Wolves have long been a source of fascination for biologist Kevin Van Tighem, who grew up in southern Alberta in the 1960s and 1970s. He read widely about the exotic creature he had never seen, an animal often hated and feared: depicted in a popular fairy tale as a big-toothed, big-eyed monster whose trickery would soon be rewarded with a pleasant meal.

Van Tighem’s first personal encounter with a wolf — unexpectedly hearing one howl near his home in Banff — helped launch him on a lifelong journey to understand our complicated relationship with the shaggy canid whose ancestors branched off millions of years ago in the tree of evolution, eventually to gift humans with our most loyal companions: dogs.

There was a particular poignancy to that first surprising howl, recalls Van Tighem, author of the prize-winning book The Homeward Wolf.  

Wolves had been exterminated from southern Alberta — hunted, trapped and poisoned by strychnine, along with foxes and skunks and the inevitable by-catch of other furry and winged critters, including ravens. 

Now, they were back.  

“As a hunter, when I’m out there I really identify with them,” Van Tighem, the former superintendent of Banff National Park, tells The Narwhal.  

“I’m trying to experience the landscape in the same way that they do. I cut across their tracks and I see that they’re out there. There’s just a sense that these are my kindred spirits, that these are my fellow hunters.”

Today, Van Tighem’s fellow hunters remain the hunted.

Each winter in B.C., when snow brightens the landscape and wolves are clearly visible, the provincial government dispatches sharpshooters in low-flying helicopters to kill Canis lupus.

In this case, the killing is not motivated by fear of rabies, as it was in southern Alberta when Van Tighem was young.

Instead, the provincial government culls wolves in a costly attempt to pull endangered southern mountain caribou herds back from the brink of local extinction. 

In the words of the ministry responsible for the cull, “predator reduction is an immediate measure to stop caribou from dying in order to stabilize and recover identified herds in B.C.”

This past winter, the B.C. government spent almost $2 million to kill 463 wolves in the habitat of 10 endangered caribou herds, according to an email from the Ministry of Forests, Lands, Natural Resources Operations and Rural Development.

That’s an average $4,300 per wolf. 

In the habitat of the Columbia North herd in the Kootenays, where 10 wolves were shot over the winter, the government spent $100,000, according to the ministry — an average of $10,000 per wolf.

No easy fix for waning caribou populations

For Van Tighem, the winter cull is a symptom of an ecosystem out of balance, a natural world so disturbed by human activity that we are forced into playing an ecological version of whack a mole (or, in this case, shoot a wolf). All the while, we clear-cut the old-growth forests on which southern mountain caribou depend, seeding their habitat with oil and gas operations and splintering it with roads. 

“We overshot the mark,” Van Tighem says. “We basically took more than the ecosystem could spare and, sure enough, we started seeing symptoms of the problem. And one of the most obvious symptoms is this fact that most of these caribou populations are either gone or in decline.” 

Animal rights groups, along with some conservation groups and some scientists, decry the wolf cull as cruel, unnecessary and ineffective, especially in the absence of robust habitat protections for southern mountain caribou — a species that evolved to escape undue predation by spreading out on vast, unfettered landscapes.

Other scientists and conservation groups support the cull as an emergency stop-gap measure, while also underscoring that improved natural resource management and habitat protection — including protections that allow caribou to range between mountain tops and valley for food — are essential to saving the species from local extinction. 

There’s no easy fix: killing wolves in endangered caribou habitat is not something the B.C. government can do for two years, five years, or even 10 years to ensure that caribou herds persist, while at the same time continuing to allow their critical habitat to be fractured by new development like industrial logging and pipelines.

According to biologist Paul Paquet, an internationally recognized authority on wolves, 70 to 90 per cent of the wolves in endangered caribou habitat will have to be eliminated every single year for decades in order for the cull to be effective. 

His estimate aligns with a B.C. government document that circulated last September, proposing to kill more than 80 per cent of the wolves in the habitat of three endangered caribou herds over the winter.

Those herds include the Hart Ranges in the province’s interior, where the Coastal GasLink pipeline is the latest in a line of industrial disturbances, and the company building it — a subsidiary of TC Energy, formerly TransCanada Pipelines — paid for the winter wolf kill.

“That intense killing would have to continue over numerous years, probably up to 50 years, to have a positive effect,” says Paquet, a carnivore specialist with Raincoast Conservation Foundation, a group that advocates for an end to all wolf kills.

“Wolves can recover. And it’s not only that they can recover within the regions where they’re being killed. But they also will come from other areas as well.” 

Wolves, which can travel up to about 45 kilometres a day, quickly adjust to the cull; when one pack is eliminated, another pack will soon move in. If the alpha male and female are killed, the pack often breaks up without their leadership and younger members are faster to reproduce, Van Tighem points out. 

“You’re constantly breaking down their social structure and sending untrained adolescents out onto the landscape to figure out how to kill things and to reproduce. So you’re increasing predation because these are inefficient hunters.”

It all adds up to more wolves — and more culls. 

“The wolves are incredibly resilient,” says Stan Boutin, a mammalian ecologist at the University of Alberta. “If you stop the control, they will go back in numbers very quickly to what they were before you started the control and, as soon as those numbers get back up, it’s back to caribou populations declining.” 

“You can’t take your foot off the pedal, which you would love to do.”

B.C.’s wolf and caribou dilemma

Before humans transformed the landscape, wolf predation didn’t unduly affect the teeming caribou herds that roamed across Canada. Caribou were so iconic to the country that, in 1937, they were chosen for the tail of the Canadian quarter, where they remain an antlered emblem of the north.

“They were doing just fine in getting along with each other until this culture arrived that was into exploiting the habitat that they both occupy,” Van Tighem says. “Anybody who says wolves wipe out caribou is missing the point … They certainly can now, but it’s only because we re-arranged all the deck chairs and it’s easier for them to get around.” 

As forests are clear-cut and landscapes are disturbed by additional industrial development, a flush of new growth attracts moose and deer. Wolves soon follow the moose and deer into caribou habitat. Roads, seismic lines and other linear disturbances, akin to predator highways, make the pursuit all the easier.

“The spin off for that has been the increased overlap and density of wolves in caribou range,” Boutin says. “And caribou take it on the chin and down they go.”

So what to do? Either wolves die, or caribou die. But now B.C. faces a Sophie’s Choice dilemma, in which the outcome might be undesirable not just for wolves, but for caribou as well. 

The B.C. government is on a trajectory to spend tens of millions of dollars killing thousands of wolves in the habitat of endangered caribou herds over the next few decades. 

Yet those caribou herds might disappear regardless, due to the twin scourges of on-going habitat destruction and climate change, which is taking an eraser to habitat for herds already in precipitous decline and creating new habitat favourable to deer. 

Some scientists, including Boutin, believe a number of southern mountain caribou herds are likely to wink out no matter what measures are taken at this point in time, because we haven’t acted soon enough to save them. Old-growth forests, on which mountain caribou depend for nutritious lichen, their sole winter food, don’t grow back in a few decades. 

If some caribou herds are likely to become locally extinct, even with annual wolf culls, why shoot wolves in the first place? 

The B.C. government has no choice, Boutin points out. 

The federal Species at Risk Act mandates that action be taken to recover species and population groups at risk of extinction. 

“The federal requirement, the law, says, ‘thou shalt try to protect these herds no matter what the state they’re in and how likely or unlikely you are to get them to be self-sustaining,’” Boutin says.

Yet there are likely some herds in whose habitat such extensive land use changes have taken place “that there is absolutely no way we could actually restore the habitat back to any sort of magnitude [in which] we could expect to see a viable caribou herd exist,” he says. 

The B.C. government can’t sit back and do nothing, or federal Environment Minister Jonathan Wilkinson could ask Cabinet to approve an emergency protection order under the Species at Risk Act. That order would allow Ottawa to make decisions that normally fall within provincial jurisdiction, such as whether or not to grant logging permits, a hot-button political issue for any provincial government. 

And B.C. has left it very late for action. By permitting the on-going destruction of caribou habitat, the provincial government placed itself in a capsule with only one emergency escape hatch — killing wolves.

Culling wolf populations is now a priority for B.C.’s $47 million caribou recovery strategy, which also includes population monitoring, habitat restoration, caribou health monitoring, supplemental feeding, maternity penning, and tourism and recreation management.

The recovery strategy aims to address the precipitous decline of the province’s remaining 13 southern mountain caribou herds, all threatened with local extinction. Four herds have already been declared locally extinct, including two herds in the Kootenays that winked out just last year. 

Study found wolf cull effective

When Boutin and nine colleagues examined the effectiveness of wolf culls and other adaptive management strategies, in a 2019 paper for the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, they found the survival rate of caribou calves and adults increased and herd numbers stabilized when wolf control was carried out aggressively.

“In the short term, wolf control as a way to stop declines in fact works and you can use it for that reason,” Boutin says. 

“But at the end of the paper we say quite clearly that if you want to have caribou populations in the long term you can’t do wolf control forever and ever. You’ve got to deal with the habitat creation problem that has led to all of this. We have to get that habitat back to a place where it’s not good for wolves and it’s great for caribou. And unless you have energy to do that part, the wolf cull is either around forever and ever — or you will never have viable caribou populations anyway.”

Paquet says wolves have a profound influence on the ecosystems in which they live, including on a variety of other species. Removing them from the landscape could be damaging to the diversity and productivity of the environment.

“That’s not been considered,” he says about the wolf cull.

When wolves were reintroduced to Yellowstone National Park in the U.S., after the last pack in the park area was exterminated in the 1920s, the wolves had a buoyant impact on the ecosystem. Elk populations, which had ballooned in their absence, were kept in check; elk were no longer able to cause lasting damage to the land and plants from overgrazing, including on woody species such as cottonwood and aspen. 

Paquet says it’s unlikely that habitat required by some southern mountain caribou herds will be viable even in 50 or 100 years, given the species’ dependence on increasingly rare old-growth forests and with the variable of climate change. 

“I think they’re on a long-term slide to extinction no matter what we do,” he says. 

“And this creates all sorts of ethical dilemmas and really some moral confusion because you feel compelled to do something given what the situation is. And one of those things that people are doing, and I think they’re doing it in good faith, is killing wolves under the assumption that that will benefit caribou in the long-term.”

Toby Spribille is an evolutionary biologist who studies hair lichen, the winter food for mountain caribou.

He says many factors and interactions are at play in the sharp decline of caribou herds. Whether wolves are really driving the decline, he says, has not been proven. 

“Yes, wolves are causing mortality in some areas,” says Spribille, an assistant professor in biological sciences at the University of Alberta. 

“But in other areas, such as the Columbias, other causes of mortality — such as avalanches, bears and cougars — exceed mortality from wolves. So you could kill all the wolves you want and caribou would still decline. It looks like we haven’t gotten to the root of the problem.” 

Herd declines need to be examined from the “bottom-up,” starting with the accessibility of sufficient amounts of lichen to support herds at different times of the year, according to Spribille. 

The destruction of old-growth forests — and, with them, lichen, which grows in foragable amounts only on mature trees — means caribou have to travel further to find food, with greater exposure to harassment by winter recreation as well as predators, he says.

Snow-pack fluctuations caused by climate change mean that deep-snow winters, which give the lichens a “hair-cut” in the tree canopy, are sometimes followed by shallow-snow winters, making it difficult for caribou to reach hair lichens, hanging from tree branches, that sustain them through the coldest season, he further notes. 

And then there’s the question of wolf distribution. 

Spribille points out that in the Kootenays, where caribou herds have been in perilous decline over the past quarter-century, verified wolf mortality is lower than mortality from other predators. That could indicate smaller wolf populations in southern B.C., compared to wolf populations in the Peace and other northern areas. 

‘We would have to think differently about who we are’

B.C.’s winter wolf cull figures appear to support Spribille’s observation, with far fewer wolves taken out — at greater cost — in the Kootenays. 

Twenty wolves were killed over the winter in the habitat of the Central Selkirk caribou herd in the Kootenays, according to an email from the ministry in response to questions from The Narwhal. Just 10 wolves were killed in the Columbia North herd range.

In the Peace, 80 wolves were killed in the range of three caribou herds, including the Klinse-Za herd that two First Nations have spent the last six years trying to resuscitate, with tenuous success documented in Boutin’s co-authored paper, through an elaborate and expensive maternal penning project.  

And 94 wolves were killed in the range of the Itchas Ilgachuz herd in the Chilcotin, while 54 were killed in the Tweedsmuir herd range, the ministry said. 

Van Tighem says we, as a society, are not prepared to address the underlying issue of habitat loss for caribou because “it means we would have to think differently about who we are and how we live.” 

The prevailing mindset is to conceive of the Canadian economy rooted in the exploitation of natural resources — the oft-cited “hewer of wood and drawer of water,” he notes.

We aren’t willing to change our ambitions, he says, so we seek another way to ‘save’ caribou. 

Instead of taking immediate measures to protect critical caribou habitat and designate some areas off limits to forestry, mining, oil and gas development and road-building, we zero in on wolves.

“We look at the problem and we say we need to find a way to save the caribou and keep logging,” Van Tighem says. “We need to find a way to save the caribou and keep … motorized recreation. We need to find a way to save the caribou and keep on drilling for oil and gas and piping it off to the export markets … And it comes right back to how you introduce the question.”

Earlier this year, the B.C. and federal governments signed a landmark agreement with two First Nations in the Peace region that aims to protect endangered caribou herds through habitat protection and restoration, in addition to annual wolf culls. 

But no such new protections have been forthcoming for endangered southern mountain caribou herds in the rest of the province, including in the Kootenay and Chilcotin regions. The majority of B.C.’s southern mountain caribou herds are covered by a second, much vaguer, caribou recovery agreement that does not include robust habitat protections.

Last year, Doug Donaldson, Minister of Forests, Lands, Natural Resource Operations and Rural Development, said additional habitat protection for caribou in the south of the province were unnecessary, but did not provide any scientific evidence to back his statement.

Boutin says society will have to make some tough decisions about which caribou populations to save and which to let go, based on probabilities of herd survival. Those decisions must be guided by science, he says.

It’s a similar strategy to priority threat management, championed in Canada by scientist Tara Martin, who describes the methodology as “a mathematical equation to determine how to save as many species as possible for the least cost.”

Right now, Boutin says “we’re just throwing good money after bad,” killing wolves in the critical habitat of some caribou herds that have lost so much habitat they are unlikely to persist no matter what we do.

“If there’s no concerted effort by governments to do the other hard part — which is land use management — it’s a very unfair situation because we’re just killing wolves for a short term return on investment that in the end will not amount to our ultimate goal, which is to keep caribou around in the long term.” 

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Coastal GasLink paid $171,000 to kill wolves in the range of an endangered caribou herd that will lose critical habitat to the company’s pipeline for a gas export project, The Narwhal has learned.

The money for a winter wolf cull in Hart Ranges caribou habitat, northeast of Prince George, was part of $1.5 million the B.C. government required Coastal GasLink to pay for “caribou and predator monitoring” — a condition for receiving a provincial environmental assessment certificate for its 670-kilometre pipeline.

Construction of the pipeline, which will supply fracked gas from northeast B.C. for the LNG Canada project, will remove or disturb 2,750 hectares of habitat for the Hart Ranges herd, eliminating old-growth forest the government had set aside for the herd’s recovery and also cutting through two designated caribou migration corridors, according to project documents.

Chris Johnson, an ecology professor at the University of Northern British Columbia who sits on committees advising the federal government on caribou recovery, said it’s the first time he’s heard of a corporation paying for a predator kill in B.C. to compensate for destroying the habitat of an endangered species.

“There are all sorts of ethical questions about killing wolves to save caribou, although the science clearly shows that the method does work,” Johnson told The Narwhal.

“Those ethical questions are made even more challenging by having industry pay for the wolf kill.”

Ministry called for 80 per cent of wolves to be exterminated

 Charlotte Dawe, conservation and policy campaigner for the environmental group Wilderness Committee, which has mapped the destruction of caribou critical habitat in B.C., called Coastal GasLink’s financing of the winter wolf cull “shocking and disturbing.”

“It’s incredibly problematic,” Dawe said in an interview. “If we begin to accept money like that, I worry about the future of all species that are at risk. If this sets a precedent — where industry is now able to pay money for governments to partake in really unethical and not effective solutions to recover species at risk — it’s a dangerous road to go down.”

Last September, the provincial Ministry of Forests, Lands, Natural Resource Operations and Rural Development proposed a two-year predator cull in the habitat of Hart Ranges southern mountain caribou and two other at-risk herds.

The ministry said more than more than 80 per cent of wolves had to be exterminated to reverse steep caribou declines.

Human disturbances, including oil and gas development, have given natural predators such as wolves easy access to caribou whose habitat has been destroyed or fragmented right across Canada, with disastrous consequences for the once-robust species that evolved to spread out on unfractured landscapes.

Flagging tape marks the route of TC Energy’s Coastal GasLink pipeline, which cuts a wide swath through critical habitat for the endangered Hart Ranges caribou herd in the Anzac River drainage. Photo: Taylor Roades / The Narwhal

The Hart Ranges herd — which consists of two subpopulations known as the Parsnip and the Hart South — fell from an estimated 600 animals in 2010 to 375 in 2016, according to a YouTube video produced by the B.C. government, which has not released updated herd figures.

Johnson said while the Coastal GasLink project is only the latest industrial project to have a negative impact on the Hart Ranges herd, it represents a worrying trend of continued habitat loss and habitat degradation.

Despite the 38 per cent drop in population, the Hart Ranges herd is by far the largest of B.C.’s 10 remaining deep-snow caribou herds. Eight other deep-snow herds have become locally extinct in B.C. over the past decade.

Deep-snow caribou live in regions where snow is piled too high to paw through, forcing them to rely on arboreal lichens, which only grow in abundance in old-growth forests. Other southern mountain caribou populations can paw through snow to reach terrestrial lichens.

Coastal GasLink donated generously to BC Liberals

David Silver, the chair in business and professional ethics at the University of British Columbia’s Sauder School of Business, said the protection of animals and ecosystems and the development of the economy are all important values.

“When economic development threatens animals and ecosystems, difficult decisions must often be made regarding priorities,” Silver told The Narwhal. “Sometimes one can find ways to proceed with the economic activity and mitigate the harm to animals and ecosystems. In this case the ‘solution’ comes at the expense of the wolves.”

Silver said whether or not killing wolves is an ethically defensible outcome depends on how the decision to proceed in this manner was made and whether it was made by democratically elected, informed representatives “free of illegitimate pressure or influence on the part of the company or industry.”

The decision to oblige Coastal GasLink, a subsidiary of TC Energy (formerly TransCanada Pipelines), to pay the provincial government to monitor caribou and their predators was made in 2014 by the previous BC Liberal government.

Coastal GasLink subsequently donated more than $17,000 to the BC Liberal Party between 2015 and 2017, according to Election BC’s political contributions database.

Its parent company, TransCanada Pipelines Ltd., donated more than $135,000 to the BC Liberal Party from 2005 to 2016 and close to $14,000 to the BC NDP between 2012 and 2017.

In granting Coastal GasLink an environmental assessment certificate, former environment minister Mary Polak and former minister of natural gas development Rich Coleman said the project would have no significant adverse effects, “except with respect to caribou and greenhouse gas emissions.”

The pipeline corridor would generate “significant residual adverse effects” for caribou, due to habitat loss and fragmentation, as well as increased access for humans and predators, the ministers said in their decision statement, noting the project would negatively affect management and conservation objectives for at-risk caribou.

“…the success of proposed mitigation is uncertain and the project is likely to negatively impact caribou recovery objectives,” the ministers stated.

A view of the endangered Hart Ranges herd’s critical habitat in the Anzac valley north of Prince George. In 2019, the B.C. forests ministry issued 78 new logging cut block permits in the herd’s critical habitat, including six cut blocks in the Anzac valley. The cumulative impacts of industrial development, including forestry and oil and gas, spell trouble for caribou herds like the Hart Ranges. Photo: Taylor Roades / The Narwhal

Company also paid for GPS collars to track wolves

The Ministry of Forests, Lands, Natural Resource Operations and Rural Development confirmed in an email that Coastal GasLink contributed $559,800 to “caribou recovery and management efforts” over the past fiscal year, which ended on March 31.

The bulk of the funds went to the Hart Ranges herd, including $35,000 to capture and collar wolves, said the ministry, which also confirmed Coastal GasLink spent $171,184 on predator management to meet wolf density populations of less than three wolves per 1,000 square kilometres in the Hart Ranges herd habitat.

Last fall, the provincial NDP government asked hunters not to kill wolves with GPS radio collars, saying the effectiveness of wolf pack reduction — which typically involves shooting wolves from helicopters — would increase with more collared wolves alive on the landscape.

“When collared wolves are removed from their pack, the capability to reduce wolf numbers is significantly diminished, as packs can no longer be located quickly and efficiently reduced,” explained a ministry document for hunters.

The ministry said 91 wolves were killed during the winter in Hart Ranges herd habitat. About $300,000 had been budgeted for predator control from the Coastal GasLink funds this past winter, but not all the money was needed, and the unspent $129,000 will go back into the “caribou and predator monitoring” fund, the ministry said.

Coastal GasLink also paid $48,000 to collect data on new Hart Ranges caribou calves and their survival, $30,000 to access mortality sites to determine the cause of death in adult female caribou, $42,000 to collar caribou during helicopter captures, $10,000 for a birthing estimate model and to estimate births, and $10,000 to “initiate wildlife habitat area development for calving, rutting, connectivity and mineral licks,” according to the ministry.

The remaining $20,000 Coastal GasLink contributed during the past fiscal year went to the Telkwa herd in the Skeena region for mortality investigations, a fall census, a calf recruitment survey and collaring, the ministry said.

The Telkwa herd, which had 26 animals in 2018, will lose 245 hectares of habitat to the pipeline, according to a report from the B.C. Environmental Assessment Office. The pipeline will also disturb 334 additional hectares of the herd’s habitat, including in a proposed wildlife habitat area, a provincial designation meant to conserve critical habitat.

Coastal GasLink did not respond to a request for comment.

Human disturbances on the landscape make it far easier for wolves to prey on caribou. The logging of old-growth forests, on which caribou depend for nutritious lichen, their only winter food, soon brings a flush of growth. The greenery in newly open areas attracts moose and deer, which are followed by wolves. Photo: Patricia van Casteren / Flickr

Wolf culls: ‘we simply can’t do that forever’

Johnson said many British Columbians are under the misguided assumption that wolf culls are a necessary evil.

“It can be effective in reversing the decline of caribou populations that are suffering unsustainable mortality from predators such as wolves,” he said.

But wolf control will only be effective in the long-term if it is accompanied by strong efforts to conserve caribou habitat, including reductions in activities responsible for increasing wolf distribution and abundance, Johnson said.

New habitat protections for six imperilled southern mountain caribou herds in B.C.’s Peace region were recently announced by the B.C. government as part of a landmark partnership agreement with local First Nations.

Yet there are no new meaningful habitat protections for dozens of other highly endangered caribou herds in the province, including the Hart Ranges herd, even though all of B.C.’s southern mountain caribou herds are facing local extinction.

Last year, two more herds in B.C. became extirpated, or locally extinct, including the transboundary Gray Ghost herd that migrated back and forth from the Kootenays in southeast B.C. to the United States.

In a long-awaited move, last fall the Trump administration listed 17 imperilled B.C. populations of southern mountain caribou under the U.S. Endangered Species Act, including the Gray Ghost herd and the Hart Ranges herd.

The designation protects 12,000 hectares of critical habitat in Idaho and Washington so the species can eventually be reintroduced south of the border, where the demise of the Gray Ghost herd — also known as the South Selkirk herd — spelled the disappearance of caribou from the contiguous United States.

Johnson said wolf culls are only effective if they eliminate 70 to 80 per cent of the wolves in caribou range and take place every single year.

“We simply can’t do that forever,” he pointed out. “Wolf cull is supposed to be a stop gap approach to give some of those populations a chance to recover and also to implement other strategies that are going to minimize the effects of wolves on caribou populations.”

“The concern is how many years are we going to engage in wolf control and what are we going to do so we don’t get caught in this endless loop of very aggressive wolf control?”

Dawe said wolf culls should only occur in tandem with sufficient habitat protection, habitat restoration and emergency recovery efforts, such as penning pregnant caribou until their calves are old enough to stand a higher chance of survival in the wild.

“If all of those measures are happening and caribou are still being picked off at an unsustainable rate, that is the only way you should even be discussing a wolf cull.”

“The B.C. government has just relied only on a wolf cull,” Dawe said. “And we continuously find ourselves in a situation where caribou habitat is being destroyed while wolves are being killed at the same time.”

Recovery of species at risk must be guided by scientists, “not by industry’s interests and industry’s pockets,” she said.

The Coastal GasLink pipeline is shown in yellow, cutting through critical habitat for the endangered Hart Ranges caribou herd. In addition to approving the pipeline in the herd’s habitat, the B.C. government granted permits for 22 new cutblocks between October 2018 and July 2019, according to data from the Wilderness Committee. Map: Carol Linnitt / The Narwhal

No easy answers about industry paying for wolf cull

Dawe also said Coastal GasLink’s contribution of $65,000 for moose monitoring in Hart Ranges habitat this past year may also be a precursor to a moose cull.

When new roads are built and older forests are cut down for the pipeline — which will result in the clear-cutting or disturbance of 613 hectares of old forests, according to project documents  — the areas will flush with new growth the following spring.

“That’s the type of food that moose love,” Dawe pointed out. “So the theory is that moose come in and start eating all this nice new growth and they follow paths into caribou habitat … and then wolves follow them in.”

“For this caribou sub-population to now have Coastal GasLink coming through [with] more disturbance in the way of a pipeline, roads to facilitate that, [and] logging, it’s going to make that number even worse and it’s going to put them further on the brink of extinction.”

Johnson said there’s no easy answer to the question of whether a wolf control program sponsored by industry is less desirable than a cull sponsored by the government.

“On one hand, we’re achieving the same outcomes regardless of who’s paying for it. On the other hand, industry may not want to align with something that’s as objectionable as predator control, or wolf control. Many people in the public have concerns about those types of activities.”

“The one big picture philosophical issue here is the company actually paying for this mitigating strategy,” he said. “Has it crossed some sort of line?”

“I don’t know where I sit yet but I do think it’s terribly interesting.”

U.S. lists B.C. caribou as endangered while province approves logging in critical habitat

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A new southern mountain caribou protection agreement is being heralded as a landmark measure to protect six highly endangered herds in Treaty 8 traditional territory in B.C.’s northeast.

But scientists say a second, new conservation agreement aimed at protecting the rest of B.C.’s imperilled southern mountain caribou herds is “vague,” and some conservation groups are calling it a roadmap for the potential local extinction of herds already in sharp decline.

Both long-awaited draft agreements were announced Thursday by the B.C. government. The B.C. press gallery was given 30 minutes notice of a lunchtime technical briefing and news conference, and the government did not issue a press release.

A widely praised caribou partnership agreement for B.C.’s Peace region — forged among Saulteau and West Moberly First Nations and the federal and provincial governments — features habitat protection, including the designation of a new protected area for caribou and areas that would have interim moratoriums on industrial development such as logging.

It also includes an Indigenous guardian program, building on complex efforts by the two First Nations to save the spiritually important Klinse-za caribou herd — part of the Pine River caribou population unit — through a five-year-old maternal penning project. Details about the program, which West Moberly and Saulteau First Nations will take the lead in planning, have not yet been released.

Roland Willson, chief of West Moberly First Nations, called the partnership agreement “a real achievement” and praised B.C.’s NDP government for “cleaning up the mess” left by the previous Liberal administration.

Only 219 caribou remain in six herds in the south Peace region, compared to 800 in the early 2000s. Those six herds are found in the Pine River, Quintette and Narraway population units near Chetwynd, Tumbler Ridge and Mackenzie. A seventh herd in the Pine River population unit has already become locally extinct.

“We’re excited about it,” Willson told The Narwhal. “It took a long time to get it done. The focus was on trying to save jobs and trying to save caribou — finding the balance.”

“Everybody is going to have to make adjustments,” Willson said. “It can’t be the status quo anymore because the status quo got us to this stage.”

“It can’t be the status quo anymore because the status quo got us to this stage.” — Chief Roland Willson

Saulteau First Nations Chief Ken Cameron called the partnership agreement a “powerful moment in history” and a “turning point for B.C., Canada and First Nations.”

“People working together to save a species from extinction — it’s real and we can do this — our partnership agreement confirms it,” Cameron told reporters.

Questions remain for southern B.C. caribou herds

The second, far less detailed conservation agreement — between the federal and provincial governments — covers the remainder of B.C.’s imperilled southern mountain caribou herds and does not include any habitat protections or proposed restrictions on industrial development.

Instead, the bilateral agreement focuses on measures such as continued wolf and moose kills and keeps the door ajar for new B.C. government logging approvals in critical caribou habitat. It makes a commitment to developing plans “to reduce habitat disturbance,” but without any fixed timelines.

“It still leaves many question marks for those of us who have been worried about caribou for some time,” said UNBC scientist Chris Johnson, who sits on committees advising the federal government on caribou recovery and co-chairs the terrestrial mammals subcommittee of the Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife in Canada (COSEWIC).

“Time is precious,” Johnson told The Narwhal. “Anyone who disagrees with that simply has their head buried in the sand. Seeing the disappearance of the Purcell and Selkirk caribou herds is evidence enough.”

“It’s no longer a question of people being concerned that there’s a lot of crying about the sky falling. The sky is falling for caribou.”

Almost 30 of B.C.’s 52 surviving caribou herds are at risk of local extinction, and a dozen of those herds now have fewer than 25 animals. Two herds in the Kootenay region were declared locally extinct early this year.

After decades of inaction, the B.C. government was compelled to come up with a plan to protect southern mountain caribou following federal Environment Minister Catherine McKenna’s declaration last May that southern mountain caribou faced “imminent threats” to their recovery and that immediate intervention was required.

If McKenna is not satisfied that B.C. has a suitable plan of action to protect endangered herds, she can ask the federal Cabinet to approve an emergency protection order under the federal Species at Risk Act.

That would allow Ottawa to make decisions that are normally within the jurisdiction of the B.C. government, including whether or not to grant logging permits.

Logging approved in critical caribou habitat

Since last May, the B.C. government has approved 400 new logging cutblocks in endangered caribou critical habitat.

Willson explained that nobody wanted a federal protection order because it would have shut down industry and caused job loss.

“It’s a shame that it got to the stage where Canada recognized the imminent danger and had to step in,” he said in an interview.

“But they did, and that brought everybody to the table. The focus, good or bad, was making sure that the emergency orders weren’t put into place. Nobody could take the chance of that happening.”

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

“I think there’s a balance to be had between development and caribou protection,” Willson said. “There’s got to be a way to make that work, and a willingness to make that work.”

At a media technical briefing, a spokesperson for the B.C. ministry of forests, lands and natural resource operations said a federal protection order could have resulted in significant job losses, pointing out that the draft agreements will “minimize the risk” of an emergency order being placed on B.C.

No mining operations would be affected by the partnership agreement, although forestry would be impacted.

“We recognize that measures to recover caribou will have some impacts on economic activities in and around caribou habitat,” Doug Donaldson, Minister of Forests, Land and Natural Resource Operations, told reporters. Donaldson said that the two agreements aim “to get caribou conservation and recovery underway,” while ensuring resource extraction can continue.

“The purpose of draft agreements is to ensure caribou recovery in B.C.,” Donaldson said.

“The whole intent of this draft negotiated partnership agreement is to ensure the conservation and recovery of caribou herds that’s so important for biodiversity and healthy ecosystems, while at the same time ensuring that natural extraction activities can continue to be part of the economy in the northeast.”

Asked if the government will continue to issue logging approvals in critical caribou habitat, Donaldson replied that “logging permits will not be issued in core areas identified by provincial biologists as critical for caribou recovery.”

What is ‘critical habitat?’

Johnson, who lauded proposed protections in the partnership agreement with First Nations, pointed out that the definition of critical habitat carries a legal meaning under the federal Species at Risk Act (SARA) and refers to the habitat required for a species to persist.

“It is a bit of a game to re-label critical habitat in a way that potentially removes it from the protections of SARA and I don’t know for sure — I can’t say because I’m not inside the minister’s head — but I suspect there’s some of that gamemanship going on here.”

A sedated caribou cow is relocated to the Revelstoke pen. Photo: B.C. FLNRO

Scientist Justina Ray highlighted the contrast between what she called a “comprehensive” partnership agreement and a “pretty vague” bilateral conservation agreement.

“The language is so dramatically different, from what I’ve seen,” said Ray, who also sits on committees advising the federal government on caribou recovery and co-chairs the terrestrial mammals subcommittee of the Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife in Canada (COSEWIC).

“You don’t see the holistic language that you see in the partnership agreement anywhere else.”

Ray said it’s “very unclear” how the conservation agreement will protect the majority of B.C.’s at-risk southern mountain caribou herds, which she said are in an “emergency situation.”

“You can’t tell anything from this,” she said in an interview. “It outlines key principles and broad recovery actions but it doesn’t say what these are. While it talks about benefits, it’s pretty tentative about whether or not it will actually help caribou.”

“The conservation agreement is very quiet about how resource management will shift in some fashion to take care of populations at the scale that matters, which is at the population scale, and manage cumulative disturbance.”

Tim Burkhart, spokesperson for the Yellowstone to Yukon Conservation Initiative, a science-based organization that works to protect the longest remaining wildlife corridor on the continent, called the partnership agreement with First Nations “a real achievement.”

“Sitting down together, working with First Nations to save endangered species, is exactly what we want government to be doing for biodiversity,” Burkhart told The Narwhal.

“The plan they’ve come up with is good news for the Klinse-za herd for sure. However, they’ve left all the other caribou herds in B.C. hanging.”

Burkhart said the conservation agreement is “inadequate,” noting that herd plans won’t be finished until 2020 under the draft plan.

“How many caribou herds can we lose in the meantime?” he asked. “The caribou can’t wait. While B.C. and Canada negotiated we lost two herds.”

“The caribou can’t wait. While B.C. and Canada negotiated we lost two herds.” — Tim Burkhart, Yellowstone to Yukon Conservation Initiative

Wilderness Committee spokesperson Charlotte Dawe also praised the partnership agreement and said the conservation agreement falls short.

“I predict we’ll continue to see logging in critical habitat under this plan and caribou numbers will continue to dwindle ever closer to extinction,” Dawe said in a statement.

“It’s always maddening to see recovery plans with wording like ‘we will plan to make more plans.’ When it comes to habitat protection, we don’t need more planning, we need off-limit areas and protected habitat.”

Willson said the “million dollar question” is how many at-risk herds in B.C. can be saved.

“Our herd, the one we’ve been working on, the Klinse-za herd, is not out of danger,” he pointed out. “They’re a long way from being out of danger. We’ve had all hands on deck and we’re still going to be like that for a while.”

The provincial government is seeking public input on the draft agreements until April 26.

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Even if you live on Vancouver Island you’re not likely to have seen the elusive coastal wolves that populate its northernmost corners.

These genetically unique wolves, which are distinct from their land-locked cousins, live an atypical life for a grey wolf, living in remote estuaries and consuming a diet of mostly marine life.

There are an estimated 250 wolves on Vancouver Island, according to the B.C. Ministry of Forests, Lands and Natural Resource Operations, the government ministry that is currently considering whether or not to expand the wolf trapping season in the province this spring.

The science behind the practice of culling wolves on Vancouver Island is being hotly contested by scientists and conservationists who say there’s very little evidence to support the province’s theory that wolves are responsible for a shrinking deer population.

The issue has been thrust into the public spotlight recently after a guide hunter who posted photos of Vancouver Island wolves in snares on social media offered a personal bounty for carcasses.

“Anecdotally, there has been an increase in wolf populations on northern Vancouver Island, particularly in the area around Port Hardy,” a spokesperson from the ministry told DeSmog Canada in an e-mailed statement.

“Biologists have also noticed increased wolf signs (tracks or sightings) in the area.”

That’s a far cry from hardcore evidence, Ian McAllister, executive director of Pacific Wild told DeSmog Canada.

In fact, there is no evidence that the unique coastal wolves on northern Vancouver Island kill large numbers of deer, he said. McAllister has been studying coastal wolves for over two decades.

“There’s absolutely no data or field-based research. There’s no peer-reviewed science to support this.”

Lack of science-based wildlife management across North America

An absence of data-driven decision-making in wildlife management isn’t unique to B.C.

Recent research published in the journal Science Advances found that across North America wildlife policies lacked basic scientific precepts.

Lead author Kyle Artelle, a biologist with Simon Fraser University and the Raincoast Conservation Foundation, reviewed 667 management plans for 27 species that are hunted and trapped in Canada and the U.S.

“We highlighted four foundational hallmarks that would be required for a wildlife policy to be considered science-based: transparency, external scrutiny, clear objectives and evidence,” Artelle told DeSmog Canada.

Artelle and his team found that 60 per cent of wildlife management policies reviewed had fewer than half of those hallmarks. About half of the policies examined did not rely on population data.

“You’d be hard pressed to call any given activity science if it’s missing any of those pieces,” he said.

B.C. coastal wolves are often called a sea wolves for their ocean-rich diet which includes seals, sea lions, herring and salmon. Photo: Ian McAllister

Those indicators don’t even describe the scientific process completely, he said, “they’re just foundational non-negotiable requirements.”

An absence of adequate data, analysis and evidence doesn’t stop politicians from using science to defend and promote their policies, Artelle said.

Other scientists from Raincoast have published further research on this point, finding governments at time create “political populations” of large carnivores, which are managed to meet political rather than scientific ends.

“There’s a lot of power in that term — science. Which is why we need to be careful when it’s used to defend preferred policy options,” Artelle told DeSmog Canada.

“There’s a concern that politicians might use science to defend what they’re doing without having the actual evidence for justifying the activity.”

Artelle said wolf management in B.C. is a prime example of missing hallmarks of science.

On Vancouver Island, the province is pairing anecdotal information on declining deer populations with anecdotal evidence on increased wolf populations to justify hunting and trapping practices, he said.

“It doesn’t make biological sense that if a food source is crashing, the predator population would be increasing,” Artelle said, pointing to a study in southeast Alaska that found declining deer populations were the result of logging activities rather than wolf predation.

A similar occurrence may be happening on Vancouver Island where old-growth forest is increasingly being replaced by single-age stands rotated in timber harvests, he said.

The fight to save caribou

Habitat disturbance has been identified as a key driver of caribou decline. Both woodland and mountain caribou populations require large tracts of undisturbed habitat for survival.

On mainland B.C. and in Alberta, wolf culls are used to protect rapidly declining caribou populations although the practice is seen as controversial when not paired with aggressive habitat protections.

According to the ministry of Forests, Lands and Natural Resource Development, the South Selkirk, South Peace and North Columbia area caribou herds are in dire straits.

The province’s plan for those regions is to eliminate all wolves in an effort to protect caribou that remain.

“A minimum of 80 per cent of the wolves in the treatment area need to be removed and ideally all wolves will be taken,” the ministry said in a statement.

Around 250 wolves have been shot from helicopters over the last two years as part of the province’s wolf cull pilot project, which is in the fourth year of its project five-year lifespan.

The pilot project was pushed ahead even though the province’s 2014 wolf management policy acknowledged there is uncertainty killing wolves will help caribou.

“Attempts to control wolves to reduce predation risks on caribou has been a provincial priority since 2001. Wolf densities have been reduced: however, at this time, a correlation between reduced wolf densities and caribou recovery cannot be substantiated,” it says.

Caribou recovery is mandated from the federal government under the Species at Risk Act. According to a federal draft recovery plan for caribou, the provinces are responsible for protecting 65 per cent of caribou habitat from disturbance. In 2012 Ottawa directed the provinces to develop plans for that disturbance threshold by 2017. It was a deadline every single province missed.

Mark Hebblewhite, wildlife biology professor at the University of Montana, who served on the science panel for Canada’s boreal caribou recovery, said there is reasonable evidence that killing wolves buys time for threatened species like boreal woodland caribou in Alberta and the Yukon, but no evidence that wolf control has any lasting effects on deer populations.

“The real question about wolf control in the name of caribou conservation is what is being done about protecting critical habitat for caribou. And, in short, the answer in Alberta and the oil producing areas of B.C., is not enough,” Hebblewhite told DeSmog Canada.

Hebblewhite has compiled data on oil and gas activities in caribou habitat and has identified 19,000 wells drilled in caribou ranges in Alberta since 2004.

There is no point in killing wolves while simultaneously continuing to destroy caribou habitat with oil and gas exploration and industrial logging, he said.

Paul Paquet, Raincoast senior scientist and adjunct professor at the University of Victoria, also worries about the long-term effects of the war on wolves.

Wolves prey on caribou, as they always have, but the role played in the decline of caribou is a symptom, not the underlying cause, he said.

“Quite simply, people are the ultimate cause of caribou endangerment through the ongoing degradation imposed by our resource industries on caribou habitat,” he said

“As a result, caribou are on a long-term slide to extinction, not because of what wolves and other predators are doing, but because of what humans have already done.”

Artelle said governments should be more open with the public about the scientific uncertainties of killing wolves.

“Instead of science being used as a marketing ploy, we need clarity on ‘we’re going ahead with this approach because we don’t want to limit oil and gas production’ or ‘we don’t want to limit economic production.’ ”

The public deserves to be more fully informed about the main drivers of caribou decline, he said.

“It’s rarely honestly disclosed why the wolf cull is being pursued when we know wolves aren’t the main driver.”

Policy decisions are often made in the face of incomplete knowledge.

“Given the science will often be incomplete it’s important to be very clear with the public about uncertainties in the science, and how those decisions are being made knowing that science is imperfect.”

With files from Carol Linnitt.

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Despite widespread condemnation from conservation groups and scientists, the B.C. government is set to continue shooting wolves from helicopters in an attempt to save endangered mountain caribou herds from local extinction in the South Selkirk, South Peace and North Columbia herd areas.

The wolf cull is happening in conjunction with other measures to try and stem the decline of mountain caribou herds, including maternity penning projects and restricting snowmobiles in some critical habitat.

“The wolf cull, maternity pens, it’s all part of the talk-and-log process that’s going on,” says Craig Pettitt of the Valhalla Wilderness Society. “We know damn well that the caribou need habitat and, as we talk, they are logging their habitat.”

Pettitt lives in the Slocan Valley and has worked on caribou issues since the early 1970s. He can see the logging from his window.

While government scientists say the wolf cull is necessary, many independent scientists are skeptical this strategy will have any meaningful long-term effect on the recovery of the mountain caribou, without significant measures to restore and protect their habitat.

ICYMI: How Canada Is Driving Its Endangered Species to the Brink of Extinction

According to the Ministry of Forests, Lands, Natural Resource Operations and Rural Development “wolves are the leading cause of mortality” amongst caribou in the South Peace region, attributing 37 per cent of adult caribou deaths to wolves.

“Habitat loss, due to industrial development and recreational activities, has also adversely affected the number of caribou,” the ministry acknowledges. This includes oil and gas, mining and forestry.

When old-growth forests are clear-cut, nutrient-rich habitat is depleted and the early growth that comes back attracts deer and moose. This brings more wolves, which prey upon the caribou as by-catch. Roads and transmission lines also limit the area in which caribou can hide and provide easy access for wolves to travel and hunt, making them more successful predators.

“As a result, we’re decimating their food source, we’re fragmenting their habitat and we’re facilitating access for wolves,” Pettitt says. “So to start targeting wolves without dealing with the other side of the equation is a talk-and-log process.”

Habitat protections a ‘sham’

So has the B.C. government set aside enough suitable habitat for caribou? Certainly the government is placing some land off limits to certain types of activity, from coal mining to oil and gas development to snowmobiling.

But if you ask Virginia Thompson – who represented the Revelstoke-Shuswap planning district during the 2007 Mountain Caribou Recovery Implementation Planning (MCRIP) process – the province isn’t doing nearly enough.

“It is a sham that they did any habitat recovery in this planning area,” she said.

Thompson recalls scientists recommended to the province in 2007 that about 34,000 additional hectares of caribou habitat needed to be set aside from logging in her unit. The province agreed to set aside 10,000 hectares. And even this minimal amount was eventually whittled down by amendments and loopholes for the forest industry to continue business as usual.

“This [wolf cull] is a drastic, over-the-top bloodbath,” Thompson says. “And they haven’t even done the minimal amount of habitat control that they promised to do in the last recovery plan.”

“We know damn well that the caribou need habitat and, as we talk, they are logging their habitat.” https://t.co/YVTyet6upO

— DeSmog Canada (@DeSmogCanada) February 19, 2018

Too little, too late

While some of the larger herds, such as the Columbia North herd, may still have time to recover, given significant measures are taken to restore their habitat, it may be too late for some herds.

“We’re now in the position where we’ve waited too long,” says Hannah Barron, conservation director at Wolf Awareness. “So now it seems that we’re trying to stem the decline [of caribou] rather than recover the species. It is kind of a last ditch attempt to make it look like they’re doing something, all the while habitat destruction continues.”

The government says predator to prey ratios need to be controlled to allow caribou herds to stop declining. To illustrate this point, the ministry highlights the South Peace region, where the caribou population in wolf control zones has increased from 166 to 192, an increase of 16 per cent since the wolf cull began. In contrast, in the South Peace areas where no wolf control has happened, adult mortality remains high and calf recruitment is low.

However, in the South Selkirk region, government scientists say in their 2017 wolf management report the program “is not demonstrating success in terms of increased caribou numbers.”

Sara Dubois from the Faculty of Land and Food Systems at UBC questions when the government will draw the line.

“Even if you remove wolves, there are other predators, there are cougars. Do you go in and remove all the cougars next? Where do you stop?” she asked.

Even the ministry’s own scientists acknowledge that wolf recovery from year to year has been so persistent that, “a very extensive effort will be required every year to continue to keep the wolf population low.”

World-leading authority on wolves Paul Paquet writes in his essay, Mirror, Mirror on the Wall: The Wolf As Scapegoat: “Quite simply, people are the ultimate cause of caribou endangerment through the ongoing degradation imposed by our resource industries on caribou habitat… Yet, governments habitually favour the destruction of wolves over any consequential protection, enhancement or restoration of caribou habitat.”

Industry at the wheel

Some evidence as to what is driving this agenda can be gleaned from a single line in the review of last year’s wolf management plan, which reads: “Continued successful implementation of wolf control is seen as an essential step by industrial sectors, since significant habitat has already been set aside to help recover caribou.”

The ministry states that it has, “worked extensively with companies and sector organizations to advance caribou management and recovery.”

But Pettitt sees this statement as an admission that industry is influencing government policy. “That quote is by the industrial sectors. They’re driving the government. They’re saying, look, we’re not giving up any more habitat. You go out there and kill wolves.”

Last year, nearly 100 wolves were killed in the South Peace and South Selkirk areas combined. While ministry staff say it is difficult to predict how many wolves will be culled this year, their stated intention is, “to remove all wolves found in the treatment areas.”

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When the Alberta government released its draft plan to save the province’s dwindling caribou populations from local extinction earlier this month, it was heralded as a major step forward — but big questions remain.

The biggest one: after years of failing to intervene in the caribou crisis, will the new plan be enough to bring them back from the brink of extinction?

“It was great news for northwest populations where big protected areas are needed and there’s still time there to ensure caribou recovery,” conservation specialist Carolyn Campbell from the Alberta Wilderness Association told DeSmog Canada.

But when it comes to the Little Smoky range, it’s still not enough, Campbell said.

“The problem is the underlying causes of predation are still allowed to worsen in the next five years by restarting logging and by implying energy infrastructure can still go ahead,” she said. “We can’t support the plan continuing to destroy habitat.”

Woodland caribou are a threatened species both provincially and federally. According to provincial estimates, caribou are disappearing at a rate of about eight per cent per year due to habitat loss from energy and forestry development, which in turn increases wolves’ reach into caribou habitat.

Under the federal Species At Risk Act, the province must preserve 65 per cent of critical caribou habitat by October 2017.

“We inherited a bit of a policy logjam on this,” Environment Minister Shannon Phillips told the Calgary Herald. “Certainly, there were a number of jobs at risk both in the energy and the forestry sector, and we have a looming federal deadline for us to file our range plans for this particular species at risk. It made for a number of tough choices.”

Biggest Caribou Announcement in Decades

“This is the biggest caribou conservation announcement — in a real concrete way based on habitat — that’s come out of Alberta arguably for the last 30 or 40 years,” Mark Hebblewhite, associate professor of ungulate habitat biology at the University of Montana, told DeSmog Canada.

In 2011, after a lawsuit launched by the Alberta Wilderness Association forced both the Alberta and Canadian governments to address the problem, Alberta proposed a province-wide wolf cull, to the dismay of the general public and the scientific community.

For Hebblewhite, the current proposed plan is exciting because for the first time it puts emphasis on habitat protection and reclamation especially, but not exclusively, in those areas least impacted by industrial development.

“This plan really recognizes the important role of habitat in recovering caribou and that you can’t kill wolves forever and continue to not protect habitat,” he said.

Plan Goes Soft on Oil and Gas Industry

In addition to the protection of 18,000 square kilometres of caribou habitat in the northern part of the province, the plan addresses Alberta’s most at-risk caribou populations: the Little Smoky and A la Peche herds.

For those herds, which are located in prime forestry and oil and gas resource areas, the province proposed strict restrictions on timber harvest and recommends oil and gas limit their activity in those zones.

The proposal, Hebblewhite admits, could have been harder on the oil and gas industry.

“It’s a little softer on oil and gas than I think ultimately may be required to recover habitat,” Hebblewhite said.

That arrangement may mean any benefits for caribou coming at the expense of forestry might be outdone by oil and gas drilling in those ranges, Hebblewhite said.

Since 2012, when the federal draft caribou recovery strategy was released, 667 new wells were drilled in core critical caribou habitat in the Little Smoky range alone. A total of 96 per cent of that caribou range is within 500 metres of human development, Hebblewhite said.

“It’s the most heavily destroyed caribou habitat in the country.”

Campbell agrees the recovery strategy trends in the right direction by encouraging the energy industry to limit its impact in caribou ranges and it also rolls back the “perverse requirement” for leaseholders to develop their resource within five years of purchase — whether or not it makes economic sense.

“But,” Campbell said, “we don’t have limits on land disturbance.”

Reclamation Strategy Gets Industry On Side

Hebblewhite emphasized an important aspect of the current strategy is that it doesn’t pit industry against caribou recovery aims. Reclamation plans are being used as an opportunity to put oil and gas workers back on the job.

“There’s a huge investment in the restoration of seismic lines that wolves and other predators zoom up and down on and renders all these caribou vulnerable to predation,” he said.

That kind of innovative and inclusive thinking has brought industry on board with the plan, he said.

“It’s another strength of this plan, that it’s not being sniped and groused on by forestry and oil and gas.”

The province engaged a mediator who consulted with Aboriginal, environmental and industry groups.

Continued Habitat Destruction Means ‘Caribou Zoos’

Campbell said although the general sentiment is that oil and gas activity has ground to a halt in Alberta, there is still plenty of activity in natural gas plays like Fox Creek within the Little Smoky caribou range.

“It’s booming with activity. There are many big companies operating in there like Shell, CNRL and Encana that know very well they’re operating in endangered caribou habitat.”

Campbell said without specific and strict land disturbance limits, there is no way to guarantee caribou will get the habitat protections they need.

“With no limits set we are concerned that when this issue falls out of the public eye, conversations between companies and the regulator will lead to more disturbance.”

That leads to a prolonged reliance on the wolf kill, Campbell said.

And it has also led to the introduction of “caribou zoos” to fence in caribou, which Campbell calls “a step backwards.”

“Caribou and species at risk generally are valuable because of what they say about the habitat that they’re in,” she said.

“They’re not just little bizarre ornaments on the landscape that we should be keeping alive by all sorts of methods that don’t respect the ecology they need to thrive.”

However, for Stan Boutin, the University of Calgary conservation biologist that introduced the idea of caribou pens, it is going to take every sort of strategy possible to save the caribou herds most at risk of disappearing.

“I was keen to see this, this incorporation of this caribou rearing facility — or a pen, or zoo or whatever you want to call it — into the recovery strategy,” Boutin told DeSmog Canada.

“People are so eager to get back to a natural system that they think anything that’s artificial is not right to do,” Boutin said. “Those herds, particularly Little Smoky and A la Peche are never going to go back to being natural for many, many, many years.”

Boutin added the scientific and conservation communities seem to be able to stomach some amount of predator control but balk at a fence designed to achieve the same end.

“Apart from predator control, it’s the only other option. Everything else will do nothing in the short term to save the Little Smoky and A la Peche herds.”

“Let’s not forget that this is a compromise strategy for everyone,” Boutin said. “Everyone had to pay the piper.”

He congratulated the Notley government for working so hard behind the scenes to bring it together.

Climate Change Threatens Caribou Habitat

He added that regardless of the efforts made to save these critically endangered herds, climate change may so drastically alter their range in southern Alberta that it becomes no longer suitable for the species.

“That’s another hidden twist in all of this,” he said. “There’s a very real possibility that the changing climate for the southern distribution of caribou in Alberta has created a situation where we have deer now being a full-fledged part of the system, which means higher numbers of wolves, which in turn means caribou can‘t coexist there.”

The Little Smoky herd is an example of a population that is on the “trailing edge of their climate envelope,” Boutin said.

That could mean caribou in that region need permanent human intervention to survive in that region, he said.

Boutin said these shifting climate envelopes are going to become a more common conservation phenomena in coming years.

“We as a society have not grappled with how we are going to deal with those populations that are in that really tough circumstance where the only way you keep them is by very strong artificial management all the way through.”

Photo by John E Marriott Photography

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wolf Cull Ignores Main Drivers of Caribou Decline

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

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

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

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

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

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

Industrial Impacts in B.C. Growing

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘I Want To Eat a Caribou Before I Die’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Too Late for Habitat Focus?

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

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

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

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

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

Paquet disagrees, however.

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

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

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

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

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Culling Alberta’s wolves without prioritizing caribou habitat protection and restoration is like “shoveling sand,” according to Mark Hebblewhite, associate professor of ungulate habitat biology at the University of Montana.

Hebblewhite says the Alberta government is sponsoring a wolf cull without doing the one thing that could possibly scientifically justify it: conserving and restoring critical caribou habitat.

“That’s the tragedy here: the Alberta government blew the opportunity to do the right thing,” he said.

“It’s all shoveling sand without real commitment to habitat conservation.”

Scientists have warned of Alberta’s caribou losses for decades and in recent years have argued the majority of the herds are endangered with some facing an imminent risk of local extinction. Provinces have until 2017 to formulate provincial caribou recovery plans under the new federal caribou recovery strategy released in 2012.

The goal for each province is to maintain 65 per cent undisturbed habitat in all caribou ranges, according to Duncan MacDonnell, public affairs officer for Alberta Environment and Sustainable Resource Development (ESRD).

“It is ESRD’s responsibility to implement recovery plans,” for Alberta, MacDonnell said, adding that since 2004 the province has had a wolf cull in place “to hold the line while the habitat recovery plans take place and are implemented.”

Since 2006 more than 1,000 wolves have been shot in the Little Smokey and A La Peche caribou ranges.

The province’s use of predator management has generated serious controversy, especially in light of continuing sales of oil and gas leases in caribou ranges, a move experts say undermines the scientific integrity of the wolf cull.

“There are all kinds of ethical problems in this mess,” Hebblewhite told DeSmog Canada.

“It’s unethical to sell oil and gas leases in endangered caribou critical habitat.”

Hebblewhite recently published a paper, Managing Wolves to Recover Threatened Woodland Caribou in Alberta, that demonstrated the wolf cull in the Little Smoky and A La Peche regions helped stabilize local caribou herds, but won’t contribute to their long-term survival without habitat recovery and protection.

“If we had started killing wolves 10 years ago, stopped all development, and started restoration, we might actually be somewhere,” he said.

Hebblewhite is preparing to release additional research that shows that since the release of the federal recovery strategy, the federal and provincial governments have allowed significant oil and gas activity to continue in caribou ranges.

“This is where it is most egregious: on the one hand, the Alberta government is saying they are doing habitat conservation while on the other I have proprietary oil and gas industry data that shows there have been hundreds of wells drilled in the Little Smoky herd, and 1,500 wells drilled in the Cold Lake herd range on the border with Saskatchewan. And that herd is the second most rapidly declining herd in the country.”

“And this is just since 2012 when the federal caribou recovery plan, including the delineation of critical habitat, was adopted,” he said.

“We are still destroying caribou habitat…it shows quite clearly that we’re killing wolves and we are not doing anything to recover caribou or the boreal forest.”

Habitat Destruction, Seismic Lines a Costly Lack of Foresight

Oilsands companies are in a “mad rush” to restore seismic lines in Alberta’s caribou ranges before the province reveals its caribou recovery plan — mandated under the Federal Caribou Recovery Strategy — by 2017.

With tens of thousands of kilometres of seismic lines, their restoration is critical for reducing the mobility of wolves in caribou ranges.

Scott Nielsen, a University of Alberta professor who is studying seismic line restoration, said now that restoration on these legacy lines is happening, industry should work with scientists to ensure it’s done right. At a cost of roughly $10,000 per kilometre Nielsen says prioritizing the most critical areas for caribou and other species is critical.

“A lot of companies are grouping together and doing restoration projects, but if each company is doing a little bit here and a little bit there, the scale at which the disturbances occur at and the scale at which caribou and wolves move at are big. We need to think big when we’re thinking of the restoration or the offsets.”

“It would be even better if the work could be coordinated from the stand point of objectively trying to identify areas with the best bang for our buck both from the perspective of biodiversity and cost benefits,” he said.

And now, Nielsen said, even with aggressive restoration in place, “from a caribou perspective there has to be some form of zoning or restriction in development for at least certain herds for them to persist.”

But the government of Alberta, in lieu of enforcing habitat protection — which would require limiting new leasing for oil and gas companies — has relied on predator control as a means to keep caribou herds alive.

Predator control, Nielsen said, “tends to be a favourite tool used when you’re desperate and you have a population or a species that is critically endangered and threatened.”

The wolf cull is “one tool the managers are using for a short-term solution,” Nielsen said. “And if they aren’t working towards a long-term solution then it should be abandoned.”

Real Issue is Habitat Conservation

For Raincoast Conservation Foundation biologist and wolf expert Paul Paquet, the continued destruction of caribou habitat demonstrates the Alberta government is working at cross-purposes.

“The whole issue around oil and gas leases is it shows the government working at cross-purposes,” Paquet said. “I think it undermines their credibility.”

He added the negative effects of unrestored seismic lines on caribou habitat has been known for decades, but both government and industry have failed to take meaningful action.

“They don’t seem intent on doing what needs to be done,” Paquet said, adding the failure to protect caribou habitat throws the province’s ongoing wolf cull into a “moral dilemma.”

Research recently published by Hebblewhite and his colleagues shows that while the killing of wolves in some areas has stabilized populations, aggressive predator control was unable to put caribou back on a path to self-sustaining populations.

“All of this is useless if the primary reasons for caribou decline isn’t addressed and that primary one now is loss of habitat and degraded habitat,” Paquet said.

Hebblewhite agrees.

Predator control “has to be against the template of real commitment to habitat conservation. But if we’re just doing it in small little parts of the habitat and destroying other parts, it’s probably not going to have a very good effect.”

The wolf cull “reminds us we’ve screwed up the entire ecosystem,” Hebblewhite said. “Killing wolves is a short-term response to that. It buys us time.”

Image Credit: John E. Marriott

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Companies in Alberta’s oilsands are scrambling to find a way to reclaim tens of thousands of kilometres of seismic lines cut into the boreal forest before regulations that mandate the recovery of endangered caribou habitat are implemented in late 2017.

But while crews experiment with planting black spruce in piles of dirt during minus-25 degree weather in a bid to repair the forest, the Alberta government continues to lease massive segments of the region for further exploration and still hasn’t mandated reclamation of seismic lines.  

The controversy over caribou habitat and wolf culls in Alberta has stewed for years, but the issue of seismic lines has been largely overlooked. It’s these linear corridors cut through the forest (used to set off explosive charges to locate oil and gas deposits) that encourage predators like wolves to infiltrate what remains of fragmented caribou habitat.

“I don’t think a lot of people thought these seismic lines were a big deal,” said Scott Nielsen, an Alberta Biodiversity Conservation Chair and University of Alberta professor. “But … there are these cascading effects that you can’t anticipate.”

In a century of oil and gas development, hundreds of thousands of kilometres of these wolf freeways have been cut through Alberta’s forest. In one section of the Lower Athabasca region alone, south of Fort McMurray and extending out to Cold Lake, there are 53,000 kilometres of seismic lines.

“We still face the legacy of a tremendous amount of linear disturbances from the initial phases of exploration in the oilsands,” Nielsen said. “So it’s become a major conservation concern — or crisis — really.”

In 2012, the federal government released a recovery strategy for endangered caribou that demands that 65 per cent of their ranges be “undisturbed.” Right now, some Alberta caribou herds have as little as five per cent of their ranges left undisturbed.

“Trying to recover things after they’ve happened is a heck of a lot harder than preventing habitat disturbance in the first place,” Nielsen said.

Restoration Costs Estimated $10,000 Per Kilometre

Some industry players are already voluntarily putting their minds to finding a way to piece the fragmented forest back together — even though restoration costs roughly $10,000 per kilometre.

“With caribou being listed [as endangered] and these areas being defined as critical habitat — that’s why there’s a bit of a mad rush to deal with the legacy of disturbances that we have,” Nielsen said.

Companies Push Ahead with Restoration Despite Lack of Government Requirement

Devon Energy, an oilsands company involved in seismic line restoration since 2011, is trying to make it harder for wolves to move around in caribou ranges.

“Seismic lines, not just seismic lines but roads and trails out in northern Alberta, make it easier for wolves to travel and hunt more efficiently,” Amit Saxena, senior lands and biodiversity manger with Devon, told DeSmog Canada. “They are increasing the spatial overlap between wolves and caribou, more than pre-disturbance levels.”

Saxena said while most companies are doing what they can to ensure new seismic lines come with a lighter footprint — by reducing their width and straightness — there is still a lot of work to do to inhibit wolf movement on the thousands of kilometres of legacy lines crisscrossing the province.

“Sometimes we actually put up wooden or snow fences at 500 metre intervals along the line, and sometimes we’ll do log rollback and brush clearing, making big piles,” he said. “That not only impacts wolf movement on the line but also human movement on the line so that limits the amount of ATVs and quads that go down those lines that will ultimately negatively impact the recovery of the line.”

Devon is working toward the federal government’s target of 65 per cent undisturbed habitat in caribou ranges and prioritizes line recovery based on their habitat value for caribou. The company is also working to offset disturbance in new ranges with conservation in others.

But Saxena pointed out that since there is “no carte blanche requirement” from the province for seismic line restoration, companies are trying to find ways to balance the restoration with other priorities.

“We have to be realistic about it also,” Saxena said. “Industry priorities do play a role in there.”

Tree planting along seismic lines in the ALGAR historic restoration project area. Image from COSIA.

COSIA Pilot Project Tests Caribou Habitat Reclamation Techniques

Kris Geekie, director of community consultation and regulatory affairs for Nexen, said his company is exploring new seismic line restoration techniques in caribou habitat through the Canadian Oil Sands Innovation Alliance (COSIA) as part of the Algar Historic Restoration Project.

“We’re looking at an area nobody is currently active in. There are no oilsands leases within that area and what we’re testing is how can we restore [seismic lines] faster, what are the appropriate treatments, and what are the tactical plans specifically for managing forest fragmentation from seismic lines,” Geekie said.  

Geekie said Nexen, along with other oilsands companies like Statoil, Shell and ConocoPhillips, are working on 390 kilometres of seismic lines throughout the Algar region.

“The pilot is specifically designed to find out if we can improve the sustainability [of caribou] in that area. Basically, the less linear disturbance in the area, and the less access for wolves, is one way we can improve the sustainability of caribou herds.”

Caribou Recovery Plan Still to Come: Province

Alberta Environment and Sustainable Resource Development (ESRD) is currently formulating the province’s caribou recovery plan, according to public affairs officer Duncan MacDonnell — although it’s too early to tell what role seismic line restoration will play in the plan.

“We must have caribou recovery plans ready to go by the end of 2017,” MacDonnell said. “It’s our responsibility to meet those plans according to the [federal] criteria.”

None of the provinces have filed their caribou recovery plans yet, he said, adding the variety of caribou ranges in Alberta alone has contributed to the delays in the draft plan’s release.

“How far [ESRD goes] in terms of restoration schedules or plans, we have no idea yet,” MacDonnell said.

He added ESRD is carrying out a wolf cull in the Little Smoky and A La Peche caribou ranges as an interim measure while the province prepares its recovery plans. Those plans are expected to include some restriction on new development in caribou ranges. 

Nexen seismic line replanting. Photo from Boston College Center for Corporate Citizenship via Youtube.

Alberta Government Continues to Sell Energy Leases in Caribou Range

Yet the Alberta government’s recent sale of energy leases in caribou range has onlookers concerned not enough is being done to protect caribou habitat despite government promises.

Carolyn Campbell from the Alberta Wilderness Association said the government is “sending mixed messages” when it comes to caribou recovery.

In early March, the province came under fire for putting 21,000 hectares of energy leases in caribou habitat up for auction. Campbell said the day after her organization issued a news release on the auction, the government quietly announced the sale would be delayed.

Since then, several new small lease sales in that range have been announced.

“Alberta is being highly inconsistent right now,” Campbell said.

“The problem with new leasing is it creates new rights holders — energy companies — who have a time limit to prove up those leases and under weak rules that enables them to put down new well-sites, new roads, new pipeline infrastructure.”

Campbell said new energy lease sales continue while the government is perpetually delaying the release of range-specific recovery plans. She said Alberta initially committed to releasing the first plan, for the Little Smoky and A La Peche herds, in 2014.

“Time is running out for these caribou. It would be pretty inappropriate to try to run the clock out to 2017,” she said.

She added the current rules for habitat disruption are “unacceptably weak for an endangered species” even when paired with recent efforts to restore disturbed land.

“Even though some companies are getting interested in reclamation, the net effect with all the new leases and activity is ongoing degradation,” Campbell said.

“New lease sales should be totally deferred until there are strong range plans in effect.”  

Image Credit: Alex MacLean

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