Summary

• In early May, BC Parks announced Pipi7íyekw/Joffre Lakes Park will be restricted to members of the Líl̓wat and N’Quatqua nations from June 20-27 and Sept. 8-30. 
• Líl̓wat Nation has since released its own statement with different closure dates, saying the trust with the province has been broken. 
• Since 2018, the two First Nations have been working with BC Parks on visitor management and the temporary closures — called reconnection periods — have been implemented since 2023. However, negotiations broke down last year over a dispute over the 2025 closure length.

Once again, one of B.C.’s most popular parks is implementing temporary closures this summer — and no one is happy about it.

Since 2023, Pipi7íyekw/Joffre Lakes Park has closed for brief reconnection periods, when entry is restricted to members of Líl̓wat and N’Quatqua First Nations, whose unceded territories encompass the park. During these periods, members can harvest traditional medicines, participate in cultural events and ceremonies and enjoy a part of their territory that is often too crowded with visitors for them to access at all, trampled and strewn with trash by the end of peak season. Since 2018, the two nations have worked with BC Parks on a joint strategy for managing visitors.

Last year, things went off the rails. Backlash over the temporary closures spiked as politicians — including BC Conservative leadership candidate Caroline Elliott and OneBC leader Dallas Brodie — used the closures to argue Indigenous Rights had gone too far. On X, Brodie claimed that park access across the province may someday be “dependent upon your racial status.”

Then came a dispute over the length of the final 2025 reconnection period. The nations planned for two months, from late August to the end of October, but BC Parks went with about half that time, between the Labour Day weekend and Oct. 3. The decision sparked protests from members and supporters of the two nations and allies. 

Which brings us to May 7, when BC Parks announced the closure dates for this year: one week in June, which includes National Indigenous Peoples’ Day on June 21, and from Sept. 8 until the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation on Sept. 30. Neither nation was part of the announcement. They have not met with BC Parks as a working group since last fall’s dispute, according to the Ministry of Environment and Parks, which said it “has been working to try and re-engage” the nations ever since.

On May 27, almost three weeks after the BC Parks announcement, Líl̓wat Nation released a statement calling on the B.C. government to implement its desired reconnection period for the fall, spanning Aug. 23 to Oct. 5. That’s roughly three weeks longer than the province’s stated closure, and the nation made it clear the unilateral announcement by the province “has further undermined an already fractured relationship.”

In an emailed statement, Líl̓wat Nation said this year’s letter has also been signed by N’Quatqua First Nation, “reflecting continued alignment between the two nations on the importance of the closure periods and the broader management concerns at Pipi7íyekw/Joffre Lakes.” 

The planned reconnection period has once again unleashed “an unspeakable amount of online racism,” Green MLA Jeremy Valeriote said in the legislature on May 19. Valeriote, whose West Vancouver-Sea to Sky riding includes Pipi7íyekw, added the ministry’s lack of consultation with the First Nations, as well as the public disagreement over closure dates, may fuel the growing misinformation and mistrust surrounding Indigenous Rights in B.C. 

During question period, he asked Minister of Environment and Parks Tamara Davidson: “How is this collaboration? It seems that the government is either blaming the nations or waving the problem away instead of doing the actual work to alleviate the confusion in the minister’s estimation. Have the Líl̓wat and N’Quatqua Nations become collateral damage in the toxic reconciliation dialogue we’re experiencing?”

Major spike in visitors at Pipi7íyekw/Joffre Lakes

Just three provincial parks in B.C. require visitors to reserve a free day-use pass in advance during busy months — Pipi7íyekw/Joffre Lakes, Garibaldi Park and Golden Ears Park, all located within driving distance of Vancouver. Though there are more than a thousand parks in the province, these three and a handful of others become magnets for visitors. 

According to BC Parks, provincial parks on the south coast have seen a 52 per cent increase in visitor traffic since 2010 — and in Pipi7íyekw/Joffre Lakes, visits increased by 222 per cent between 2010 and 2019. 

“The overtourism leading up to the day-pass system was pretty significant. … I don’t think people fully appreciate what it’s like to have 200,000 people tramping through a relatively small park,” Valeriote told The Narwhal.

The stampede put a strain on the park, which can be accessed only through a single out-and-back route: trails were packed, cars spilled out of the parking lot, trash cans overflowed. Temporary closures were implemented to ensure rights-holding First Nations could access their territory, as well as give the land itself an opportunity to rest.

The nations’ proposed 2025 closure dates reflected “the time required for our communities to reconnect with the land, conduct ceremonies, gather food and medicines, and allow Pipi7íyekw the rest it needs to heal,” according to an August statement. “The province’s refusal to honour these dates undermines both reconciliation and the health of the land and people.”

History is repeating itself in 2026, with another disagreement over dates. 

In a statement sent to The Narwhal on May 27, the Ministry of Environment and Parks said it’s aware of the discrepancy between its 2026 dates and those given by Líl̓wat Nation. “The province reached out to the Líl̓wat Nation and N’Quatqua First Nations starting in February, reiterating a desire to identify long-term solutions that provide predictability and support the needs of all park users,” it said. According to the statement, the length of the 2026 closure dates align with “a commitment the province made in 2023 for 30 days of closures” — though in 2024 and 2025, the park was closed for nearly twice as many days. 

Parks Minister Davidson declined an interview with The Narwhal, but said by email the government values its relationship with both nations and hopes “to return to the table to collaborate on long-term solutions that provide predictability and support the needs of all park users.”

When asked if the province has a plan in place for protests or blockades that might arise over the disputed closure dates — as they did in 2025 — Minister of Indigenous Relations and Reconciliation Spencer Chandra Herbert did not answer directly, but said the province supported peaceful protest but not blockades.

Green MLA concerned about the politicization of parks closures

Valeriote told The Narwhal he worries the ministry’s unilateral communications, contradicted by Líl̓wat, will exacerbate growing tensions in B.C. over Indigenous Rights and reconciliation. 

The claim that the closures are race-based — rather than rights-based — has been deployed frequently.

“I won’t mince words: the Conservatives and OneBC are using this as a political wedge issue,” Valeriote said. “It’s fully opportunistic. They’re talking about … ‘We no longer have access to our public land.’ It’s pure fear mongering, and it’s irresponsible,” he said. “But in our political system, they’re taking advantage of an opportunity. That’s unfortunately how this political system works.”

Valeriote alluded to the recent tension over the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples Act, or DRIPA, which spiked in the wake of a court decision affirming that Cowichan Nation holds Aboriginal Title over a former village site in Richmond, B.C., which is now privately owned land. Despite Cowichan asserting repeatedly that they do not intend to seek claim to private land, the ruling has sparked panic among some property owners, with politicians rushing to reassure them — or amplify their fears. 

“They’re using [parks] to argue that Indigenous people are getting too good of a deal, and we should all be scared and, you know, private land ownership is playing into that.”

Misinformation is circulating, and not only about the closure dates, but who exactly is being kept out. B.C. politics reporter Rob Shaw posted on X that the BC Parks closure is “to allow First Nations to practice cultural and conservation traditions.” In fact, while there are 203 First Nations in B.C. — and residents of the province who are members of other First Nations across the country — only Líl̓wat and N’Quatqua members can access the parks during those periods.

Do B.C. and the First Nations see the park the same way?

In her emailed statement, Davidson emphasized balancing “predictable access” and visitor experience with reconciliation. “As one of BC Parks’ busiest destinations, welcoming thousands of visitors each year, we have a responsibility to carefully manage visitation in [the] park so people can have the most enjoyable experience.” When asked in the legislature on May 28 if trust had been broken with the First Nations, Davidson said, “I think we’d have to go back to Líl̓wat and N’Quatqua to ask them. But for our part, we’re working together and we’re trying to build that relationship back up again.” (In their August 2025 statement, the nations wrote, “We have lost trust in working with BC Parks.”)

But Líl̓wat’s statement makes it clear the First Nation sees the park differently, writing that reconnection periods are required “so our people can harvest, hold ceremony, teach our children on the land and carry out our stewardship responsibilities in Pipi7íyekw.”

In other words, a park is not just for enjoyment; it’s also a responsibility and a relationship. And that responsibility requires acknowledging that predictability is an increasingly unrealistic goal as climate change wreaks havoc on the planet, including Canadian parks. In recent years, parks across the country have closed after being damaged and destroyed by storms and floods. Many parks — including Jasper in Alberta, and Nopiming in Manitoba — have closed after being scorched by wildfire.

There is no certainty when it comes to our future access or enjoyment of nature. And the likelihood that parks will be around for anyone to enjoy is diminished when stewardship is treated as less important than on-demand access. The province knows this — despite the repeated emphasis on widespread access, only 500 daily passes are available, often booked up within moments of reservations opening.

“We see [a park] as a kind of piece of infrastructure, like a building, that’s supposed to be able to handle constant traffic and constant stress,” Valeriote told The Narwhal. “And I appreciate the Indigenous way of looking at it: it’s cyclical, and it’s a cultural asset that isn’t just about monetizing or utilizing 365 days a year. Sometimes it does need time to rest and reset,” he said. “I think the small amount of solitude that the Líl̓wat and N’Quatqua Nations can get in that cultural place is worth inconveniencing locals or tourists for a relatively few days a year.” 

Líl̓wat has asked the ministry to respond by Tuesday, June 2, and urged it to align the closure dates with those identified by the First Nation. 

“Reconciliation must be matched by action,” Líl̓wat Nation’s Chief Dean Nelson said in the statement. “If the province is serious about building a relationship based on mutual respect, it must start by respecting our reconnection periods.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“This was years in the making.”

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

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

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

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

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

Finally, Catcheway’s spouse Paul Marion, who serves as the nation’s herd manager, lured the timid mammal out using a bell and hay. Now, the bison are able to recognize the couple’s truck. But if it’s driven by someone unfamiliar, they can get “spooked,” Catcheway noted. 

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

‘Small but very tangible act of reconciliation’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘I find they have their own personalities’

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

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

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

Marion prepares the hay and salt blocks for the animals.

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

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

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

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

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

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

First Nations are ‘reclaiming their role’ in conservation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Who is your lovebird?

It’s the season for lovebirds — but which bird? Here at The Narwhal, we spend a lot of time writing and reporting on birds from coast to coast to coast. They’re ecologically critical, dazzlingly diverse, often imperiled by human activity and climate change — but also, let’s not forget, very romantic. Has a partner ever built you a home in a chimney? Or regurgitated food to save you all that tiresome chewing? Have they ever locked their talons to yours and executed a “death spiral” at high altitude to prove their undying affection?

If not, perhaps it’s time to look beyond the human dating pool for your ideal bird bae. Luckily, we’ve got a lot of strong contenders right here in Canada, from our iconic goose to the snowy owl, from monogamous to poly, there’s got to be one — or a few — out there for you. As you may have heard, boyfriends are embarrassing — but birds? They’re timeless.

Take our Valentine’s Day quiz to find the nest-mate of your dreams.

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The head of a national network that tracks the spread of wildlife diseases says a persistent funding shortfall is undermining Canada’s ability to detect and respond to emerging threats to biodiversity, agriculture and human health.

Damien Joly is the chief executive officer of the Canadian Wildlife Health Cooperative, a network of Canada’s five veterinary schools and the B.C. government’s Animal Health Centre. The cooperative works with federal, provincial and territorial governments to monitor wildlife diseases across the country.

In an interview with The Narwhal, Joly said the organization is “cash strapped across the board.”

“We do not have the resources we need to effectively monitor these diseases,” he said.

That warning comes as Canada grapples with the spread of highly transmissible diseases, such as chronic wasting disease, a fatal infection that afflicts deer, moose, elk and other cervids. At the same time, avian influenza, which has caused huge die-offs of wild birds and triggered mass culls at hundreds of infected poultry farms across the country, continues to spread. Hundreds of dead wild birds found in southern Manitoba in recent months have been linked to bird flu, as have the deaths of wild birds in Ontario. 

In Atlantic Canada, Joly said the cooperative is scraping together whatever funding it can find to continue monitoring the spread of avian flu, keeping a particular eye out for mutations in the virus.

“We’re seeing massive die-offs in Europe and it’s not going to be long before that particular strain finds its way over the Atlantic into Canada,” Joly said. 

Environment and Climate Change Canada is the cooperative’s primary funder, contributing almost $1.2 million in 2024-25. Funding from other federal agencies and departments, as well as provincial and territorial governments, brought the cooperative’s total budget to $3.5 million for that fiscal year, according to its annual report.

While Joly said the cooperative’s partners in government work hard to secure funding for wildlife disease monitoring, budget shortfalls remain a persistent problem.

“Every region is in a deficit situation,” Joly said. The result is the cooperative is being forced to dip into its rainy-day funds to cover costs.

Now he’s calling for federal, provincial and territorial governments to renew their commitment to implementing the Pan-Canadian Approach to Wildlife Health strategy, which most environment ministers endorsed in 2018 at an intergovernmental conference.

Joly estimates at least $10 million a year is needed to implement that strategy, half for the cooperative and the rest to be shared among provincial and territorial governments to strengthen wildlife disease monitoring and response.

At a minimum, Joly said more streamlined and consistent funding would give the cooperative and its staff more stability. Currently, he said, he’s managing reporting for more than 20 different funding pots for the cooperative’s national office alone.

In a statement to The Narwhal, Keean Nembhard, a press secretary for Julie Dabrusin, minister of environment, climate change and nature, said the federal government remains committed to conservation, addressing key threats to biodiversity and the principles of the Pan-Canadian Approach to Wildlife Health. But, he said, implementing that approach would require coordinated efforts and funding from federal, provincial and territorial governments.

Nembhard said Environment and Climate Change Canada has committed to providing the cooperative almost $360,000 in core funding for another two fiscal years to support monitoring and diagnostics of wildlife pathogens. But that’s only a fraction of the funding the cooperative needs, meaning the organization is still being left to juggle a piecemeal funding model.

Wildlife disease tracking is key to defending against emerging threats 

For three decades, the Canadian Wildlife Health Cooperative has been tracking the causes of death for wild animals assessed by the network’s pathologists. That record gives researchers a clear picture of the pathogens and diseases that spread among wildlife and how deadly they usually are.

Having a baseline is crucial for being able to detect and respond to emerging threats to biodiversity quickly, Joly said. 

Take chronic wasting disease, which was first detected in Canada on a Saskatchewan elk farm in 1996. Since then, the disease has spread through wild populations of deer, elk and other cervids. With cases now being detected in British Columbia, Joly said the risks to caribou are particularly scary.

“This is a species that’s in trouble already,” he said. 

Researchers knew the disease was a looming threat for B.C. long before the first case was detected in the province in 2024, according to Kaylee Byers, an assistant professor in the School of Population and Public Health at the University of British Columbia.

As monitoring showed the disease had spread to Alberta and neighbouring regions in the United States, the risk that it would move into B.C. grew.

Knowing where and how a disease is spreading can give governments and researchers a chance to target their response, Byers said. That could mean, for instance, increasing sample collection and testing in high-risk areas or putting in place new protocols for transporting animal parts. 

Byers, who is also the deputy director of the B.C. arm of the Canadian Wildlife Health Cooperative, said wildlife disease monitoring today largely relies on the public to report sick, injured or dead animals. 

“What’s really challenging about that, is it’s not the full picture,” she said, adding that more funding could allow for expanded monitoring.

“Take something like avian influenza,” she said. Wild birds land in plenty of remote wetlands where there’s potential for the virus to spill over into other animal populations. But, if people aren’t frequenting these areas, that spread might not be captured by current monitoring programs, she warned. 

Wildlife diseases can threaten human health, livestock and international trade

Understanding the pathogens and diseases spreading among wildlife is important for people as well. These diseases can threaten the wildlife populations hunters rely on for food. They can pass to and spread rapidly among livestock, putting animal welfare in jeopardy and farmers’ livelihoods at risk. And they can threaten our own human health.

Many of the diseases that affect people today are zoonotic, meaning they’re caused by germs that can spread between animals and people. 

Scientists have worried for years about the potential for bird flu to cause a human pandemic. While it has wreaked havoc around the world in recent years, it hasn’t caused widespread disease in people so far. There have been dozens of human cases in the U.S. since 2024, mostly among workers exposed to the virus at infected poultry and dairy operations. In Canada, a teenager was infected with a severe case of the virus in late 2024. Advanced testing showed the closest match for the virus she contracted was found in wild birds in the Fraser Valley. The teen spent almost two months in hospital before she was released. 

Though human cases remain rare, bird flu has taken a significant toll on poultry farmers across the country. Since 2021, there have been outbreaks at 591 poultry farms in Canada. Millions of farmed birds have been culled as a result.

As a member of the World Organisation for Animal Health, Canada is obligated to monitor and report on certain diseases, including avian flu, that spread not just among livestock but also wildlife.

“Identifying disease risks in wildlife early ensures timely intervention strategies, reduces the risk of disease spread to other animals or people (so-called spillovers) and reduces the impacts on wildlife themselves and on biodiversity and ecosystems,” Claire Cayol, the organization’s project manager for wildlife health information systems, said in a statement to The Narwhal.

Founded in 1924, the international organization sets standards related to animal health, including for surveillance of certain wildlife diseases, that allow for global trade of animals and animal products.

What that means, Joly said, is the work the Canadian Wildlife Health Cooperative does is also vital to Canada’s ability to trade beef, poultry and other food products. 

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I’ve spent 18 years documenting Prairie life in western Manitoba, mostly photographing the people who make up the province’s small towns, farms, Hutterite colonies and First Nations. As photojournalists, we are constantly in and out of people’s lives, which is an amazing privilege — but it can also be exhausting.

This year, I decided to spend my time with bees.

My friends and apiarists Andrew and Hiltje Vander Velde happily agreed to allow me to come and go from their hives, letting myself in and out of the electric fence meant to deter bears looking for honey. I spent hours at a time in the early morning and late evening watching the honeybees work, collecting pollen from near and far and bringing it back to the hives. I got to see the different colours of the pollen up close.

I wanted to capture the detailed lives of bees, including macro-lens portraits. This was not an easy task. Macro lenses have narrow depths of field — and flying bees move quickly and erratically, usually coming in and out of my focal plane faster than I or the camera could register. I wanted photos that felt like portraits, so I set up backdrops, relying on crafting or scrapbooking items I purchased. I’d pick a colourful piece of cardboard paper, line it up vertically against a side of a hive and focus my camera on the action just outside the entrance so I could get bees returning to their home or heading out on their missions. It might sound simple — but it required taking thousands of photos each sitting to get a few that were in focus. 

I sat in the grass, my face and camera lens inches from the upper entrance to the hive, my neck and shoulders contorted into uncomfortable positions. And I photographed, while enveloped in the droning sound of thousands of bees at work. Sometimes I listened to podcasts, other times I listened to the songs of the western meadowlarks, bobolinks and least flycatchers. 

Some days I’d wear the full beekeeper suit that Andrew and Hiltje lent me, other days just a T-shirt and shorts. Aside from one poor bumblebee that inadvertently got pinched in my elbow crease, I was only stung less than six times in total, each when I was wearing my beekeeper suit. Most were just one sting at a time, on an exposed bit of wrist or ankle. 

Once I had a group of angry bees following me back to my car. I’m not sure how I inadvertently caused them stress that day, but I could register their agitation in the change of pitch in their buzzing — the wing vibrations they use to communicate. 

The mesh head covering, which hung off a rimmed hard hat, was a pain in the ass to photograph through so I’d often ditch it, especially in the evenings when the bees were calmer. Over the years I’ve learned to follow beekeepers’ leads. My friends at Deerboine Hutterite Colony rarely wear any protective covering so if I’m around them, I also don’t wear anything. When I came across apiarist Mike Clark, director of the Manitoba Beekeepers’ Association, pulling honey boxes from hives amid a strong late summer wind, he also wasn’t wearing any protective gear. Meanwhile, thousands of honeybees, blown out from frames of honeycomb with a leaf blower, filled the prairie air with chaos. 

“Shallow breaths,” Clark told me. “They’re attracted to carbon dioxide.” That day was magical. Dozens — if not hundreds — of bees explored and rested on my arms, legs and torso while I photographed their hives shortly after their honeycomb was collected. I didn’t get stung once; I gently brushed them off my body as I changed positions. 

The backdrop to all of this, of course, is that bees are under threat. Canada is home to more than 800 species of wild bees, many of which are rare. The threats to them are many: pesticides, invasive species, climate change and more. Honeybees are also under threat. Mites and the viruses they spread led to 30 per cent of honeybees dying in Canada last winter, according to the Canadian Honey Council, though not all apiarists experienced this same level. However, the conversations around the threats are nuanced and complicated. Beekeepers tout the importance of honeybees in pollination and how they can benefit wild bees and wildflowers. Not to mention, the harms versus benefits are situational, based on competition for pollen and other factors. 

But this project wasn’t about the big picture. It was about looking closely, and enjoying the moments with a tiny insect many of us never turn our full attention to. It was a case study in zooming in and slowing down.

Summer evenings at the hives were especially beautiful. The low sun backlit the bees, still active in the airspace above their hives, with trees in shade providing a dark backdrop to their glow. There’s something beautiful about getting to know a subject beyond the surface level. I spent hours watching bees take evening naps on plants just outside their hives, or casting shadows on and through the delicate petals of poppies in the garden at Deerboine Colony. 

The beauty was in the details: leafcutter bees store their collected pollen on the bottom of their abdomens using specialized hairs called scopa to grasp the powdery plant fertilizer. When leafcutters plunge themselves headfirst into flowers, their pollen-covered back ends stick out. Bumblebees, of which Manitoba has several species, sometimes climb out of flowers looking like they fell into a vat of pollen, with it clinging to every part of their fuzzy, barrel-shaped bodies. Patches of goldenrod and fireweed were the bee equivalent of a Manitoba social. 

Some evenings at the hives, shortly after the sun had set, coyotes filled the air with their cries from every direction. Activity slowed as bees entered their hive for the night, congregated on discarded honeycomb or rested on plants in the field. 

The occasional firefly would glow alongside the bees still moving across the dusk-blue sky. 

I sat and watched the activity slowing — and felt lucky to be there in that moment.

Updated May 25, 2026, at 9:00 a.m. MT: Due to an editing error, this story previously misnamed the Canadian Honey Council. It is the Canadian Honey Council, not the Canadian Honey Bee Council.

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.

There’s something freeing about ending the workday and shutting off that professional part of your brain — or so we’ve heard. It’s not exactly our experience at The Narwhal, but many of us also wouldn’t have it any other way.

When your job involves reading, writing and sharing stories of the natural world, you can’t help but find glimpses of it all around you: whether in interacting with nature — The Narwhal team loves a good walk (and more rugged adventures that we won’t get into here, but do in our members newsletter) — or reading about it. 

Over a year of ups and downs in really every way possible, many of us found comfort and entertainment in books and, at times, gravitated toward titles that touch on the topics we cover at The Narwhal.

From toiling in vineyards to unearthing ancient Celtic wisdom on the natural world, these stories captivated us, and were a reminder of why we are so lucky to do what we do.

From our bookshelves to yours, here are a few books we read in 2025.

Wine 

By Meg Bernhard 

American indie press Bloomsbury bills its Object Lessons series as “a book series about the hidden lives of ordinary things.” In her entry on one of humanity’s most beloved libations, journalist Meg Bernhard pens a beautiful, personal meditation on wine and the complex cultural, social and environmental issues underpinning her favourite drink. Framed through her experiences being introduced to wine in her 20s and then working on vineyards in Spain, where she came to appreciate wine as both an agricultural product and an art form, Bernhard offers a fresh and surprisingly moving account of a centuries-old beverage. Weaving seamlessly between the intimate — detailing her family’s relationship to alcohol and the women winemakers who helped develop her palate — and systemic — exploring sexism in the wine industry, migrant agricultural work and the effects of climate change — Bernhard manages to combine memoir, travel writing and journalistic reportage to produce a book that is anything but a stuffy treatise on tasting notes and point scales (it may actually make you rethink the former). It’s the perfect gift for the wine lover in your life who cares about complicating the narrative and good writing. 

-Paloma Pacheco, assistant editor

To Speak for the Trees

By Diana Beresford-Kroeger

Orphaned at a young age, Diana Beresford-Kroeger was raised by her bachelor uncle, whose vast library — and quiet evenings spent reading beside him — formed her school years in County Cork, Ireland. She spent summers with her great aunt and uncle in the Lisheens Valley, learning the language of trees and their fundamental role in our existence, even after so much of Ireland’s forests were logged by the Brits. To Speak for the Trees follows these summers working with her Celtic elders and the earth, gleaning an incredible depth of knowledge from both. It continues as she marries this understanding with academic scientific study to become a highly recognized author, botanist and biochemist, now based outside Ottawa, and a leader in climate change solutions; if each person planted a tree a year for the next six years, we could heal the Earth, she simply notes. She closes the book with the Ogham script, the alphabet of the old Irish language with each letter corresponding to a tree — their essential role in our lives intrinsically written. It’s a retelling of ancient wisdom for a new audience that desperately needs to hear it.

-Elaine Anselmi, bureau chief

Black Bear

By Trina Moyles

Through all of Yukon-based journalist Trina Moyles’ reporting (some of it for The Narwhal), her deep connection to both rural and remote areas and the people and animals that live in them shines through. Black Bear, in a way, explains the roots of that empathy. Moyles grew up in northwestern Alberta in Peace Country, where growing up as a young girl, bears were an ever-present part of reality. But they weren’t the only threat Moyles — and other young women — learned to live with. “Our coming of age in a resource town in northern Alberta would require different survival strategies,” she writes. “I would learn how to fawn and please, but also how to physically fend off an attack and defuse threats — not only from bears, but from boys and men.” Her memoir is a beautiful tangle of interconnected narratives. To learn to survive as a young woman in a “hard-drinking resource town,” Moyles signed up for a self-defence course — taught by a conservation officer with a black belt in karate who had worked for the government to set leg snares for bears. But Moyles doesn’t focus on childhood alone. The book is about “coexistence with bears in the boreal forest,” and a reflection on what she learned from her dad, a bear biologist, along the way. Come for the bears, but stay for the heart-wrenching and personal story.

-Sharon J. Riley, managing editor

The One-straw Revolution

By Masanobu Fukuoka

A microbiologist and plant pathologist, Masanobu Fukuoka (1913-2008) turned away from “modern” agriculture in 1937 and looked instead to nature, learning how to grow food by mimicking natural processes using a method he called shizen nōhō (自然農法) — “Do-Nothing” farming. His 1975 manifesto is a practical guide to farming techniques and principles that helped spur movements like permaculture and regenerative agriculture — and it’s also a philosophical treatise on aligning ourselves to the rhythms of the land. Interspersed between chapters on rice cultivation, how to help soil regenerate its microbiome and the perils of large-scale commercial farming, Fukuoka offers moments of commentary on why he believes a return to nature is necessary. “Human beings are the only animals who have to work,” he writes, “and I think this is the most ridiculous thing in the world.” Instead, he suggests by attuning ourselves to the land to harvest only what we need to live, we are “simply doing what needs to be done.”

-Matt Simmons, reporter

We’re suing the RCMP to fight for press freedom

In November 2021, photojournalist Amber Bracken was arrested by the RCMP while on assignment for The Narwhal. So we launched a lawsuit to take a stand for press freedom. Now, we’re in the middle of our trial.

Gliff 

By Ali Smith

What begins with an homage to fairy tales — siblings named Briar and Rose are abandoned in a cottage by their mother and her boyfriend, and left to fend for themselves — evolves into a strange and lovely story about humanity and collective resistance. The title, Gliff, comes from a Scottish word for a fleeting glance or moment, and is also the name Rose gives to a horse she finds in a pasture behind the house. The siblings exist on the margins of a world like our own — everyone is absorbed in their phones and ruled by algorithms — but the sinister aspects of technological dependence and state surveillance have been cranked up a notch; by the end you’ll want to throw your phone in a lake. Ali Smith has an abiding and empathetic interest in outsiders, and an unparalleled facility for pleasurable wordplay; her sentences romp across vast green fields of meaning, offering an essential template for examining a troubled world clearly — and without losing hope. 

-Michelle Cyca, bureau chief

Pests: How Humans Create Animal Villains

By Bethany Brookshire

Bethany Brookshire offers a thoughtful and engaging exploration of the relationships human beings have with the creatures that share our world, whether we want them to or not. What makes an animal a pest? Why are some venerated as wildlife and others pampered as pets? In most cases, those categorizations “aren’t about the animals themselves, they’re about us,” Brookshire writes. From pigeons to pachyderms — yes, some elephants are considered pests! — each chapter examines the histories, misconceptions and contradictions we hold about the animals we love to hate. You’ll learn at least as much about human nature and culture as you will about the critters we’ve branded as vermin for insisting on existing in the spaces we’ve claimed as our own.

-Shannon Waters, reporter

Nerve: A Personal Journey Through the Science of Fear

By Eva Holland 

What does it look like to face your biggest fears? And why do our brains get so scared? These are some of the questions that Whitehorse-based journalist and writer Eva Holland answers through her book Nerve. Eva’s willingness to let you into her brain as she navigates her mother’s death and how it connects to her crippling fear of heights makes for an incredible read. As do her efforts to overcome that fear, including from the tops of mountains. Like any good journalist (and one who has written for The Narwhal before), Eva digs into the facts and presents the science behind fear, making a compelling case for why we need fear in our lives and how to navigate it.

-Lindsay Sample, bureau chief 

The Best of The Raven

By Russ Rutter and Dan Strickland

While visiting Algonquin Provincial Park in Ontario this year, I discovered a real gem of environmental science writing. The park’s newsletter, The Raven, has been published fairly regularly since 1960, and The Friends of Algonquin Park has produced anthologies of the newsletter’s best issues. I devoured these anthologies in 2025, drawn in by the accessible science writing, but also by the natural and cultural history captured by these archival newsletters. Read as a whole, they document a changing ecosystem, covering, for example, the collapse of Algonquin’s deer population in the mid-20th century. The newsletters also describe the shifting ways humans have engaged with nature in the park; I was intrigued to learn that before those deer disappeared, they would congregate on the shoulder of Highway 60 and eat from the hands of park visitors. These Raven anthologies are a great read for any lover of Algonquin Park. As for my next discovery, I was recently tipped off to the existence of The Crow, a parody of The Raven produced by park employees in the 1970s and available to view at the Algonquin archives!

-Will Pearson, assistant editor

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.

My dad was known as “the bear guy” in Peace River. He often got the call to advise on what to do with “problem bears” reported by the public. Now and then they’d get a call from a farmer about a grizzly bear, but for the most part the culprit was a black bear that had wandered into town or was nosing through somebody’s trash bins. “Problem bear” or “nuisance bear” were the terms commonly used by wildlife managers to describe bears that showed no fear of people, fed on anthropogenic food sources and edged close enough to threaten a person’s perception of safety. Perception being the key word there, my dad would later grumble. It was a tricky thing to assess and manage, because everyone’s perception of risk was different. Some people tolerated a bear wandering through their backyard. Others viewed the bear as a threat to their children’s safety. For everyone, the distance or threshold between the bear and their circle of comfort, the perception of a situation going from harmless to dangerous, could be markedly different. There was no clear line, no border drawn in the sand, that signalled to bears: You shall not pass. 

Reports of problem bears were most frequent from late April, when bears crawled out of hibernation, through the spring and summer months, and into October, when they entered hyperphagia, a state of extreme hunger. Most of the calls to conservation officers about “problem bears” were regarding black bears, hands-down, owing to the fact that the grizzly population in northwestern Alberta was significantly less and, for the most part, tended to avoid people. The expression “problem bear” almost always refers to a black bear, even today.

“There’s a goddamned bear breaking into my shed!”

“There’s a bear prowling the riverbank. I’m scared for the safety of my kids.”

“There’s a bear up in a tree behind my house. I threw rocks at it, but it won’t budge.”

“Human safety is always our number one concern,” my dad would say. “But it’s about keeping the bear safe, too.”

One evening, our community made the national news when a black bear waltzed right through the automatic doors of the IGA grocery store and beelined for the bakery. Brendan and I laughed when we watched the footage captured by the store’s security camera: the bear strolling through those doors as if he’d done it a thousand times before, eventually chased out by the store manager with an industrial broom. The story made for a comedic segment on the six o’clock news, as no one was harmed, the bear included. My brother and I were excited, even proud, that the news of the bear had put our small town on the map. Maybe it was a problem bear, but it was our problem bear. For my dad, it was just business as usual.

Another day, another nuisance bear.

In the 1990s, wildlife managers relied on a bear management concept called “mutual avoidance,” a term that was coined and popularized by Stephen Herrero, a behavioural ecologist and author of Bear Attacks: Their Causes and Avoidance, a book published in 1985 that became, and remains today, widely influential. “Mutual avoidance is a desirable end state,” Herrero wrote in Bear Attacks. He called for a “standoff between bears and people rather than the petting, feeding and garbage eating that have characterized the past.” Herrero argued that a century of tolerating, and in some cases even encouraging, bears feeding on anthropogenic food sources had created a legacy of food-conditioned and habituated bears. Bear Attacks was one of the first books to draw a connection between food habituation and fatal maulings, arguing that a food- habituated bear is a dangerous bear. His logic was sound: Close the garbage dumps, clean up unmanaged food sources, and scare away food-habituated bears through persistent negative, or adverse, conditioning. My dad agreed.

He and his colleagues used negative conditioning to send problem bears a message, loud and clear: You aren’t welcome here. Mostly, they’d rely on non-lethal methods, driving bears off by vehicle, honking the horn or turning on a loud siren. They’d fire off a round of cracker shells at the bear, or shoot them with rubber bullets.

“We aim for the fat on the bear’s rump,” my dad told me. “The rubber slug will certainly sting and send them a message, but it won’t cause any harm to the bear.”

Some of the problem bears would be captured in culvert traps, a live bear trap designed like an open culvert: long enough for a bear to worm in, pull on bait at the back of the trap — typically a beaver carcass or roadkill — and trigger the door to slam behind them. Biologists would tranquilize the bear and take its physiological measurements: body weight, length, sex and general health. They’d age the bear by examining its teeth, the wear on its canines and incisors, looking for the presence of yellow dentine, which would indicate an older bear. Sometimes my dad would extract a tooth with pliers and send it for analysis in Edmonton. Under a microscope, a lab technician would count the number of rings on a tooth root, like the growth rings on a tree stump, to determine the bear’s age. The problem bear would receive a bright yellow or orange ID ear tag. Some would get a radio collar, so biologists could follow its whereabouts like a prisoner released on parole. The problem bears entered the system as numbers, so repeat offenders could be identified.

Most wildlife managers had a three-strikes-you’re-out policy. For bears that didn’t get the memo on mutual avoidance, their story ended with a lead bullet. “Put down” was the common expression, or “cull,” like kill made soft, or “euthanized,” as though the bear were akin to our family’s dog, Sage, whom we said goodbye to on the operating table at the veterinary clinic. “Destroyed” was another word used by wildlife managers, and as a child I imagined them blowing up the bear into ten thousand tiny pieces the same way they detonated the Death Star in Star Wars.

Bears that remained afraid of people and avoided areas used by humans would have the best chance at survival, my dad reminded us. 

The calls from the public about problem bears wore on him, however. 

“Who’s really the problem here — bears or people?” he’d complain.

Bears were just being bears, he’d say, drawn by their noses to unmanaged food sources, including unsecured garbage bins, or cooking oil dumped behind a restaurant in town, or an apple tree, or raspberry bushes in somebody’s backyard. Or maybe someone left their barbecue wide open, or forgot a bag of dog food out on the front steps of their house. Or perhaps it was a bear just passing through town, using the paved walking trail as a corridor to travel. In cases where bears would refuse to budge from people’s backyards, sometimes they’d discover small cubs clinging to the upper branches of nearby trees, which the mothers guarded from below.

At the root of every problem bear, my dad would say, is a human problem. The idea of a “bad bear” was solely a human construct. The bear was just trying to pack on enough pounds to survive the winter. If it discovered a human-made food source, that was our fault, not the bear’s.

But for all the resources that went into dealing with these so-called problem bears in town, the bears that actually killed people seemingly appeared out of thin air, like a sleight of hand. Their victims never saw it coming. These black bear attacks, although incredibly rare, mostly happened in remote areas where human activity encroached on their habitat.

‘When they get into predatory mode, it’s like the flick of a switch’

When I was in Grade 10, my forestry class was preparing for a two-week field course outside Swan Hills, Alta., an area located to the south of Peace River where there’s a high density of grizzly bears and black bears. My dad came to my high school to give a presentation on bear safety, specifically, how to protect ourselves from or avoid bear attacks. I’d grown up listening to these cautionary stories and instructions, but somehow the repeated telling felt as visceral as the first. He told us a story about 63-year-old Cree trapper Bella Twin, who, in 1953, encountered and defended herself against one of the world’s largest recorded grizzly bears in this same region and astonishingly put down the bear with a .22 rifle, a firearm meant for hunting small game like grouse and rabbits. I shivered in awe of Bella’s bravery, and my classmates’ eyes were wide with admiration. Even the boys nodded with respect. I was proud of my father, standing in front of our class like a bear guru of sorts. 

We were instructed to respond differently in a close encounter with a grizzly bear versus a black bear. The two species had, behaviourally speaking, evolved differently. Whereas black bears evolved in trees, often fleeing and climbing to safety in frightening encounters, grizzly bears evolved on treeless plains where they had to stand their ground and fight back in defence situations. If it was a defensive grizzly bear attack, a mother protecting her cubs, for example, he advised us to play dead, which would potentially defuse the attack. “You’ve got to convince her that you’re not a threat,” he said. Often, in defensive grizzly attacks, bears would eventually leave after initially wounding or impairing a person. 

“Cover the back of your neck with your hands,” he told us. “Try to stay on your stomach. The bear will likely try to flip you over, but if you can, stay on your stomach and protect your vital organs.”

If it was a black bear attack, he said, “you’ve gotta fight with everything you’ve got.”

We learned of a 10-year-old girl from Williams Lake, B.C., who fought off a black bear with an axe and a pot of boiling water, which she flung in the bear’s face.

Black bear attacks in North America occur more frequently than grizzly bear attacks, he explained, but when grizzlies do attack, it often results in serious injury or death. There were other key differences between grizzly bears and black bears.

He pointed to research from Herrero’s Bear Attacks that found the majority of fatal grizzly bear attacks occurred in national parks, where bears had become food-habituated and accustomed to people. On the flip side, nearly all the fatal black bear attacks took place in rural, remote areas — not so different from Peace River or the Swan Hills. Although these incidents were extremely rare, Herrero found that black bears would stalk and attack their victims in broad daylight, whereas the majority of grizzly bear attacks occurred at night. Perhaps that’s due to the fact that grizzly bears, as their habitat has shrunk in size and fragmented, have adapted to become more nocturnal. In over half the accounts, black bears preyed on people of smaller stature, their victims often women or children. There was an assumption that grizzlies were more dangerous than black bears, but just because black bears tended to be smaller didn’t mean they were any less deadly. “[Black bears] can bite through live trees thicker than a man’s arm,” Herrero wrote in Bear Attacks. “They can kill a full-grown steer with a bite to the neck.”

“If a black bear is stalking you, you’re probably not going to see it coming,” my dad told us. “When they get into predatory mode, it’s like the flick of a switch. They’re on. They’re focused.” 

A collective hush fell over the room, all eyes glued to my father.

No doubt he was thinking of the tragic bear attacks that had occurred only a few years earlier at Liard River Hot Springs, a remote campground in northern British Columbia. On August 14, 1997, an adult black bear stalked a woman named Patti McConnell and her 13-year-old son, Kelly, near the upper hot springs pool. The bear attacked McConnell and then turned on her son, who had attempted to beat the bear off his mother with a stick. When Ray Kitchen, a 56-year-old trucker, heard their screams, he went running to intervene, but the bear charged and knocked him over. As people heard the attacks, they fled from the hot springs for the parking lot, and in the ensuing panic the bear mauled a fourth victim, a 28-year-old man. Eventually, two bystanders came running with rifles. They shot the bear, but both Patti McConnell and Kitchen died from their wounds. 

My classmates and I had learned about the gruesome attacks, right down to the goriest details, on the television news. It made the front page of the newspapers with headlines that read: DEADLIEST ATTACK IN NORTH AMERICAN HISTORY. Reader’s Digest published a story called “Rogue Bear on the Rampage” that depicted the 13-year-old boy watching the bear “engulf his mother’s almost naked body.” The story read like a thriller novel; it was impossible to tear your eyes away from the sensational account. “[Kelly’s mother] lay beside him, her skin ashen, her eyes open and unblinking,” the article read. “The animal’s foul, rancid breath made Kelly want to vomit. He closed his eyes. He knew he was about to die.”

There was something unsettling about the way people leaned in to the bear attack story, some kind of twisted desire to consume every last gruesome detail. We were drawn to the blood lust of bear attacks with a magnetic intensity. It was hard to look away from the onslaught of headlines, but then again, we were kids growing up in a culture obsessed with violence inflicted by predators of all kinds — from wrestlers bashing one another over the head with folding chairs to movies about serial killers and rapists. Bears were just another bad guy.

But when it comes to bears, a fatal, predatory attack is never personal. It’s not evil or malicious, or premeditated. It’s about the animal’s attempt to survive and evolve. The media’s obsession with bear attacks generates sales and dollars, but more often than not, it fails to bring us any closer to understanding them as a species.

The detail about the woman’s “almost naked body” reminded me of the opening scene in Spielberg’s cult classic Jaws, a movie we worshipped as kids, that opens with a young woman with long blond hair running along a beach, giggling and taking off her clothes. A drunken suitor follows behind, slurring, “What’s your name again?” “Chrissie!” she says. “Where are we going?” “Swimming!” she responds. As she pulls off her sweater, revealing her breasts, the man says with a laugh, “I’m definitely coming!” Chrissie swims elegantly out into the calm ocean waters as the guy drunkenly struggles out of his clothes and passes out on the beach. 

The point of view changes to that of the great white shark, lurking beneath Chrissie, rising up toward her. The camera zooms in on her naked body, a perfect Barbie replica, and the theme music, the two single notes produced by a tuba that Jaws would become world-famous for — duh duh, duh duh, duh duh — warns us that she’s about to get attacked. The Reader’s Digest story about the Liard River Hot Springs bear attack used similar stylistic tactics, only the rogue predator on a killing spree was a black bear instead of a shark. And the “almost naked” woman was an actual human victim. 

At the root of my discomfort about the sensationalized story was not only the conscious fear of being attacked by a wild predator, but an unconscious one too, which began to take up space in my body. The fear of what it meant to be a girl on the brink of adolescence in the North. 

Learning survival strategies for a different kind of threat

Growing up, I wore my brother Brendan’s hand-me-down clothes — grunge jeans that hung off my sapling frame and baggy Nirvana T-shirts — with pride. I cut my long blond hair into a mushroom cut, a popular hairstyle in the early 1990s, just like he did. We rocked out to the same music: the Offspring, Pennywise, NOFX. I remember sitting with my brother in the back seat of our parents’ Dodge van, drumming on the back of the driver’s and passenger’s seats, Green Day full blast on the stereo, gleefully bellowing the lyrics: WELCOME TO PAR–A–DISE!

On the weekends, he played in hockey tournaments and I religiously attended, even travelling with the team to away games. The ice was my brother’s preferred habitat, the place where he seemed the happiest, where he came alive. My mom said she used to take him to the arena where they lived at the time, in Brooks, Alta., when he was a baby, and his eyes would follow the game, watching the players zip back and forth. By the time Brendan could walk, he could skate.

For me, the hockey arena was a different kind of wilderness. The other players’ younger siblings and I would scurry up and down the side ramps, chasing rogue pucks that flew over the glass, and search beneath the bleachers for sticky quarters to buy scorching hot Styrofoam cups of hot chocolate and bags of hickory sticks from the vending machines. They called us “rink rats.” We were scavengers of sorts, allowed to freely roam the arena. But when my brother set foot on the ice, I would rush back to the bleachers where my parents sat and watch him like a hawk. I’d perch behind his team in the players’ box, cheering until my lungs were hoarse. As they played, the scent of the boys’ damp, sweat-saturated hockey gear — gloves, pads, socks, uniforms — filtered up toward us. I secretly loved that smell, even when, after games, my brother grabbed me and playfully threatened to zip me up in his equipment bag. 

Brendan’s dream — like many other boys’ dreams in Canadian towns and cities — was to play on a team for the National Hockey League. Somehow, when we were kids, it didn’t seem so far out of reach. We were of a generation force-fed those inspirational slogans printed on laminated posters tacked up on the walls: IF YOU CAN BELIEVE IT, YOU CAN ACHIEVE IT. Brendan was always one of the strongest players, and our family organized our lives around his great love and his dream of playing in the NHL. 

While I had begun to struggle with a growing sense of my body as an object of appraisal, never quite measuring up, my brother had to contend with his own perceived shortcomings: He was always one of the smallest guys in his class and on his hockey team. Over the years of playing minor hockey in Peace River, coaches often told him, “Too bad you aren’t bigger.” That he wasn’t an “alpha male” — a term that seemed to imply being physically big and dominant-spirited — weighed on him. 

Our coming of age in a resource town in northern Alberta would require different survival strategies. I would learn how to avoid getting unwanted attention from boys or men. I would learn how to fawn and please, but also how to physically fend off an attack and defuse threats — not only from bears, but from boys and men. Defensive tactics of a different kind. Even then I sensed that the cultural onus seemed to be on us, as girls, to protect ourselves from harm.

And so, at 13, I signed up for a self-defence course. I learned how to hit an attacker in the “vital areas,” jabbing the eyes, striking the nose, jaw or temple. How to carry car keys between my knuckles when walking to my vehicle at night. I didn’t even have my learner’s permit yet, but that was a trick I’d carry with me long into adulthood.

When he was 15, Brendan started getting “fucking smashed,” as he liked to say, with his hockey teammates on the weekends. He tried to hide it from my parents; alcoholism ran on both sides of our family, our mother always warned us. She spoke often of her childhood, growing up with an alcoholic father whose own father, a Ukrainian immigrant, had struggled with substance abuse. But booze flowed like the river in the North. The only way to drink was to drink hard. Get blackout drunk. “If you can’t remember what happened, you know it was a good night,” the saying went.

Brendan gifted me with a mickey of lemon gin, hidden in a small wooden chest he’d made in his Grade 11 industrial arts class, the summer I was 14 years old. My first sip of alcohol triggered cringe and disgust, followed by a warmth that rocked my body like ocean swell. I tasted relief in alcohol. I swam in the sea of disembodiment. The fear and anxiety that was gradually accumulating in my girl body found release. 

We drank religiously every weekend in the bleachers at Friday night hockey games, at bush parties, in gravel pits and next to the gravesite of Twelve Foot Davis, a legendary trapper who’d improbably struck it rich on a 12-foot-wide gold mining claim during the Klondike gold rush. We got high, standing atop a large cement pad where Twelve Foot’s remains were entombed, overlooking the Peace River Valley, the lights of town glittering down below. We gathered around stacks of burning pallets, Metallica’s “Enter Sandman” blasting out of one of the hockey gods’ vehicles. Boys on shrooms and cocaine dared one another to jump over the dancing flames. Someone emptied a jerry can of fuel on the fire and it exploded. We waterfall-chugged and drank until we couldn’t walk. We drank until the red and blue lights flickered through the bush and the RCMP extinguished the flames and shut down the party and everyone drove home drunk.While we’d been trained to deter problem bears, and to protect ourselves against predatory wildlife attacks, there were quiet, embedded risks to growing up in northern Alberta. There were other predatory forces we wouldn’t see coming — and no soundtrack to indicate an incoming threat. 

It was my intoxicated classmate at the bush party, stumbling into the back seat of one of the hockey gods’ trucks. The next week at school, they wouldn’t call her a victim, they’d call her a slut. 

Don’t be a Chrissie — she had it coming.

“Bear spray is more effective than a gun,” my dad had informed my classmates and me in his presentation before our field trip to Swan Hills. “It’s faster and safer.”

How many of my female classmates were also thinking what I was thinking? 

Maybe it could work on guys, too.

As teenagers, we had a significantly greater chance of dying from alcohol poisoning and drug overdose, or operating vehicles or ATVs while drunk, than of being mauled by a bear. Yet, in some ways, we were better equipped to fend off predatory wildlife than we were to cope with social pressures and substance abuse. As my brother and I began to prioritize partying on the weekends, we inherently spent less time with our family on the land, camping, canoeing and hunting. We were just teens in a small northern town, doing what teens do. Experimenting beyond the boundaries of our family culture, moving toward independent social behaviour. But there were consequences to our actions; too many of our peers died — far too young.

We toasted our lost friends like fallen comrades, pressed the bottle of Jack Daniel’s to our lip, and taunted one another on, drink, drink, drink, drink.

On that Grade 10 field trip to Swan Hills, we didn’t encounter a single bear.

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For the past 12 winters I have been photographing and observing snowy owls in farmers’ fields northwest of Elmira, Ont. — with permission from the landowners, and a pocketful of dog treats to befriend off-leash farm dogs.

While snowy owls typically roost on the ground, they prefer a higher perch — a tree, a fencepost or hydro pole from which to hunt prey.

To witness a hunt is truly a memorable sight.

Their feathers allow near-silent flight as they swoop down to attack their prey, such as meadow voles, mice and birds. But it takes practice; I’ve witnessed inexperienced young owls chase pigeons round and round a grain silo and fail. Meanwhile, a mature female I encountered one winter targeted a pigeon 300 metres across a field and snatched it out of the sky.

In a good year, I might have seen as many as 10 snowy owls in the roughly 10-square kilometres I routinely cover. But in the past two years, only two or three have made their way to these fields for the winter, after spending the summer on the Arctic tundra. Birders and ecologists across Ontario and Quebec have also reported fewer sightings in recent years. 

Although some snowy owls remain in the Arctic year-round, many begin migrating southward in late autumn. In years when an abundance of lemmings can be found on the tundra, the number of chicks born — or the clutch size — can be larger. The young owls aren’t ready to compete with experienced hunters, meaning they are pushed south.

Some migrants enjoy wintering in Ontario’s lake country, where waterfowl are abundant, while many prefer flat, open farmland that resembles tundra. With incredible eyesight, the ability to turn their heads about 270 degrees and phenomenal hearing, they are able to home in on mice and voles across a field.

But snowy owls that find their way south face human-related threats such as electrocution from power lines and rodenticide poisoning in the mice and voles they eat. Automobile collisions, though, appear to be the most common cause of death among snowy owls wintering in eastern North America.

In the North, climate change has severely impacted Arctic ecology, with the region warming three times faster than the global average, threatening the survival of many plant and animal species including the snowy owl. As the treeline creeps north in the warming climate, the snowy owl’s tundra is also giving way to forest.

Lemmings are their main source of food in the Arctic, and breeding success is intertwined with any fluctuation in the population of these rodents. A healthy number of lemmings generally means more “snowies.” The opposite is also true. As snow cover thaws and refreezes amid warmer temperatures and rainfall, lemmings — who can forage plants and lichen through snow — are prevented from reaching their food sources by the ice. 

Warmer temperatures could also see the northward advance of insect borne diseases such as West Nile virus, which has been found in migrating snowy owls. Snowy owls are also gradually losing their circumpolar habitat as mining interests grow in the Canadian North and oil and gas interests take up space, such as along Alaska’s northern slope. The massive oilfield in Prudhoe Bay is 300 kilometres east of a traditional snowy owl breeding site in Utqiagvik, Alaska. And there is also the looming threat of legacy oil spills in the area, south of Utqiagvik, the town formerly known as Barrow. 

There has been a 30 per cent reduction in the breeding snowy owl population over three generations, according to the International Union for the Conservation of Nature. Since 2017, the International Union has classified snowy owls as vulnerable to extinction. The Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife in Canada reported in May that, with a population decrease of more than 40 per cent over the past two decades, snowy owls are now threatened — one step away from endangered. 

The winter still brings snowy owls south. But for how much longer?

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After a secret ballot, global trade restrictions will not be placed on the species at the heart of Canada’s most lucrative fishery. But trade of American eels is also driving a massive, illegal economy — and advocates say the vote represents a failure to address this serious threat.

On Nov. 27, countries voted against listing the American eel and other eel species at the 20th meeting of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species, or CITES, in Uzbekistan. Canada was among the nations who voted against restrictions. At the meeting, the Canadian delegate said populations of American eel have remained stable for the last two decades, and that the proposal did not take into account advances in technology used to distinguish eel species. The vote was followed by an announcement this week that Canada will not list American eel under the Species At Risk Act, following more than a decade of deliberation.

The restrictions would have applied to the trade of 17 eel species, including American eel, which is the basis of a controversial fishery in Atlantic Canada. American eel are harvested as palm-size juveniles from Maritime rivers in the spring, and exported to Asia for rearing in aquaculture facilities. A kilogram of baby eels (called elvers) was fetching nearly $5,000 in 2023.

That price drives not only commercial and Indigenous fisheries, but also a large black-market fishery conducted by organized crime, experts say, making a coordinated response necessary. The Sustainable Eel group, a conservation group based in the U.K., says illegal eel sales are the “world’s greatest wildlife crime.” Despite its vote against the listing, experts say Canada, as a hub for the trade, has a particularly important role to play. 

“Canada could have played a role at this meeting, and actually led support for the proposal,” Katie Schleit, fisheries director at Oceans North says. “They’ve come out in all kinds of different arenas as being a champion to fight illegal, unreported, unregulated fishing, [but] … they aren’t taking responsibility for the role that Canada’s actually playing in the global illegal trade of eels right now.”

Illegal fishing, exports put pressure on American eel

Trade poses a significant threat to biodiversity, according to Sheldon Jordan, a wildlife crime consultant who formerly worked on wildlife enforcement at Environment and Climate Change Canada. “When [people] think of endangered species, they’re thinking of all the things in The Lion King, but the biggest threat is actually [to] the consumables. It’s the fish, it’s the wood, the things that we eat,” he says. With eel, “the demand is outstripping the supply. There is a conservation issue.” 

The Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species, which has been ratified by 185 parties, is meant to address this. Since 1975, the convention has worked to regulate the trade in wild plants and animals, to maximize their chances of survival.

This year, the European Union, with the support of Honduras and Panama, nominated 17 species of eel to be included under an appendix that regulates trade, but doesn’t prevent it. While the proposal noted Japanese and American eel are particularly at risk, the parties nominated over a dozen freshwater species, noting that eels are often impossible to tell apart, making enforcement a challenge.

European eel — which has declined by up to 95 per cent in rivers across Europe — shows why this is important, Jordan says. 

The export of European eels from the European Union has been banned since at least 2011 (with European eel listed under CITES in 2009), but the ban did not stop the export of juvenile eels to Asia. Jordan says his Environment Canada officers in Vancouver and Toronto intercepted containers of frozen eel meat from Asia as late as 2017, almost a decade after the CITES listing. The meat was labelled as American eel, but genetic testing revealed up to 50 per cent was European eel that had been falsely declared to evade controls.

 “In the end, our officers confiscated 186 tonnes of eel meat,” Jordan says. “That was six, seven times more than our previous record when it came to endangered species being seized.” 

Jordan says he warned colleagues at Fisheries and Oceans Canada that given the low supply and high price of European eel, it was only a matter of time before demand exploded for North American exports. “And unfortunately, that has come to pass.”

In Canada, the target is American eel, which is also found throughout the eastern United States, the Caribbean and at the northern edge of South America. American eel have a complex life cycle that starts in an area of the Atlantic Ocean known as the Sargasso Sea. Larvae spend up to a year floating around in the ocean, before transparent juveniles swim up rivers in the spring.

The Canadian commercial quota for those elvers has been set at roughly 10,000 kilograms for decades, and in recent years, the fishery has been the subject of bitter conflict as high prices have increased fishing pressure. Meanwhile, as Jordan predicted, exports of elvers have soared; in 2022, imports of live elvers into East Asia from the Americas jumped to 157 tonnes, up from 53 tonnes in 2021, according to a paper published in Marine Policy.

Over the last five years, Fisheries and Oceans Canada has cancelled the elver season multiple times, citing illegal fishing and violence. Since then, the federal government has imposed new regulations to increase the traceability of the catch, including possession and export licences. 

At this year’s meeting of the endangered species trade convention, Canada’s delegate cited these regulations in its position against listing. The delegate also described recent advances in rapid genetic testing that they said addresses the lookalike problem, though an Environment and Climate Change Canada report from September notes these tests have a 20 per cent false positive rate, and an ideal operating range above 18 C, meaning they can’t be used on frozen meat.

Not everyone agrees on stability of American eel population

Whether harvested as part of the official commercial quota or not, Jordan says elvers are sent to Toronto, where the companies that prepare them to survive export are located. 

Jordan says this makes Toronto the intermediate destination for American eel from not just Canada, but also the Caribbean, including places like Haiti where political instability fuels poaching, and the Dominican Republic, which has been asking for help in controlling illegal trade. “Toronto is basically the hub of the legal and illegal elver trade in the Western Hemisphere, with almost all of the eels going through Canada on their way to Asia,” he says. 

Being a central hub for the eel trade across the Americas, Canada would have been “in a really strong place to play a positive, constructive role in regulating the international trade,” Jordan says. He thinks a stronger stance would have levelled the playing field for Canadian harvesters, who are currently held to a higher standard than in other countries. 

Yet Mitchell Feigenbaum, a commercial licence holder with a fishing business based in New Brunswick and member of an industry group, says while licence holders agree illegal trade is a problem, they were opposed to the listing.

Feigenbaum says initially, he saw a listing as just “more red tape.” But he became concerned when he saw the text of the proposal, which identified American and Japanese eel at serious risk of becoming endangered without regulation. He felt the push for the listing was an attempt by “environmentalists and scientists with a particular predisposition” to call into question the conservation status of eel. “It really just felt like it’s a slap in the face, or … a strategic move by opponents of the fishery to gain a political advantage.”

Feigenbaum suggested American eel are resilient and can recover when their population is depleted, pointing to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s 2015 decision not to list American eel as threatened. In its statement at the convention, the Canadian government referred to a 2025 Fisheries and Oceans scientific report indicating that populations were stable. 

Not everyone sees eel populations that way. 

Kerry Prosper, Mi’kmaw Elder and councillor for Paqtnkek First Nation, has been fishing and working with eels most of his life. In recent years, he’s noticed a significant decline in the population of adult eels that community members once fished for food. “It’s quite a contrast that we’re in, and it’s so sad.” 

Paqtnkek was offered a licence for the elver fishery by Fisheries and Oceans Canada, but turned it down, Prosper says. “We simply don’t have faith in their management plans.”

In 1990, a Supreme Court case known as Sparrow ruled that First Nations had the right to food, social and ceremonial fisheries, putting that right above commercial and recreational fisheries. Prosper says the ruling is being disregarded, and he worries the harvesting of baby eels harms the adult population, putting food security at risk.

Harvesting and exporting eels for commercial profit shouldn’t come “at the cost of the species itself and the Indigenous people who live near where it comes from,” he says. “It’s just total disregard and disrespect to the animal and to the people.”

Schleit, with Oceans North, points out that stability of the American eel population in recent decades comes after a period of steep decline. In its stock assessment, Fisheries and Oceans noted that the species has likely declined by more than 50 per cent since 1980 

Federal government announces American eel will not be added to species at risk

On Tuesday, the federal government announced they would not be listing American eel under Canada’s Species At Risk Act. In a statement, Fisheries and Oceans Canada said it had determined that the Fisheries Act “is most effective for conserving the species while also providing the greatest overall socio-economic benefits to Canadians.”

Not classifying eel as a species at risk could be an acceptable decision from a sustainability perspective, Schleit says, but the government still needs to demonstrate how else they’re effectively managing the species. By not promoting a CITES listing, she says Canada missed a chance to show global leadership.

In a statement, Fisheries and Oceans Canada spokesperson Barre Campbell confirmed that Canada voted against the listing, and said Canada “is committed to the sustainable and orderly management of fisheries for eel and elver.” He also said that the American eel did not meet criteria required for a CITES listing, which requires a 70 percent population decline, and that CITES regulations would create duplication for Canadian harvesters. 

Despite their opposition to the listing, many countries, including Canada, recognized the existence of an issue at CITES, and approved a non-binding resolution to work together to address illegal trade. Schleit says it’s possible to build on that momentum to continue to enact stronger protections for eels. In the meantime, she says, these enigmatic species remain at risk.

“European eel basically got traded to the point where it crashed,” she says. “We see a strong chance that that’s going to happen again with American eel.”

This story was updated on Dec. 5, 2025, at 11:05 ET to correct the units of measurement of Canada’s commercial quota for elvers.

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B.C.’s minister of Water, Land and Resource Stewardship hopes to start working with the federal government toward a strategy to prevent train-wildlife collisions in the new year.

“It’s really concerning,” Randene Neill said in an interview with The Narwhal this week. “I wasn’t aware that the numbers are that high.”

Neill’s comments follow The Narwhal’s investigation into wildlife strikes in B.C., produced in partnership with CBC and the Global Reporting Centre. It showed hundreds of animals are killed on tracks owned and operated by Canada’s two major railway companies: Canadian National (CN) and Canadian Pacific Kansas City (CPKC).

The railways are required to report collisions to the B.C. government, but records obtained through freedom of information requests show reporting is both inconsistent and incomplete, obscuring the full scale of the problem.

“Now it’s definitely, definitely on our radar and we’re going to work to do what we can to work with the federal government and to reduce those types of collisions,” Neill said.

However, neither Ottawa nor B.C. seem willing to accept full accountability for the issue of train-wildlife collisions. Neill said the federal government has jurisdiction over transnational railways, suggesting any new regulations must ultimately come from Ottawa.

Meanwhile, a spokesperson for Transport Canada Minister Steven MacKinnon said the provincial government has authority over the issue. 

“As wildlife-railway collisions fall under provincial jurisdiction, we look forward to working with the Government of British Columbia on how we can best assist in addressing this issue,” a statement from the federal minister’s office said.

In response, a spokesperson for the B.C. ministry said, “While the province compiles provincial data and is responsible for wildlife management in B.C., the onus is on the federally-managed railways to manage this issue — not on B.C.’s wildlife to stop getting hit.”

Train collisions with wildlife take a toll 

The B.C. ministry is currently compiling data on wildlife collisions, which are reported to the province through various channels. “Getting those numbers and being able to really target those problem areas is important and probably a first step,” Neill said.

Asked whether she would commit to releasing the data, Neill said she would work to make it public, calling it “an important part of the process.” 

For now, it remains unclear exactly how many animals are struck and killed by trains in B.C. 

In the Elk Valley in the province’s southeast, collisions with trains and vehicles on Highway 3 are a leading cause of death for grizzly bears, according to wildlife scientist Clayton Lamb. 

Lamb has been monitoring bears in the area for more than a decade. In a particularly jarring incident he followed a few years ago, a mother grizzly and her three cubs were killed in a single collision with a train along the Elk River near Elko, B.C.

When Lamb arrived at the scene, he found the cubs lying in a row on the dry riverbed just below the train bridge and the mother’s body farther down the tracks.

The grizzly population in the area is dense and fairly stable, but with a high mortality rate, it’s not self-sustaining, Lamb said. Instead, it’s propped up by bears moving in from other areas like the Bull River, Flathead Valley and Kananaskis. Lamb’s concern is the steady stream of bears could one day dry up as more habitat is lost to development. “We don’t know the tipping point at which that fairly complicated dynamic will stop working,” he said.

Trains regularly strike wildlife in other areas as well, according to locomotive engineer Jim Atkinson, who worked for CN for more than three decades before retiring in 2008. For years, he travelled the picturesque route between Jasper National Park in Alberta and Blue River, B.C.

Wildlife collisions were “a huge issue,” he said. Whenever he saw an animal on the tracks, Atkinson would blow the whistle repeatedly, hoping to scare it out of harm’s way. At night, he’d also shut off the headlights, hoping to give it a better chance of escape by preserving its night vision. But it wasn’t always enough. Especially when winter snow was piled high on either side of the tracks, animals would too often choose the most obvious path and run straight down the tracks in a futile attempt at escape, he explained.

“You can’t see what’s going on because it’s dark and you’ve got the headlights off and you’re blowing the whistle and ringing the bell as hard as you can and then you hear them go underneath the engine,” he said. “It was difficult.”

But stopping wasn’t a feasible option — trains need up to two kilometres on average to slow to a stop.

Neill, a former journalist, said she’s observed the risks herself. She recalled seeing deer eating spilled grain along the railway tracks in the winter in Brandon, Man., where she began her journalism career. Now, she says she’s willing to work at reducing collisions not only in B.C. but across the country.

Companies ‘obscuring the facts to secure their bottom line’: BC Green Party leader

The Narwhal reached out to both the BC Conservatives and the BC Greens for comment on this story, but did not hear back from the Conservatives ahead of publication.

In an interview BC Green Party leader Emily Lowan called for an overhaul in the way the railways’ risks to wildlife are managed.

“It’s horrific,” she said. “And it’s the same story that we’ve seen across B.C. — massive corporations like CPKC and CN are obscuring the facts to secure their bottom line at the expense of our wildlife, our workers and our environment.”

“It seems like our government has completely abandoned its duty to hold these massive corporations accountable,” she said.

In response, Neill said transnational railways fall under federal jurisdiction. 

While railways are required to report strikes under B.C.’s Wildlife Act, Transport Canada previously told The Narwhal there are no specific requirements under the federal Railway Safety Act focused solely on train-wildlife collisions.

“We definitely want them to improve what they can to reduce these collisions and we’re willing to absolutely work with them to do that,” Neill said.

Both CN and CPKC previously told The Narwhal they report wildlife strikes to the B.C. government and take steps to reduce collisions. CN noted it continues to make investments in technology and pointed to specific efforts in Jasper National Park and northern B.C. where the company has installed limited fencing to reduce wildlife strikes. CPKC, meanwhile, said it has replaced about 6,000 older grain cars and manages vegetation along the tracks to avoid attracting wildlife and to give animals a clear escape path.

In a follow-up statement Thursday, a CPKC spokesperson reiterated a previous comment noting the company views this as “a complex problem, with no simple solutions” and continues to work with federal and provincial governments to reduce collisions.

CN did not respond to The Narwhal’s request for comment ahead of publication.

Researchers say there are potential solutions companies could deploy more broadly. These include using an early warning system to alert wildlife to oncoming trains, installing targeted fencing in high-risk areas, reducing grain leaks and spills and removing carcasses to avoid attracting other animals to the tracks and enhancing wildlife trails to give animals better alternative travel routes.

Both Lowan and Neill noted collisions aren’t just an issue for wildlife populations, but also for the locomotive engineers, who must deal with the trauma of hitting animals on the tracks.

“It’s in everybody’s interest to be able to work together to reduce those collisions,” Neill said. 

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