach to saving Canada’s at-risk species, and the B.C. government has taken a keen interest as it develops promised legislation to protect the province’s 1,807 species at risk of extinction.

B.C. approved 83 logging cut blocks in endangered caribou habitat in last six months

A mathematical approach to the conservation question

Known as priority threat management, the methodology has already been adopted by New Zealand and the state of New South Wales in Australia, where a majority of species vulnerable to extinction are now recovering.

Martin describes the methodology as “a mathematical equation to determine how to save as many species as possible for the least cost.”

“We are continuing to invest in species with a low likelihood of recovery at a very high cost,” she explains in a telephone interview from her home on Salt Spring Island.

“And while we do that a whole raft of other species are likely to become more endangered. So in order to avoid having more species in that critical state we need to think more carefully about how we’re using those resources.”

Priority threat management is similar to triage in the medical world. Used widely in World War 1 battlefields in France, army medics assessed the severity of injuries and prioritized stricken soldiers for treatment. Some soldiers were so grievously wounded their chances of survival were slight no matter how much medical attention they received. Doctors, equipped with woefully insufficient resources, focused on doing the greatest good for the greatest number of patients.  

If we think of B.C.’s at-risk species as early casualties of the extinction epidemic sweeping the globe, Martin says we need to identify which species in the province have the highest likelihood of recovery.

If no actions can be taken to ensure that species like caribou have a greater than 50 per cent chance of recovery, “these are the species that we should triage” so we can devote limited resources to helping species that stand a greater chance of persisting, she says.

“This approach is really about identifying those actions which have the highest chance of recovering as many species as possible. It also identifies which species are potentially beyond recovery.”

Martin wants to be perfectly clear that the issue is not that Kootenay Boundary caribou are too expensive to save. The B.C. government has contributed more than $500,000 to the Revelstoke penning project, for instance, and the federal government has dished out almost $1 million, according to an e-mail from the ministry of forests, lands, and natural resource operations.  

Land tenures in the Kootenay Boundary Region. Mining, smelting, logging, hydroelectric power generation, agriculture, ranching and tourism are all important drivers of the local economy. These activities have put tremendous pressure on local species of caribou, goat, sheep, elk, moose, wolf, lynx and cougar — all of which have become extirpated in many other ranges across North America. Image: Priority Threat Management Pilot Report

Rather, Martin says caribou in the region have “have basically gone beyond a tipping point because we haven’t acted soon enough.”

The analysis in the 96-page pilot study, which the provincial government released to The Narwhal upon request, suggests, as Martin puts it, that  “there’s very little you can do to have a self-sustaining population of caribou in 20 years in that region.”

“Of the options that are left on the table it’s likely that none of them are sufficient to bring caribou back,” says Martin, a prospect she calls “chilling.”

“The only time that this type of methodology suggests giving up on a species is when there’s no actions left on the table to take.”

Are we ‘giving up’ on some species?

UBC biologist Sarah Otto, who sits on the federal Species at Risk advisory committee, points out that Canada’s current approach to saving at-risk species is simply not working.

“We’ve got to try something different,” Otto says in an interview.

If being listed under the federal Species at Risk Act is the equivalent of going to hospital, getting a bed in the ICU signals that the overall health of vulnerable populations is likely to take a significant turn for the worse.

According to the World Wildlife Fund’s 2018 Living Planet Report, the populations of species listed under Canada’s Species at Risk Act have declined by an average 28 per cent since the Act was adopted in 2002.

Otto says funding is scattered among at-risk species without being prioritized “in an overarching fashion,” and in the absence of sufficient information about whether or not management strategies will be effective.

“That scattershot approach, I would say that’s the metaphor for having field medics that aren’t triaging,” she observes. “They’re running around trying to figure out what they can do.”  

Priority threat management has worried some scientists, who point out that the federal government is legally required to oversee recovery of more than 700 species listed under Canada’s Species at Risk Act, including southern mountain caribou. The David Suzuki Foundation fears the methodology could be used by governments and industry as an excuse for the continued destruction of endangered species habitat, a leading cause of extirpations and extinctions.

“It provides a perverse incentive to industrial players that drive species to the point at which they are deemed ‘too costly’ to save,” scientist David Suzuki wrote in an October blog post. “If species are abandoned, so are requirements for habitat protection and restoration that many industries see as limiting to their bottom line.”

“I absolutely in my heart wish it weren’t a business case issue…”

But Martin says priority threat management strengthens the business case for protecting as many at-risk species as possible.

“I absolutely in my heart wish it weren’t a business case issue because I have such a strong intrinsic valuation for species,” she says.

“What we’re doing is providing guidance. We’re saying that ‘there’s limited resources to invest, here’s how you invest them to save as many things as possible.’ At the moment we just don’t know the price tag for saving all of B.C.’s species at risk, or all of Canada’s species at risk. We need to understand what this will cost so we can close the funding gap.”

Brass tacks for B.C.’s Kootenay Boundary Region

In an e-mailed statement, the B.C. environment ministry confirmed that the provincial government plans “to build” on the pilot study “and lessons learned” as it develops species at risk legislation, “in order to help ensure that our recovery efforts provide the highest conservation benefits for taxpayer dollars.”

At Queensland University in Brisbane, Australia, Martin studied with the famous mathematician and biologist Hugh Possingham, who twinned species conservation with the field of decision science.

“It was definitely an ‘aha’ moment when I realized [that] trying to save everything was not going to work given that we didn’t have the resources to save everything,” Martin recalls. “We were squandering those resources, chasing species that had the lowest chance of recovery at the highest cost.”

Martin extended Possingham’s work on individual species to entire ecosystems, with an eye to highlighting management strategies — for example, habitat protection, disease management, or pollution and pesticide management — that would benefit as many species as possible.

She returned to B.C. in 2012 with a PhD that predicted the impact of livestock grazing on Australia’s woodland bird populations like the black-chinned honeyeater, a crow-sized bird that extracts nectar from flowers.

B.C.’s former Liberal government heard about Martin’s work and asked her to help lead the pilot study in the Kootenay Boundary area, a rugged mountainous landscape in B.C.’s southwest that covers eight million hectares.

The biodiverse region is home to 56 species and four ecological communities that the B.C. and federal governments list as vulnerable to extinction. They include fish such as white sturgeon and bull trout, mammals like the American badger, the Gillette’s Checkerspot butterfly and birds like the bobolink, a small blackbird with a bubbly, tinkling song that winters in South America.

The region is also home to 150,000 humans and an abundance of activities that have impacted species now struggling to persist, including extensive mining, smelting, logging, agriculture, hydroelectric power generation, ranching and tourism.

When Martin and government scientists applied priority threat management to the Kootenay Boundary area, they discovered that four species, including southern mountain caribou, are so close to local extinction that fast-disappearing populations are unlikely to persist no matter what actions are taken.

Joining caribou on what Martin calls the regional “extreme intensive care” list is the sharp-tailed grouse, a prairie chicken that congregates in places known as leks, where males pouf out their purple neck pouches and hold elaborate, foot-stomping dancing competitions to attract a mate. According to the pilot study, the grouse is already extirpated from the region.

The northern leopard frog, and the southern maidenhair fern — species which, along with the sharp-tailed grouse, are at the extent of their range in the Kootenay Boundary — are also on the list.

A sharp-tailed grouse in flight. The species is extirpated, locally extinct, in the B.C. Kootenay Boundary Region. Photo: Murray Foubister / Flickr

If we spend $1.6 million a year on optimal management strategies, the pilot study found that 51 of those 60 at-risk species have a greater than 50 per cent chance of persisting in 20 years. Those species include the blotched tiger salamander, of the world’s largest land-dwelling salamanders.

If we toss in another $4.5 million a year, the prairie falcon and Kootenay River white sturgeon are also likely to persist in the region in two decades.

And for $22 million a year over 20 years, all of the at-risk species and ecological communities — minus the four on the extreme intensive care list — are likely to persist “at levels sufficient to maintain viable, self-sustaining populations or ecosystems,” according to the study.  

Governments ‘shirking their responsibilities’

Martin says governments are “shirking their responsibilities and are not prioritizing conservation of species.”

“We’re in a position where we have insufficient resources,” she says. “And I think a large reason for this lack of resources is that we haven’t presented a clear business case for saving biodiversity. We have not articulated what it costs to save species and what the likelihood of success is.”

Martin and her postdoctoral fellow Laura Kehoe have also applied priority threat management methodology to Saskatchewan’s south of the divide region and B.C.’s intensely developed Fraser River area.

The 101 at-risk species in the Fraser area range from iconic southern resident orcas to the short-eared owl, a trio of bat species, and coastal ecosystem species such as the horned lark, western bumblebee and barn swallow.

For just under $500 million spent on optimal management strategies in the Fraser, there is a greater than 50 per cent chance that every single one of those species — including orcas — will have viable, thriving populations in 20 years, Martin says.

“If we act quickly we have a chance to save these species from extinction, but they’re already in a very dire state,” she cautions.

Otto, a Canada Research Chair in Theoretical and Experimental Evolution, also sees value in knowing how much it will cost to save at-risk species and comparing that to current spending levels.

“Then we have better information to tell the public and government, ‘well, at this level of conservation investment we’re not going to be able to protect the species we care about.’ In that sense, the goal is really to say where’s the mismatch between what we want as a society and what we’re doing and investing.”

The pilot study only looked at the Kootenay Boundary region, and not at other regions with endangered southern mountain caribou, including in the Peace, where construction of the W.A.C. Bennett hydro dam in the 1960s severed a key migration route, setting off a downward spiral from which local caribou populations have never recovered.

“The caveat is that we’ve only looked at this one particular region,” says Martin.

“If caribou have a chance, we need to be looking at management actions beyond the Kootenay region. It’s not the nail in the coffin necessarily for southern mountain caribou.”

This report was produced with financial assistance from the Unchartered Journalism Fund.

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.

This is an excerpt from the new book, Memory, published October 1, 2018 by the Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies at UBC.

Some years ago, I visited two places that in a different, more sensitive world would have surely been enshrined as memorials to the victims of the ecological catastrophes that occurred there. The first was the site of the last great nesting flock of passenger pigeons, a small stretch of woodland on the banks of the Green River near Bowling Green, Ohio. This story of extinction is well known. Yet until I stood in that cold, dark forest, I had never sensed the full weight, scale and violence of the disaster.

At one time, passenger pigeons accounted for 40 per cent of the entire bird population of North America. In 1870, when their numbers were already greatly diminished, a single column one mile wide and 320 miles long, containing an estimated two billion birds, passed over Cincinnati on the Ohio River. In 1813, as James Audubon travelled in a wagon from his home on the Ohio River to Louisville, some 60 miles away, a stream of passenger pigeons filled the sky, and the “light of the noonday sun was obscured as by an eclipse.” He reached Louisville at sunset, and the birds continued to come.

He estimated that the flock contained over one billion birds, and it was but one of several columns of pigeons that blackened the sky that day. Audubon visited roosting and nesting sites and found trees two feet in diameter broken off at the ground by the weight of birds. He saw dung so deep on the forest floor that he mistook it for snow. He compared the noise of the birds taking flight to that of a gale, the sound of their landing to thunder.

Depiction of a shooting in northern Louisiana, 1875. Image: Smith Bennet via via Wikimedia Commons

It is difficult now to imagine the ravages that would destroy this creature within 50 years. Throughout the 19th century, pigeon meat was the mainstay of the American diet, and merchants in eastern cities sold as many as 18,000 birds a day. Pigeon hunting was a full-time occupation for thousands of people. A typical shooting club would go through 50,000 birds in a weekend competition. By 1896, there were only a quarter million birds left.

In April of that year, the birds came together for one last nesting flock in the forest outside of Bowling Green. Telegraph wires hummed with the news, and the hunters converged. In a final orgy of slaughter, over 200,000 pigeons were killed, 40,000 were mutilated and 100,000 chicks were destroyed. A mere 5,000 birds survived. On March 24, 1900, the last passenger pigeon in the wild was shot by a young boy. On September 1, 1914, as the Battle of the Marne consumed the flower of European youth, the world’s last passenger pigeon died in captivity.

***

When I left the scene of this final slaughter, I travelled west to Sioux City, Iowa. There, I was fortunate to visit a remnant patch of tall-grass prairie, a 180-acre preserve that represents one of the largest remaining vestiges of an ecosystem that once carpeted large swaths of North America. As I walked through that tired field, my thoughts drifted from the plants to the horizon. I tried to imagine buffalo moving through the grass, the physics of waves as millions of animals crossed the prairie.

As late as 1871, buffalo outnumbered people in North America. In that year, one could stand on a bluff in the Dakotas and see nothing but buffalo in every direction for 30 miles. Herds were so large that it took days for them to pass a single point. Wyatt Earp described one herd of a million animals stretching across a grazing area the size of Rhode Island. Within nine years of that sighting, buffalo had vanished from the plains.

“This capacity to forget, this fluidity of memory, has dire implications in a world dense with people, all desperate to satisfy their immediate material needs.”

The destruction of the buffalo resulted from a campaign of biological terrorism unparalleled in the history of the Americas. The policy of the federal government of the United States was explicit: exterminate the buffalo and destroy the commissary of the great cultures of the plains. Over 100 million bison were slaughtered. A decade after Native resistance collapsed, the general who orchestrated the campaign advised Congress to mint a commemorative medal with a dead buffalo on one side, a dead “Indian” on the other.

As I thought of this history, standing in that tall-grass prairie, what disturbed me most was the ease with which we have removed ourselves from this ecological tragedy. Today, the good and decent people of Iowa live contentedly in a landscape of cornfields claustrophobic in its monotony.

The era of the tall-grass prairie, like the time of the buffalo, is as distant from their lives as the fall of Rome or the siege of Troy. Yet the terrible events unfolded but a century ago, well within the lifetime of their grandparents. This capacity to forget, this fluidity of memory, has dire implications in a world dense with people, all desperate to satisfy their immediate material needs. Confronted by the consequences of our actions, there is always the path of forgetfulness.

***

Humans, of course, have long impacted their environments. Pre-Columbian peoples deforested much of Andean Peru long before the rise of the Inca. The severely eroded and barren hills of the Loess Plateau were once a flat and fertile plain covered with forests and rich grasslands, the cradle of ancient Chinese civilization. Romans and Greeks over many centuries destroyed the rich forests of Lebanon and virtually all timbered lands surrounding the Mediterranean. The extent of deforestation caused by successive Mayan civilizations in the lowlands of the Peten is only beginning to be fully appreciated. Successive generations of Polynesians exhausted the resources of Rapanui, or Easter Island, literally eating themselves out of house and home.

The story of Easter Island has become an ecological fable because it speaks directly to the fate of the world today. Yet we remain haunted by a capacity to forget that lingers like a vestigial and necrotic appendage on the body of humanity. Perhaps ecological amnesia served our needs in the past, as we gradually degraded the natural world over generations.

But today the time frame has contracted dramatically, even as our capacity to destroy the environment has expanded to an industrial scale, with no place on the planet beyond reach. If the Mediterranean forests fell to the Roman axe over centuries, the landscape of Sarawak, homeland of scores of Indigenous cultures dependent on the forest for their survival, was converted by chainsaw and bulldozer to wasteland in a mere generation. And yet we continue to forget.

How many of us remember, for example, that as recently as the 1920s the Colorado River delta was lush and fertile — a “milk and honey wilderness,” in the words of Aldo Leopold. Today it is a wasteland of barren mudflats, with the river but a toxic trickle in the sand. The Gulf of Alaska once turned a golden hue with the sheer numbers of returning salmon, a sight unlikely to be seen again.

Off the shores of Newfoundland, cod were so abundant that ships with wind in their sails made little progress, blocked by the density of fish in the water. Europe and much of the New World lived on the catch for 300 years. Then, in the years of my youth, factory ships industrialized the fishery and in a single generation reduced the species to a shadow in the sea.

Bison skulls await industrial processing at Michigan Carbon Works, outside of Detroit, in 1892. Photo via Wikimedia Commons

As recently as the 1920s, Haiti was 80 per cent forested. Today, less than two per cent of its forest cover remains. I recall one day walking along a barren ridge with an old man who waxed eloquent as if words alone might squeeze beauty from the desolate valley of scrub and halfhearted trees that reached before us to the horizon. Though witness to an ecological holocaust that had devastated his entire country within a century, he had managed to adorn his life with his imagination.

This capacity was inspiring but also terrifying. People appear to be able to tolerate and adapt to almost any degree of environmental degradation. As the farmers of Iowa today live without wild things, Newfoundlanders survive without cod, and the people of Haiti scratch a living from soil that may never again know the comfort of shade.

***

From a distance, both in time and in space, we can perceive these terrible and poignant events for what they were, unmitigated ecological disasters that robbed us and the future of something unimaginably precious in order to satisfy the immediate mundane needs of the present. The luxury of hindsight, however, does little to cure the blindness with which we today overlook deeds of equal magnitude and folly. In a manner that will be difficult for our descendants to comprehend, we drift towards a world in which people take for granted an impoverished environment, transformed by foolish negligence and reduced by expediency to a shadow of the glory that once was.

“Our capacity to forget and adapt to successive degrees of environmental degradation is less a human trait than a consequence of culture.”

In three generations, a mere moment in the history of our species, we have throughout the world contaminated the water, air and soil, driven countless species to extinction, dammed the rivers, poisoned the rain and torn down the ancient forests. As Harvard biologist E.O. Wilson reminds us, this era will not be remembered for its wars or technological advances but as the time when men and women stood by and either passively endorsed or actively supported the massive destruction of biological diversity on the planet.

Given the dire consequences, how might we explain this peculiar and ultimately self-destructive capacity to shed memory and shift our expectations as we adapt to an increasingly impoverished world? Were this to be a fundamental adaptive trait of our species, we would surely find evidence scattered throughout the ethnographic record. But most assuredly we do not.

The Colorado River Delta. Photo: Stuart Rankin via Flickr

Indeed, to the contrary, most Indigenous peoples cultivate fidelity to the deepest of memories, myths that both link the living to the ancestral past and illuminate the way to the future. Take, for example, the Indigenous peoples of Australia, who thrived as guardians of their world for over 55,000 years. In all that time, the desire to improve upon the natural world, to tame the rhythm of the wild, never touched them. Indigenous people accepted life as it was, a cosmological whole, the unchanging creation of the first dawn, when the primordial ancestors sang the world into existence.

The Europeans who washed ashore on the beaches of Australia in the last years of the 18th century lacked the language or imagination even to begin to understand the profound intellectual and spiritual achievements of Indigenous Australians. What they saw was a people who lived simply, people with modest technological achievements, strange faces and incomprehensible habits. To European eyes, the Indigenous people were the embodiment of savagery.

By the early years of the 20th century, a combination of disease, exploitation and murder had reduced the Indigenous population from well over a million at the time of European contact to a mere 30,000. In little over a century, a land bound together by songlines — through which the people moved effortlessly from one dimension to the next, from the future to the past and from the past to the present — was transformed from Eden to Armageddon. The manner by which the Indigenous peoples of Australia imbued the natural world with a sense of the sacred is not contrary to science but rather an acknowledgment of the complexity and wonder of ecological and biological systems that science illuminates. It suggests that our capacity to forget and adapt to successive degrees of environmental degradation is less a human trait than a consequence of culture.

***

As a young man, I was raised on the coast of British Columbia to believe that the rainforests existed to be cut. This was the ideology of scientific forestry that I studied in school and practised in the woods as a logger. This cultural perspective was profoundly different from that of the local First Nations. Whereas I was sent into the forest to cut it down, a Kwakwa̱ka̱’wakw youth of similar age was traditionally dispatched during his hamatsa initiation into those same forests to confront Huxwhukw and the Crooked Beak of Heaven, cannibal spirits living at the north end of the world. Is the forest mere cellulose and board feet? Or is the forest the domain of the spirits?

Herein, perhaps, lies the essence of the relationship between many Indigenous peoples and the natural world. The malarial swamps of New Guinea, the chill winds of Tibet and the white heat of the Sahara leave little room for sentiment. Nostalgia is not a trait commonly associated with the Inuit. Nomadic hunters and gatherers in Borneo have no conscious sense of stewardship for mountain forests that they lack the technical capacity to destroy.

What these cultures have done, however, is to forge through time and ritual a traditional mystique of the earth that is based not only on deep attachment to the land but also on far more subtle intuition — the idea that the land itself is breathed into being by human consciousness. They do not perceive mountains, rivers and forests as being inanimate, as mere props on a stage upon which the human drama unfolds. For these societies, the land is alive, a dynamic force to be embraced and transformed by the human imagination, sustained by memory.

Perhaps this explains why it is impossible for the Haida to forget the colour of the sea in the fall, and why the Lakota still hear the thunder of bison crossing the prairies, and why, in the wasted homeland of the Penan in Borneo, shadows still mark the ground where trees once stood in the forest. Just as 18th-century slavers concocted racial fantasies to mask the evil of their trade, perhaps we have learned to shed memory to avoid confronting the actual consequences of our egregious violations of the natural world. Our shifting expectations and dimming memory are less an adaptive trait than a reflexive impulse. If we are responsible for the numbing of our own senses, we can surely awaken to new possibilities as stewards of life, inspired by Indigenous peoples who have walked this path before us, guided by a conscience informed by memory.

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The spotted owlet lay in his incubator, refusing bits of rat muscle offered on tweezers. If he survived he would soon grow enough fluff to put a poodle to shame. But right now his skin had the texture of a plucked chicken and a few errant white feathers stuck up at odd angles, making him one of the most pathetic-looking creatures biologist Jasmine McCulligh had ever seen.

McCulligh had worked non-stop for four days in a row at the B.C. government-funded Northern Spotted Owl Breeding Program in Langley. She was on call while the owlet hatched over 85 hours in a lab called Artificial Inc., as a playlist of spotted owl calls and forest bird song rolled in the background. Now she lay on the laboratory floor, exhausted. The one-day old owlet crumpled in his plastic tray, crying.

McCulligh knew the breeding centre could not afford to lose this newborn. At that point in time, in April 2017, there were only six spotted owls left in B.C.’s wild, even though scientists had been sounding the alarm for decades about widespread destruction of the species’ ancient rainforest habitat.

Ten years into operation, the breeding centre had hatched just eight other spotted owls —  and one was blind, couldn’t fly and laid eggs in her water dish. “It was the most stressful thing of my entire life,” McCulligh remembered. “It was at the point where I just didn’t know what to do anymore.”

Jasmine McCulligh, biologist with the Northern Spotted Owl Breeding Centre, holds an artificial egg used to gather data in the nests of breeding pairs. Photo: Carol Linnitt / The Narwhal

A spotted owl hatching known as D-17. Photo: Northern Spotted Owl Breeding Program

D-17 at 12 days old. Photo: Northern Spotted Owl Breeding Program

Raising endangered spotted owls at the world’s only breeding centre for the species is part science and part educated guesswork, and takes deep pockets as well as conviction. It’s not as though biologists can google the correct antibiotic dose for an ailing chick or flip through a textbook to learn how to improve egg fertility. And then there’s the unanswered question of why spotted owls in captivity take so long to have sex. One male and female at the centre shared an aviary for four years before they mated.

“We’ve had to learn everything,” said McCulligh, the breeding centre’s multi-tasking coordinator and spotted owl specialist. “It’s been a huge, steep learning curve trying to figure out the best possible way to take care of the species here. We’ve learned that the spotted owl is so unique and special that it has specific requirements.”

Spotted owls rose from obscurity to distinction in the 1980s and 1990s and became a symbol of the destruction of ancient rainforests in the Pacific Northwest. In the U.S., debate and lawsuits raged over logging in the owl’s habitat and mill towns famously sold t-shirts and bumper stickers with the slogan, “Save a Logger, Eat an Owl.”

Logging was halted in old-growth Pacific Northwest forests in the early 1990s after the owl was listed under the broad-reaching U.S. Endangered Species Act. But the species has continued to decline in the U.S., in large part because so much of its habitat was already destroyed and because the barred owl, an invading bigger cousin, is moving into spotted owl territories.

In Canada, a legally mandated federal recovery strategy released in 2006 has been an abysmal failure. Spotted owls are now functionally extinct in Canada’s wild, where an estimated 1,000 of the raptors once lived in southwestern B.C.’s old-growth forests of Douglas fir, western hemlock and western red cedar. For 12 years, the B.C. government has steadfastly avoided identification of the owl’s critical habitat, required by the recovery strategy. This year, a full-time B.C. government spotted owl biologist detected only three spotted owl individuals in the Canadian wild, all in the Fraser Canyon. He found no breeding pairs.

A Northern Spotted Owl, strix occidentalis caurina, in southern B.C. Photo: Jared Hobbs

Map of logging in spotted owl habitat. B.C. has approved clear-cut logging in areas it set aside for spotted owl recovery at the same time as committing nearly $1.5 million to the experimental captive breeding program since 2014. Map: Wilderness Committee

The decimation of B.C.’s spotted owl population has scientists on both sides of the border asking tough questions about how we manage the 600 species legally protected under Canada’s Species at Risk Act. From feeding and medicating an ailing orca whale near Victoria to sedating pregnant caribou and flying them in helicopters to a breeding pen high in the Misinchinka mountains in northeast B.C., substantial amounts of money are being spent on increasingly complex efforts to recover endangered species while governments quietly sanction destruction of their habitat. The B.C. government, for instance, has approved clear-cut logging in areas it set aside for spotted owl recovery, while sinking almost $1.5 million into the experimental captive breeding program since 2014.

“The species is now circling the drain,” said U.S. conservation scientist Dominick DellaSala, who has worked on spotted owls as part his global work in rainforests. “We’ve got to get to the point where we’re not in the critical care unit of a hospital where the patient, in this case the owl, is on life support.”  

As a postdoctoral student, DellaSala hiked through old-growth rainforests in the Pacific northwest, hooting in the hopes of getting a call back from a spotted owl, assessing the species’ habitat needs and prey base “so we could do something about the owl before it got to the situation we’re in today.”

“We’ve put them in the ICU of captive breeding,” DellaSala told The Narwhal. “And when we have put a species in that situation, just like putting a person in ICU, you run the risk that it isn’t going to work. You’re down to the last few individuals and you can’t really make a mistake because [if you do] that’s it, it’s gone.”

Pulling out every stop to save the ailing hatchling, McCulligh called in a veterinarian, who diagnosed an infection and prescribed antibiotics. But nobody knew the correct dose for a spotted owlet that weighed half as much as a tennis ball and could fit in a teacup with room to spare, so they gave him diluted antibiotics drops. “You can’t do an intramuscular injection on something that doesn’t have muscle,” McCulligh said. “We’d give him a little drop and he hated it. You could tell he’d got it in his system.”

The owl survived with around the clock intensive care. Once he could swallow muscle, he was hand-fed pieces of rat organ meat and later, when he could regurgitate a pellet, rodent bones and fur. Today, the 18 month-old owl lives in a spacious aviary at the breeding centre, which houses 20 other spotted owls, including three from the U.S. and eight individuals brought in from the wild by B.C. government biologists to boost the breeding stock, as well as one owl hit by a car.

McCulligh describes the intensive incubation process for spotted owls. Photo: Carol Linnitt / The Narwhal

Temperature controlled incubator where owl eggs are incubated for 32 days. Breeding centre staff began artificially incubating eggs after some were broken and consumed by captive females. Photo: Carol Linnitt / The Narwhal

The ugly duckling has become a beautiful raptor, with chocolate brown eyes, a heart-shaped facial disc and dark feathers bejeweled with creamy white spots. A retinue of biologists and technicians monitor his health and progress. Each late afternoon — at dusk during breeding season — two grain-fed euthanized mice or one euthanized juvenile rat are delivered to his feeding platform.

The owl was named Dante, which means enduring. “He’s a little champ now,” McCulligh said. “I get goosebumps thinking of it. One of my proudest moments was to see this chick get better.”

I first met McCulligh at a fundraiser for the spotted owl breeding centre. It was one of a number of fundraisers — including document shredding and Adopt-an-Owl and Adopt-an-Egg programs — that she and other recovery centre staff and volunteers organize each year to supplement government funding for the centre. (The centre’s 2018 budget is $362,000, with $270,000 in direct funding from the B.C. government.)

I’d been trying to reach the B.C. government manager in charge of the breeding program to get permission for a breeding centre visit and ask about the status of spotted owls after the B.C. government announced its 2006 plan to protect them from Canadian extinction.

Journalist Sarah Cox interviews McCulligh outside an aviary at the spotted owl breeding facility. Photo: Carol Linnitt / The Narwhal

A rat bred for food at the spotted owl breeding facility. Photo: Carol Linnitt / The Narwhal

McCulligh said on the phone that she’d be happy to offer a tour but couldn’t speak to journalists without permission from the B.C. Ministry of Forests, Lands, and Natural Resource Operations. That ministry, it turned out, was both in charge of spotted owl recovery efforts and responsible for issuing permits to log in spotted owl habitat.

Trolling through the breeding centre’s Facebook page I had spotted an ad for the centre’s annual pub night “Meet the Team” fundraiser at the Townhall Public House in Coquitlam, a former mill town. A $25 ticket procured me a pub grub dinner, a glass of wine and, I hoped, a sighting of the program’s government manager.

In the wood-walled pub, built to service millworkers, was a screen with rotating black and white photographs of old-time loggers standing on planks felling old-growth trees the girth of a bus. The photographs had almost certainly been taken in former spotted owl habitat stretching from the Lower Mainland to north of Lillooet, where the species often raised its young in dead tree cavities or “stovepipes” where wind had snapped off treetops. The old-growth canopy afforded protection from predators like the Great Horned Owl and harboured plenty of flying squirrels and packrats, mainstays of the spotted owl diet.

The government manager was nowhere to be seen, but a raffle offered nine tempting prize packs displayed on thick wooden bar tables. One prize was a tour of the spotted owl breeding facility. I bought 10 numbered raffle tickets and stuffed the jar.

The next morning, an e-mail from McCulligh informed me I had won the tour package. I could have the tour anytime I wanted, she said, but she still wouldn’t be able to grant me an interview without permission from the ministry.

Three weeks later, permission finally secured, I waited for McCulligh outside locked gates at a bucolic property nestled in rolling green hills.

A pastoral scene near the captive breeding facility in Langley, B.C. Photo: Carol Linnitt / The Narwhal

McCulligh, a hazel-eyed, fast-talking millennial, grew up in Ontario dreaming of raising endangered species to release into the wild. But it was the iconic large mammals she envisioned, not avians. She was largely unfamiliar with spotted owls until 2012, when a friend sent her a posting for an unpaid internship at the breeding centre just as she completed a degree in wildlife biology at the University of Guelph. She loved working with spotted owls so much she stayed.

“Those birds are unreal to see in person,” she said. “It’s really special. I feel so lucky to work with them…And then on a grand scheme level I’ve learned in this job that it’s not about the species. It’s about the ecosystem and conservation in general. You can save one species and save so many other species because it [the spotted owl] is an umbrella species and an ecosystem indicator. It’s not just about the spotted owl. It’s about the entire Pacific northwest ecosystem — the coastal region at least.”

We parked beside a handful of trailers brought in by the B.C. government as part of its initial $450,000 investment in infrastructure for the breeding enterprise. Outside, an intern scrubbed plastic cages for future owl food — 350 to 400 mice and rats housed in a trailer that sounded like a pet store on steroids, humming with scuffling and squeaks. A dozen teeny mice, born only hours earlier, were so translucent we could see milk in their bellies.

McCulligh and her colleague at their trailer office. Photo: Carol Linnitt / The Narwhal

Translucent baby mice at just a few hours old. Photo: Carol Linnitt / The Narwhal

Rat feed for the spotted owls. Photo: Carol Linnitt / The Narwhal

The owls reside in treed aviaries, each separated by latticework and guarded by electric fences to ward off weasels and raccoons. Mindful not to disturb them, the only breeding owl aviary we stopped at was the one belonging to Oregon, the unflappable male rescued as a chick in his namesake state.

Oregon roosted high on a snag, occasionally preening his mottled chest feathers, staring straight past us. Every so often, he emitted a gentle, cooing hoot.

He shared his aviary with his prospective mate, captive-born Skalula, camouflaged among the branches.

“They’re not bonded yet,” said McCulligh. “They hang out and I think they’re really close to being bonded.” Bonding indicates a pair has copulated and produced eggs, she explained.

Cox and McCulligh search for spotted owls, Oregon and Skalula, in their quiet aviary. Photo: Carol Linnitt / The Narwhal

Oregon, a northern spotted owl, in his aviary at the breeding facility. Photo: Carol Linnitt / The Narwhal

The centre’s original plan was to release spotted owls into the wild starting this year. But those plans are now on hold, in part because the centre’s four bonded pairs are very slow to reproduce. There’s only a 25 per cent chance that an occasional egg will be fertile and an even smaller chance the spider-like embryo inside will have a heartbeat eight days after conception.

Spotted owls usually mate for life, but courtship — at least in captivity — can stretch over years and females are choosy about their mates. Shania, the first chick born in the program in 2008, to parents Einstein and Shakkai, spurned the first two males that staff placed in her adjoining aviary, connected by a tunnel.

Only after two years of sharing space with her third suitor, a young dominant male named Scud, did Shania finally accept his advances. At first the owls sat beside each other on a branch, like shy teenagers at a school dance, and preened each other’s feathers. Later, Scud brought Shania euthanized mice and rats from his feeding tray to demonstrate his provisionary skills. When Shania finally accepted his prey delivery staff knew they were on track. They grew even more excited when they saw Shania pulling belly feathers in preparation for incubating an egg. The bonded pair is now the centre’s most productive, producing fertilized eggs that hatched in 2016 and 2017.

Outside of breeding season staff sometimes put live rodents in flower box-like “mouse arenas” to give the owls a chance to hone their hunting instincts.

Cameras in nest boxes monitor copulation — five times one night for one pair during breeding season, and none at all for four-year old Jay and one-and-a-half year-old Bella, whom McCulligh described as the cutest spotted owl pair you’ll ever see. “They’re always hanging out together and will follow each other around. They’re very, very attached to each other but they never copulate. They didn’t lay eggs. Nothing.”

A juvenile spotted owl takes up temporary residence on its dispersal, Cayoosh Creek near Lillooet, B.C. Photo: Jared Hobbs

An adult female Northern Spotted Owl found in a nesting stand near Hope, B.C. Photo: Jared Hobbs

In an effort to boost sperm counts, selenium-rich sardines are included in the diet of rodents bred at the centre. Biologists have even pruned feathers from the captive females’ vents — the only “out door” on the bird — in an effort to allow “greater opportunity for fertilization,” according to Ian Blackburn, the B.C. government manager in charge of the spotted owl breeding centre.

“The program has had its challenges,” Blackburn said in a phone interview when I finally caught up with him. “Our assumption of when we thought owls would start to breed was that by age three they would be fully functioning breeding birds. And this was proven to be wrong in the captive sense, or at least at the captive breeding centre.”

Some captive female spotted owls at the centre don’t breed until they are eight or nine, while one male didn’t copulate and produce a fertile egg until he was 10, said Blackburn, a wildlife biologist who coordinated the spotted owl breeding centre until five years ago. “We’re kind of perplexed.”

At first biologists took a hands-off approach to egg laying and hatching, believing, said Blackburn, that the “owls knew how to do it better than we do.” But in 2011, after discussion with zoos, they decided to artificially incubate the eggs. “Eggs were being broken or disappearing altogether because the female ate it,” Blackburn explained. “That’s your precious commodity, that egg. That was the turning point.”

Despite the slow progress, McCulligh and Blackburn remain optimistic about the breeding program, pointing out that the centre has met its first goal of increasing the population from four owls to 21. Most of the breeding owls are young and chicks born next year could be released after their first winter, Blackburn said, noting, “we’re still waiting for that bumper crop to show up.”

Hopes were buoyed this April when a ninth chick, Bridget, hatched at the breeding centre. Unlike chickens, when spotted owls are born “they can’t stand up,” McCulligh said. “Their eyes are closed. Their ears are closed. They kind of just wobble and roll around a lot.”

A spotted owl and youngster at the breeding facility. Photo: Northern Spotted Owl Breeding Program

Bridget, on her return trip at 10 days old. Photo: Northern Spotted Owl Breeding Program

Clad in sterile gowns, masks and gloves, McCulligh and other centre staff wiped the hatchling’s waste and monitored her constantly to make sure her spindly legs didn’t splay. They weighed her four times a day and examined the chick thoroughly every 24 hours to ensure good health.

When the owlet was 10 days old, she was removed from the Artificial Inc. lab and given to foster parents in the hopes of encouraging her biological parents to lay another egg. Just as the biological parents had been none the wiser when staff replaced Bridget’s egg with a sensor egg made in a laboratory (store-bought chicken eggs are sometimes used as a substitute), foster parents Scud and Shania didn’t seem at all perturbed to find an unexpected hatchling in their nest box. The new parents immediately shredded rat meat for their charge, nuzzling her with affection.

Dante at three to five days old. Photo: Northern Spotted Owl Breeding Centre

Dante at about 10 days old being fed raw, euthanized rat meat. Photo: Northern Spotted Owl Breeding Centre

“We got one chick,” McCulligh said. “That’s exciting. In five years we have doubled the population. I don’t think you can let discouragement be a word here. It’s a slow build.”

The question of whether the centre’s slow build will ever translate into a viable spotted owl population in B.C.’s wild concerns wildlife biologist Jared Hobbs. Hobbs was a scientific advisor for the B.C.’s spotted owl recovery team from 2002 to 2006. He stepped down when the provincial government decided to focus on captive breeding as a primary plank in its spotted owl recovery strategy while continuing to allow logging in spotted owl habitat, pointing out that B.C.’s recovery strategy was not completely aligned with scientific recommendations outlined in a spotted owl recovery plan.

“In B.C. it’s still completely legal to log a spotted owl nest as long as the owl is not in the nest.”

“I’ve been watching ever since, keeping my finger on the pulse but it’s disheartening,” said Hobbs, also a professional photographer and author of the book Spotted Owls: Shadows in an Old-Growth Forest.

Hobbs said the founder population for captive breeding was notably small and there were challenges with husbandry — for instance, the owls could not learn to forage on their principle wild diet of flying squirrels and packrats. And a new set of hurdles will have to be jumped if captive-bred owls are released into an ecosystem they have never before encountered, lacking training from their parents, he said.

“Am I optimistic that we’ll see a self-sustaining population of spotted owls in British Columbia in the future? No, I’m sadly pessimistic. But I do think it’s possible. Recovery will require that we change the way we manage spotted owl habitat.”

On its website, the B.C. government claims 363,000 hectares is being “managed” for spotted owl recovery. But about half of that habitat is not currently suitable for the species, according to Hobbs, who also points out that just over half of the habitat managed for spotted owls — 190,000 hectares — was already conserved in provincial parks and protected areas.

And that’s not all, because the B.C. government also allows logging in 108,000 hectares designated as wildlife habitat areas for the spotted owl, as long as those areas are managed to ensure two-thirds of the land base retain suitable habitat.

“Much of the area set aside for spotted owl habitat on Crown land is not currently suitable for spotted owls due to previous timber harvests,” said Hobbs.

The Karen Creek clearcut, in a watershed located just east of Hope, B.C., within a Wildlife Habitat Area designated by the B.C. government to preserve Northern Spotted Owl habitat. Photo: Wilderness Committee

Charlotte Dawe, conservation and policy campaigner with the Wilderness Committee, stands in the Karen Creek clearcut. Photo: Wilderness Committee

Also troubling, the B.C. government allows timber harvesting in 75 per cent of the 51,000 hectares it calls “managed future habitat areas” for the owl, even though it could take hundreds of years for suitable habitat to re-grow. “In B.C. it’s still completely legal to log a spotted owl nest as long as the owl is not in the nest,” Hobbs pointed out.

Recovery efforts are hampered because of a provincial government decision that there be no net loss to timber revenues in any proposed future management areas for spotted owls, said Hobbs, noting, “It’s a challenge to recover spotted owls in B.C. with no net gain to its habitat.”

DellaSala likened the spotted owl to the quintessential canary in a coal mine. The owl is an indicator of a “whole complex ecosystem with all the parts that are in jeopardy,” he said. “This is just one of the parts and it’s telling us we have not done a responsible job of maintaining the old-growth ecosystems upon which the owl and thousands of other species depend.”

When old-growth rainforests are fragmented and clear-cut, “it’s not just the owl, it’s goshawks, it’s murrelets, it’s tree voles, it’s lichen,” said DellaSala, president and chief scientist of Oregon’s Geos Institute. “It’s caribou as you go further inland. It’s salmon. It’s a whole collection of species, it’s the sum of the parts of the ecosystem. And we all depend on that ecosystem for clean air, climate security, clean water and recreation. We’re all in this together and the owl is the symbol of how we overextended ourselves in terms of logging.”

Governments have known for decades that the spotted owl was in trouble, yet they have avoided taking sufficient action to reverse that downward trend. Spotted owls were assessed as endangered in 1986 by the Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife in Canada, when only a few hundred remained in the wild.

Ten years later, with the population in steep decline, a listing under the federal Species at Risk Act compelled the B.C. government to develop a spotted owl recovery strategy in 2006. The federal recovery strategy clearly identified the primary obstacles to spotted owl survival and recovery: destruction of old-growth habitat and fragmentation of remaining habitat.

“It’s universally known that the biggest threat to the spotted owl is habitat destruction in old-growth forests.”

Recovery of the species was “ecologically and biologically feasible,” according to the strategy, which set a goal of at least 250 adult owls in the wild.

Only two years later, the Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife in Canada noted a “catastrophic” population decline — to just 19 individuals — as even more habitat was clear-cut and fragmented. Juvenile spotted owls were not surviving dispersal, which sent them across clear-cut landscapes where risk of predation was far higher than in the relatively closed canopy of old-growth forests.

“All adults are old and near the end of their breeding age and there is no recruitment of young owls into the population,” the committee reported. “If current trends are not reversed, extirpation will likely occur within the next decade.”

One of the first priorities of the Canadian Spotted Owl Recovery Team was to establish — within a year of its formation in 2006 — the total amount and distribution of recovery habitat. The definition of critical habitat was deemed to be “urgent.”

But 12 years later, critical habitat has still not been identified.

Environmental lawyer Kegan Pepper-Smith called the delay “absolutely shocking, especially considering it’s universally known that the biggest threat to the spotted owl is habitat destruction in old-growth forests.”

“So long as we see this essentially unfettered destruction of old-growth habitat we’re going to see species like the spotted owl make their way towards extirpation if not extinction,” said Pepper-Smith, a lawyer with Ecojustice, which in 2004 launched a legal case seeking an emergency order to protect spotted owls under the federal Species At Risk Act. The case was dropped when the recovery plan was announced.

“We need a re-assessment of the way we prioritize timber supply of old-growth forests and the relation to protecting these species that have relied on this habitat for millenia,” Pepper-Smith told The Narwhal.

And now there is another wrinkle in the prospects for northern spotted owl recovery. Bigger, more aggressive barred owls are competing with the spotted owl for habitat, after migrating west of their historic range.

Barred owls can thrive in fragmented habitats and don’t depend on old-growth rainforests like their spotted owl cousin. “Barred owls aren’t choosy,” noted Blackburn. “With spotted owls excluded from these fragmented landscapes barred owls have just moved right in.”

“If there’s a breeding pair of spotted owls they can defend the territory. But if one mate disappears that individual bird has a hard time defending the territory. There’s just no other spotted owl around to come and pair up with it and defend it. Eventually they get pushed out.”

Just as the B.C. government shoots wolves from helicopters to try to save endangered caribou, the B.C. government and U.S. state governments also shoot barred owls to give spotted owls a chance. Over the past decade, the B.C. government has removed 189 barred owls from spotted owl habitat; 138 were captured and relocated and 51 were shot at active or recently occupied spotted owl sites, according to Blackburn.

Jasmine McCulligh. “In five years we have doubled the population. I don’t think you can let discouragement be a word here. It’s a slow build,” she told The Narwhal. Photo: Carol Linnitt / The Narwhal

At the same time, the provincial government also keeps two breeding pairs of barred owls at the spotted owl centre and hatches their eggs in incubators. Barred owls are proving to be prolific breeders in captivity compared to spotted owls, and most of their eggs are fertile. Over the past several years, the centre has released 10 captive-born barred owls with GPS backpacks to track their flight and progress — to practice for the eventual release of spotted owls, Blackburn said. One artificially incubated barred owl named Forrest accompanies breeding centre staff on school visits.

Barred owl captive breeding offers an opportunity to experiment with techniques such as mending cracks in eggs with glue, which could prove useful for spotted owl breeding, according to Blackburn. The centre has also placed barred owl babies with spotted owls to assess parenting skills. “We put in some barred owls for them to practice on and they all did great, awesome parenting,” he said. “It was quite interesting to see how immediate it was. Their mate would come and bring food immediately to the barred owl baby.”

Hobbs said the spotted owl needs governments to set the stage to allow it to recover.

“We need to give them the habitat they need to persist so they can co-evolve with barred owls and learn how to out-compete this owl or co-exist with it. And if we can do all that then we may have spotted owls in the future.”

DellaSala credits the spotted owl with teaching him an important lesson in life as he spent time climbing nest trees, examining what they ate, and learning about old-growth rainforests: that humans are part of ecosystems and depend on them.

“They’re one of a kind, they’re remarkable. It just saddens me when we don’t appreciate life.”

This report was produced with financial assistance from the Unchartered Journalism Fund.

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B.C. will continue to kill wolves for at least a decade in an attempt to save endangered caribou according to government documents released this week — but new research re-confirms that caribou declines are primarily caused by industrial development.

The province recently finished the first year of its province-wide wolf cull, which resulted in the killing of 84 animals. But documents released to the Globe and Mail indicate the B.C. government is aware habitat destruction is at the root of declining caribou populations.

“Ultimately, as long as the habitat conditions on and adjacent to caribou ranges remain heavily modified by industrial activities, it is unlikely that any self-sustaining caribou populations will be able to exist in the South Peace [region],” the document says.

New research published in the journal Biological Conservation re-enforces that view.

In their paper, “Witnessing Extinction,” Chris Johnson and Libby Ehlers from the University of Northern B.C. and Dale Seip from the B.C. Ministry of Environment found that the cumulative impacts of roads, mining, oil and gas development and forestry have resulted in a 65.9 per cent loss of caribou habitat.

The study concludes that in B.C. this level of habitat restoration and protection is unlikely.

“At current rates of habitat loss and population decline, these caribou, a significant component of Canada’s biodiversity, are unlikely to persist. Although the factors leading to extinction are complex, the cumulative impacts of industrial development are a correlative if not causative factor,” the authors conclude.

According to the federal government’s caribou recovery strategy, provinces are expected to meet a target of 65 per cent undisturbed caribou habitat in all ranges by 2017.

Wolf Cull Ignores Main Drivers of Caribou Decline

Experts say the wolf cull program is a band-aid solution, which overlooks the real drivers of caribou decline.

The real problem is much less exciting than wolves — it’s shrubs, according to Robert Serrouya, of the Columbia Caribou Research Project and researcher with the University of Alberta.

Shrubs — left to grow in areas that have been logged — provide prime habitat for species such as moose and deer, which in turn compete for habitat with caribou and inflate wolf populations. These species are referred to as “alternate prey.”

Serrouya is advancing research that could minimize the killing of wolves and transform caribou recovery in the province: alternate prey management.

By suppressing moose and deer populations, wolf numbers may naturally decline, Serrouya said. He added that killing more populous species that are commonly hunted for food, such as moose, deer and elk, may be received more favourably by the public than the wolf cull, which has received widespread criticism.

“The thing about prey reduction is you have to do much less predator control because you’ve reduced their food source, they won’t breed as much or colonize an area as much because you’ve reduced their resource,” he said.

Industrial Impacts in B.C. Growing

But other experts argue even killing off other prey species such as moose or deer won’t help much if the B.C. government doesn’t slow the province’s industrialization.

Paul Paquet, a wolf biologist with the Raincoast Conservation Foundation, said the killing of wolves or other prey species to save caribou while ignoring habitat loss is not only misguided, but unethical.

“It’s really frustrating, the wolf cull really creates a moral dilemma for people,” he said. “It’s useless to pursue without aggressive measures to protect habitat.”

“Habitat, habitat. That’s been repeated since the ’70s and ’80s,” he said.

Paquet said the B.C. government put a “totally arbitrary time frame” on the wolf cull, while contributing to the rapid industrialization of the north.

He pointed to the recent study showing a strong correlation between caribou declines and industrial development in B.C.’s South Peace region.

“At Raincoast, that’s been our primary point — to protect what we have, hold the line on what habitat remains.”

‘I Want To Eat a Caribou Before I Die’

Roland Willson, chief of the West Moberly First Nation in northeast B.C., said caribou declines have transformed his traditional way of life.

Speaking at a recent event in Victoria, Willson said the proposed Site C dam will mean further damage to caribou herds, which his tribe is working hard to protect.

“I want to eat a caribou before I die,” he said, talking about a book he wrote with the same title.

“We’ve put together a study on what we’re losing by not being able to harvest caribou any more,” he said, noting caribou is essential to traditional practices involving food preparation, tool and cloth making and art.

Willson said his people have had to go to court to fight against industrial development, especially mining, in caribou habitat.

“Canada has a Species at Risk Act that B.C. isn’t listening to,” he said. “B.C. isn’t following its own best practices.”

Willson said he isn’t against the province’s wolf cull in principle, adding the West Moberly people have long “managed the number of wolf packs.”

Willson added he isn’t opposed to industry, but wants the province to find a way to balance development with treaty rights that protect his nation’s right to traditional hunting practices.

“We don’t want to just look at the caribou. We want to eat them.”

The West Moberly First Nation is located in Treaty 8 territory in B.C. where there are thousands of oil and gas wells. The Treaty 8 Tribal Association is currently working on a strategic assessment of the cumulative impacts of development in the territory, which covers 279,000 square kilometres in B.C.

Too Late for Habitat Focus?

For Serrouya, the opportunity to focus solely on habitat protect might have been missed years ago.

“We used to do so much forestry in this province,” he said. “It’s much better now with large protected areas.”

He added that protection of old-growth forests has helped limit habitat loss and he argued B.C.’s caribou decline “isn’t necessarily being led by sprawling oil and gas activity.”

“It’s the legacy of intensive logging,” he said. “Unfortunately we can’t speed up the regrowth of deforested areas.”

“The key factor with all of this is, if you don’t do anything with the population side — the caribou, moose, deer, wolves — and you just focus on habitat protection, you’ll lose the caribou,” he said.

Paquet disagrees, however.

“Habitat protection has always been the most important part of this story,” he said, adding the removal of top predators, such as wolves, can be damaging for complex ecosystems in the long term.

“I think a lot of it is solvable,” Paquet said. “But it means full protection of their critical habitat, to hold the line there and reestablish them as their populations increase.”

“For that you need more critical habitat and less rampant industrial development. But will that ever happen in B.C.?”

Image Credit: B.C. wolf by John E. Marriott

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Official recognition that a Canadian species is in trouble is no guarantee that the slide towards extinction can be slowed or halted, a new study has found.

A paper by Raincoast Conservation Foundation scientist Caroline Fox and co-authors from the University of Victoria, published Monday by the scientific journal PLOS ONE, looks at species assessed by the Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife in Canada (COSEWIC) and concludes that, instead of recovering, many have become more endangered.

“Using the COSEWIC assessments, obviously we are not doing as well as we would like,” Fox said in an interview.

The study, Trends in Extinction Risk for Imperiled Species in Canada, aimed to assess the effectiveness of Canada’s biodiversity conservation and the report card is not good. 

Fox and her colleagues looked at 369 species and found that 115 had become more endangered, 202 were unchanged and 52 improved in status. Only 20, amounting to 5.4 per cent, improved to the extent that they were no longer at risk of extinction.

Species at risk of extinction or extirpation are initially reviewed by COSEWIC, an independent scientific panel that makes recommendations to government, and some species are then listed under the Species at Risk Act (SARA). Once a species is listed under the Species at Risk Act it has legal protection and, for most species, critical habitat is supposed to be identified and protected.

However, the study found that, in most cases, critical habitat was not fully identified. Of the 221 cases studied that required critical habitat protection, only 56 met the requirements.

“We suggest that the Canadian government should formally identify and protect critical habitat, as is required by existing legislation,” says the study.

“In addition, our finding that at-risk species in Canada rarely recover leads us to recommend that every effort be made to actively prevent species from becoming at-risk in the first place.”

Species at risk are protected by patchwork layers of legislation and the Species at Risk Act is the last resort, Fox said.

The study notes that recent weakening of federal laws that protect habitat, such as changes to the Fisheries Act, may result in more species heading for trouble.

“Future legislation should be underpinned by a strong mandate to conserve habitat and we recommend that any legislative changes that may reduce habitat protection (e.g. the Fisheries Act) should be reconsidered,” the report says.

Photo: Gregory Slobirdr Smith via Flickr

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