As snowcover recedes from the coastal plain of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska each spring, thousands of Porcupine Caribou arrive to graze on new plant growth and calve the next generation of this herd that is the ecological and cultural backbone of the region.

Following ancient trails through the Brooks, Ogilvie and Richardson mountain ranges on both sides of the Alaska/Yukon border, the herd’s migratory path to this sanctuary is one of the longest of any land mammal.

Yet with a new President in power that promises to open hydrocarbon development in the Arctic, this iconic herd’s migratory way of life could be threatened.

The North’s great barren-ground caribou herds, a sub-species grouping to which the Porcupine belong, were recently listed as ‘threatened’ by the Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife in Canada.

A combination of habitat loss, industrial development and climate change have provided a formidable challenge for the notoriously sensitive creatures.

While the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has confirmed 2016 as the warmest year on record for our planet, making it the third year in a row to re-write the record books, the arctic as a whole is warming twice as fast as the rest of the globe.

Dramatic changes are already evident across the north, with warming permafrost and earlier lake melts signaling not just a change in weather for places like the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, but an existential threat to a way of life that has existed for millennia.

Moving even faster than global or regional warming trends, a political step-change in Washington has also sent shockwaves that seem to bode ill for the environment.

Under the patriotic banner of energy security, Donald Trump campaigned on the promise of expanding domestic fossil fuel development.

We haven’t had to wonder long whether president Trump’s “America First Energy Plan” was just empty rhetoric.

Trump’s nominees to lead the Department of the Interior (Ryan Zinke), Department of Energy (Rick Perry) and the Environmental Protection Agency (Scott Pruitt) in particular served as early signals of a clear intention to de-regulate industry and expedite, or outright remove, environmental assessment and protection requirements tied to resource development.

Within days of taking office, the president has now signed executive orders advancing both Keystone XL and the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL), while simultaneously placing an expenditure and communications freeze on the EPA.

It may now be only a matter of time before renewed attention turns to the estimated 7.7 billion barrels of ‘technically recoverable’ crude oil laying under the arctic permafrost in a coastal plain area of the wildlife refuge known as the 1002 area.

Map of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge with the 1002 in orange. Source: United States Geological Survey

“The Alaskan congressional delegation has asked that the 1002 lands be opened to development. This would impact the Porcupine Caribou herd,” Yukon Conservation Society energy analyst Sebastian Jones told DeSmog Canada. This 1002 sub-area of the ANWR also happens to be the favoured calving grounds of the Porcupine Caribou herd, particularly when snowmelt occurs earlier.

“Calving grounds for these caribou herd are very, very important,” says Dr. Justina Ray, President and Senior Scientist of the Wildlife Conservation Society of Canada and Co-Chair of the Committee on the Status Endangered Wildlife in Canada, Terrestrial Mammal Species Subcommittee.

“This is the most vulnerable time of year for this animal. They come to these places habitually year after year, and drop their calves at a time that coincides with new plant growth, so it’s perfectly matched.”

“Those first six weeks of life for calves are critical,” Ray continues. “If you have disturbance in this area, whether it’s noise from exploration or infrastructure, that could increase mortality directly or indirectly because the nutrition of the females is disturbed or they don’t even calve.”

Thanks in part to one of former President Obama’s final acts of conservation — banning oil and gas drilling in the Arctic — Trump can’t single-handedly overturn the protections currently in place for the refuge.

For this, an act of congress plus two-thirds majority vote in the Senate would be required, something Jones feels Trump won’t be able to achieve, “unless something really weird happens.”

A mother caribou from the Porcupine Caribou Herd with her young calf. Photo: Peter Mather, used with permission.

He also feels carbon emission reductions of other nations “will start to reduce demand, likely before oil could flow.”

While the impacts of potential development in the 1002 area remain hypothetical for now, Trump’s denialist view of climate change may pose a more imminent threat.

“A Trump presidency looks to be much more climate reckless,” Jones says. “Caribou are among the species most vulnerable to climate change. If tundra disappears, times will get very tough for barren ground herds like the [Porcupine], and it appears we are already seeing climate effects across the north on caribou habitat.”

What makes the potential fallout from a Trump presidency on the Porcupine Caribou particularly critical, is the impact any dramatic drop in the herd would have for the Gwich’in people of Alaska and Yukon who have relied on caribou for their subsistence for over 20,000 years.

It is the resolve and relentless efforts of the Gwich’in and others that give Jones reason for hope about the potential consequences of a Trump presidency.

“Trump and his acolytes will motivate the conservation community and users of the Porcupine Caribou herd,” Jones says. “This has proven to be a formidable coalition that has defended far more focused and competent regimes.”

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.

In a scenario that sounds like something out of a Dr. Seuss book, bull trout and other fish will travel in trucks past the Site C dam for 100 years as part of BC Hydro’s strategy to save the threatened fish species from disappearing from the Peace River.

The public hydro provider, which is in the early stages of building the $8.8 billion dam, declined to discuss its fish-saving plans. However, a review of reports filed by the Crown corporation reveals an elaborate and expensive plan that may not work, according to a U.S. fish biologist with bull trout expertise.

According to BC Hydro reports, British Columbians will pay approximately $25.5 million to build a “trap and haul” facility for Peace River fish and will spend an additional $1.5 million a year to maintain the facility. The plans are contained in information BC Hydro filed with the Canadian Environmental Assessment Agency.

Migratory bull trout, listed as a threatened species in B.C., are the primary focus for the facility’s fish ladder and truck transport because Site C will block their way to spawning grounds. Arctic grayling, mountain whitefish, rainbow trout and other large fish seeking to swim past the 60-metre high dam are also expected to use the fish passage.   

Three-quarters of the Peace River’s bull trout population, estimated at about 8,000 fish, are present upstream of Site C, according to a BC Hydro technical report.

But there is a potential snag that could thwart the success of mitigation plans, raising the question of whether bull trout could become locally extinct in sections of the Peace River after Site C is constructed.

A bull trout ladder has only been attempted on one other river in North America, the Clark Fork River in Idaho and Montana, where it has met with limited success.

The Thompson Falls Fishway in Montana. Photo: Wade Fredenberg/USFWS via Flickr.

Biologists there have discovered that bull trout, unlike other fish species such as salmon, do not like to enter man-made structures, says Ryan Kriener, a fisheries biologist with Montana’s Fish and Wildlife Service.

Out of 25,000 fish that have used the fish ladder at one of the river’s three dams since 2011, only twelve were bull trout, Kriener says. “Bull trout seem more reluctant to enter these non-natural traps than some other fish.” During 2015, only seven bull trout attempted to ascend the ladder. Two made it to the top and five turned back, says Kriener.

According to BC Hydro documents, the journey for Peace River bull trout will begin when they are lured to a fish ladder entrance at the foot of the Site C dam. The fish will jump up a series of pools in the 10-meter ladder, until they reach a trapping pool. Next to the trapping pool, fish will enter an “anesthetic pool” where they will be anesthetized.

From there they will travel in a “fish lift” to a sorting area, where they will be classified by species and counted, then placed in aerated tanks for transport past the dam in trucks. Fish not deemed suitable for upstream shipping will be fed back into the Peace River downstream from Site C through a tailrace return pipe.

The bull trout, according to the Hydro documents, will be taken by watercraft to the Halfway River, about 30 kilometers upstream from the dam, where they spawn in watershed creeks and rivers. Arctic grayling will be released at the Moberly River just upstream from the dam. Other unidentified fish species will be released directly into the Site C reservoir, which will stretch along 107 kilometres of the Peace River and its tributaries, including 10 kilometers up the Moberly River and 14 kilometers up the Halfway.

The Peace-Halfway bull trout population is distinct because of its large size and the fact that fish migrate up to 280 kilometres downstream, as far as the Clear River in Alberta, after over-wintering in the lower Halfway River and Peace River mainstem.

But there is no guarantee that any bull trout successfully trucked upstream from Site C will survive their downstream journey past the dam. That’s in part because the fish will play a life and death game of fish roulette in the dam’s turbines. Up to 40 percent of bull trout and other large fish are expected to perish in the turbines, according to a BC Hydro report, while up to 10 percent of smaller fish will die.

Bull trout are being considered for status as a species of “special concern” under the federal Species at Risk Act. Photo: Department of Fisheries and Oceans.

For smaller fish unable to ascend Site C’s fish ladder, BC Hydro proposes a “periodic capture and translocation program” at an unknown cost to B.C. taxpayers and ratepayers. The crown corporation acknowledges there is no precedent for such a program. It says it would study movement patterns of small fish before deciding if a conservation benefit would result from facilitating a genetic exchange between fish upstream and downstream of Site C.

BC Hydro declined to comment on fish mitigation plans for Site C.

In the U.S., where hydro dams are owned and operated by private companies, officials readily provide information to the public about dams and fish mitigation strategies.

Avista Utilities plans to build what it says will be the second bull trout ladder in North America, at the Cabinet Gorge dam on the Clark Fork River. The only existing bull trout ladder is at the Thompson Falls dam, owned by NorthWestern Energy, further upstream on the Clark Fork.

At just over four metres, Avisa’s bull trout ladder will be less than one-half the length of the proposed Site C bull trout ladder. After ascending the ladder at the Cabinet Gorge dam through six different entrances, “fish will be collected in a hopper and hoisted to the top of the dam where they will be transferred into a fish truck,” explains Tim Swart, Avista’s Clark Fork License Manager.

The ladder will replace the dam’s current system that sees biologists spend three nights a week electro-fishing bull trout and trucking captives upstream. That system, while labour intensive, has proven far more successful than the Thompson Falls dam fish ladder, according to Kriener. As many as 65 bull trout a year have been stunned and transported upstream.

Swart and Joe DosSantos, Avista’s Clark Fork aquatic program manager, said in a telephone interview that the company expects to spend $10 million to $20 million US to build the facility and $300,000 US a year to maintain it, including the cost of genetic and pathogen testing for each bull trout and westslope cutthroat trout.

Like BC Hydro, Avista is obliged by law to develop a mitigation plan for bull trout, an endangered species in the U.S. DosSantos says Avista is hopeful that the trap and haul facility will be able to transport at least 65 bull trout a year and possibly double that number.

Bull trout are one of four at-risk species out of 32 fish species that will be affected by Site C, according to the Joint Review Panel that examined Site C for the federal and provincial governments. Along with bull trout, the goldeye and cigar-shaped pearl dace are listed as threatened species in B.C., while the spottail shiner, a freshwater minnow, is endangered.

BC Hydro claims the transformation of the Peace river’s ecosystem to a reservoir will “create a new and productive aquatic ecosystem” that will “support a community of equal or greater productivity than the existing riverine environment.”

But the Joint Review Panel disagreed with BC Hydro, concluding that Site C will result in a net loss of fish habitat and “a “profound change in the type and character of the remaining habitat.” The panel said changes will begin with construction and continue for the one hundred year lifespan of the project. It describes these changes as  “probable, negative, large, irreversible and permanent so long as the Site C Dam remains.”

One of the negative changes Site C will bring to bull trout and other Peace River fish is mercury contamination. Methylmercury, which accumulates at the bottom of the food chain, is formed naturally by certain bacteria as they decompose or feed on carbon in sediment or soil. Site C’s flooding of vegetation and soils will produce an abundance of nutrients to feed this type of bacteria. Mercury levels will spike to such an extent that fish from the Site C reservoir will not be safe to eat for two or three decades, according to the Joint Review Panel.

B.C. bull trout bulletin.

Mercury contamination of bull trout and other fish from the WAC Bennett dam and Williston Reservoir remains a concern 50 years after the dam’s construction.

A brochure on bull trout co-produced by the B.C. government emphasizes that the province has a “global responsibility for the conservation of this species.” It notes that the threatened bull trout are particularly sensitive to habitat alteration. Dam construction, logging, road-building, pipelines, and the removal of streamside vegetation are all cited in the pamphlet as reasons for the bull trout’s demise.

The brochure counsels British Columbians to conserve bull trout populations by increasing their awareness of the value of native species and protecting bull trout habitat and aquatic ecosystems and lists a phone number for reporting violations.

Image: Bull trout via the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service

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.

An alarming new study published Tuesday by the National Audubon Society says that almost half the bird species in the continental United States and Canada are already threatened by climate change.

The study — Audubon’s Birds and Climate Change Report — finds that 126 species will lose more than 50 per cent of their current ranges by mid-century with no possibility of relocating if global warming continues at its current pace.

“A further 188 species face more than 50 per cent range loss by 2080 but may be able to make up some of this loss if they are able to colonize new areas,” an accompanying media release says. “These 314 species include many not previously considered at risk. The report indicates that numerous extinctions are likely if global temperature increases are not stopped.”

“It’s a punch in the gut. The greatest threat our birds face today is global warming,” Audubon Chief Scientist Gary Langham, who led the investigation, said in the media release.

“That’s our unequivocal conclusion after seven years of painstakingly careful and thorough research. Global warming threatens the basic fabric of life on which birds — and the rest of us — depend, and we have to act quickly and decisively if we are going to avoid catastrophe for them and for us.”

Audubon President and CEO David Yarnold described the potential loss as staggeringly horrific.

“This report is a roadmap, and it’s telling us two big things: We have to preserve and protect the places birds live, and we have to work together to reduce the severity of global warming,” Yarnold said.

The report, which studied 588 bird species, says a number of iconic birds in the continental United States and Canada — including the Bald Eagle, the Common Loon and Baltimore Oriole — are under increasing threat.

Protecting birds, the non-profit conservation organization’s report added, will require both redoubling conservation efforts to safeguard critical habitat and curbing greenhouse gas emissions.

Coincidentally, the Audubon study was published the same day as a World Meteorological Organization (WMO) report found that the level of atmospheric greenhouse gases reached a new record high in 2013.

The Geneva-based WMO’s annual Greenhouse Gas Bulletin said the 2013 levels were fuelled by a surge in levels of carbon dioxide, a finding that may make politicians and national governments work harder and more cooperatively to fight climate change.  

According to a related WMO media release, the report showed that between 1990 and 2013 there was a 34 per cent increase in radiative forcing — the warming effect on our climate — because of long-lived greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide (CO2), methane and nitrous oxide.

“In 2013, concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere was 142 per cent of the pre-industrial era (1750), and of methane and nitrous oxide 253 per cent and 121 per cent respectively,” the release said.

WMO Secretary-General Michel Jarraud said there is no doubt our climate is changing and our weather is becoming more extreme due to human activities such as the burning of fossil fuels.

“The Greenhouse Gas Bulletin shows that, far from falling, the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere actually increased last year at the fastest rate for nearly 30 years. We must reverse this trend by cutting emissions of CO2 and other greenhouse gases across the board,” Jarraud said. “We are running out of time.”

Noting that carbon dioxide remains in the atmosphere for many hundreds of years and in the ocean for even longer, he said the report provides scientific data politicians can use to make decisions related to climate change.

“We have the knowledge and we have the tools for action to try to keep temperature increases within 2°C to give our planet a chance and to give our children and grandchildren a future,” Jarraud said.

“Pleading ignorance can no longer be an excuse for not acting.”

Image Credit: Tambako The Jaguar via Flickr.

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.