Are Alberta's woodland caribou on the road to extinction?
By Bill Corbett
IN THEORY, it should be simple for us to locate woodland caribou in Jasper National Park. After all, we are equipped with a helicopter, an expert biologist, four pairs of straining eyes and an antenna to detect signals from caribou radio collars. So we lift off in high spirits and swing southeast toward the long, barren ridges of the Maligne Range of the Rockies. As it is late June, the caribou will have moved from valley bottoms to exposed alpine meadows, where their tracks should be visible in the lingering snow.
Our first stop is a lofty hill that commands a view of a broad basin, but 20 minutes of peering through telescopes produces only headaches. Next, we ascend a series of narrow valleys, following the meanderings of small streams up through thick spruce and meadows to their sources in snowy basins. We spy some mountain goats, a few hoary marmots and lots of encouraging tracks, but no caribou.
Finally, biologist Kent Brown dons headphones and fiddles with a few knobs until he picks up a signal from a caribou radio collar. With hand signals, he guides the pilot up another valley until suddenly he points down and exclaims, "There they are!" Far below in a meadow, three brown animals pause in their munching to stare up at the approaching noise. As we descend they begin to run, maintaining their long-legged gait despite the uneven terrain. We hover momentarily for Brown to identify the yellow radio collar on one bull, veering off in search of other caribou.
Over two days, we spend nearly eight hours in the air, scanning countless valleys, ridges, treed slopes and alpine meadows over a broad stretch of the park south of Highway 16. Even with our electronic aids, we see only some 20 caribou, about half of them collared. Brown, who has been studying the magnificent animals in the Jasper region for several years, had hoped to see more but is not surprised. After all, there may be fewer than 400 caribou spread out across the more than 10,000 square kilometres of the national park.
The scarcity of caribou reflects the alarming decline in their population in recent years. It is becoming increasingly rare for Albertans to see woodland caribou outside the sanctuary of the national park. Some wildlife experts believe Alberta's woodland caribou may be in imminent danger of extinction.
As recently as the mid-1960s, Alberta's caribou population was estimated in the 7,000 to 9,000 range. Today, there are fewer than 3,000 animals. In particular danger is the migratory type known as mountain caribou. They are the same species as woodland caribou, but travel up to 80 kilometres or more between summer and winter ranges. Since the mid-1960s, their population has shrunk from 1,200 to a remnant of 300 to 400 animals in the Grande Cache area, and there are about another 200 around Jasper.
The decline was so drastic that in 1981 the provincial government banned caribou hunting. In 1985, Alberta designated the woodland caribou a threatened species, likely to become endangered if the causes of its decline were not reversed. But far from being reversed, these causes could well accelerate, given the rapid development of Alberta's north. More than seven million hectares of northern Alberta -- roughly the size of Great Britain -- have recently been allocated to timber harvesting. In the face of such industry, only a comprehensive management plan, implemented in the next few years, can keep the woodland caribou from declining beyond the point of recovery, say some conservationists.
The caribou's decline is due in large part to habitat disruption and loss. Forestry, petroleum exploration and coal mining have removed great blocks of boreal forest, and new roads and cutlines have crisscrossed much of the remainder. The shrunken and disrupted habitat makes it easier for wolves, poachers, and hunters who mistake caribou for elk or moose, to kill the animals.
But the outright loss of habitat alone does not explain their decline. The major problem caused by development, biologists agree, is that it increases access to caribou that were previously undisturbed in old-growth forests. Industrial activities have upset the natural balance of the caribou's world. The clearing of dense forest drives browsers such as moose into caribou habitat, and they in turn attract wolves. While moose and wolves maintain a healthy equilibrium, caribou are easy victims for wolves, and are increasingly caught in a situation called a "predator pit," where the caribou population cannot escape the predator.
"Logging has compressed caribou into smaller spaces, so wolves know where to search for them," says Tom Bergerud, one of Canada's foremost caribou experts and a biology professor at the University of Victoria. Many biologists list wolves as the leading killer of caribou in the short term; meaning that if wolves were removed, it would only be a short-term solution.
Industrial development has also cut across long stretches of the mountain caribou's migratory corridors, particularly in the west-central foothills along Highway 40 between Hinton and Grande Cache. In some cases, this may have prevented mountain caribou from migrating between their winter range in the forested foothills and their mountain alpine summer range -- confining them to year-round residency in the mountains.
At first glance, the woodland caribou, distinguished by its rich brown coat and creamy neck and rump, looks like a hardy survivor. A member of the deer family, it is the largest subspecies of caribou in Canada, with some adult bulls reaching 270 kilograms. Both males and females grow antlers, and bulls use them for sparring during the fall rut But in general, the caribou are docile by nature. They react with curiosity or nonchalance when approached by people. "Sometimes you can get them to come right up to you. Anybody who hunts them can tell you it's no challenge," says Janet Edmonds, a provincial wildlife biologist in Edson, who has studied caribou extensively in west-central Alberta.
But caribou are not always so guileless. To protect their newborn calves, caribou cows disperse to isolated locations in the high country to give birth, in an effort to avoid wolves. The females usually return to the same calving sites year after year, often travelling great distances. "At the end of winter, when there's still snow on the ground and they're at their lowest energy levels, female mountain caribou will hike as far as 80 kilometres over three mountain ranges to calve," says Edmonds.
Caribou also migrate in search of their primary food source -- slow-growing lichens in old-growth forests. Lichens become critically important in winter, when they make up 70 percent of the animals' diet. But lichens take from 80 to 160 years to mature, so caribou need large winter ranges -- an individual animal will cover as much as 100 square kilometres of old-growth pine and black spruce forest in search of food. Hence caribou population levels depend on a delicate balance between migratory patterns and slow-growing lichens. Unfortunately, this balance is easily upset. "We're dealing with an animal with low reproduction and naturally high mortality rates," says Edmonds. "Our activities tend to aggravate those weak links."
Woodland caribou were reportedly plentiful throughout the forests of northern Alberta and the mountains of Banff and Jasper national parks until the mid-1920s. Then their southern range gave way to development, wolf predation increased, and their population began to decline. The population north and west of Jasper fell sharply in the late 1940s, under pressure from over-hunting, two harsh winters, wolves and a post-war boom in forestry and sawmill construction. In the 1960s, a wolf kill and hunting curbs helped the mountain herds recover somewhat around Jasper, but unabated development has since led to steady decline. Today, Alberta's caribou are found in five or six unconnected pockets.
To reverse this decline, Edmonds recommends controlling habitat loss, man-caused mortality, and predation. She made those sweeping recommendations in a 1986 provincial plan that she co-authored, aimed at restoring populations to 4,500 forest-dwelling and 600 mountain caribou. The proposals included establishing a no-hunting zone along Highway 40, closing access roads and modifying timber harvesting through such measures as smaller cut blocks and longer cutting rotations. The most controversial proposal was a three- to four-year program to reduce the wolf population in west-central Alberta by 70 percent, allowing caribou numbers to recover.
The wolf control program has not advanced beyond a heated debate between caribou biologists and conservationists. If biologists are allowed to control wolf numbers, then caribou, wolves and logging can co-exist, says Tom Bergerud. But Dick Dekker, a veteran naturalist and editor of the Edmonton-based Wolf News, argues that Alberta's caribou population was artificially high in the 1960s because of previous wolf control programs and is now at a more naturally sustainable level. "They will take care of themselves as long as the habitat is there," says Dekker. The province, leery of what would undoubtedly be an unpopular wolf kill program, has given support only to a limited control program in areas where wolves are a grave threat to caribou.
Five years after its publication, the provincial restoration plan has not been officially endorsed, and its measures have been only partly implemented. The most visible changes are along Highway 40, where large silhouettes warn motorists of caribou, and a corridor has been established where no hunting is allowed. However, few major access roads have been closed. The Alberta government has placed some restrictions on petroleum companies exploring near winter ranges in the northeast. For instance, seismic survey crews must cut their lines by hand, to create access corridors too narrow for most recreational vehicles.
"You can't protect all of northern Alberta for caribou," says LeRoy Fjordbotten, Alberta's minister of Forestry, Lands and Wildlife. "That's why we need to know their winter ranges, habitat and migratory patterns. We have enough time to study this. A number of mills have been announced, but there's quite a time lag (before cutting begins)."
If forestry companies are to be persuaded to change their operations, data must be produced to link those operations to the caribou's decline. To date, the government has spent some $500,000 on flying costs alone, in aerial surveys of caribou in west-central Alberta over 10 years. In two new radio-collar studies of caribou herds in northern Alberta, funds were diverted from other Fish and Wildlife projects. Elsewhere, Kent Brown's study, part of a $150,000-a-year project, is collecting data on mountain caribou in the Jasper area. But considerably more money is needed, given the high costs (the helicopters cost $700 an hour) and the difficulty of studying low numbers of animals dispersed through heavy forest. For conservationists, this research represents a race against the clock: while biologists count caribou, forestry companies are proceeding with plans to log their contracted areas.
To their credit, some companies, such as Weldwood of Canada Ltd. and Procter & Gamble Cellulose Inc., are modifying their harvesting methods in some winter ranges. Weldwood, for example, is launching a pilot project to remove access roads and bridges, and to cut trees in smaller blocks. The company also plans to extend the waiting time between cuts within a block from 20 years to 30 or more years, to assess how quickly lichens grow back. Both Weldwood and Procter & Gamble are helping to fund a lichen regeneration study by Grande Prairie biologist Joan Snyder. Several oil and forestry companies have also funded aerial surveys of caribou.
Still, such projects will continue to operate in a vacuum until the province implements the restoration program. "We'd like to see a better co-ordinated, area approach, rather than a piecemeal approach," says Rick Bonar, Weldwood's wildlife and recreation coordinator. "But there's been no real push from senior government officials to act on (the restoration program)."
Rocky Notnes, a Hinton-area guide and outfitter, blames the caribou's plight on the province. "We could have avoided the seriousness of the situation if the government had been pro-active and far-sighted, instead of pro-development," says Notnes, the caribou watchdog for the Alberta Wilderness Association in the Grande Cache-Hinton area. The AWA, which says the caribou will disappear unless action is taken now, has called for the five winter ranges used by mountain caribou in west-central Alberta to be designated as ecological reserves. The government has so far considered a logging moratorium on one of the five ranges.
While the main debate centres around the mountain caribou of west-central Alberta, woodland herds to the north and northeast are also facing increasing pressure from logging and energy exploration. Long-time trapper Lee Morin says the development of a natural gas field in the Chinchaga area of northwest Alberta has resulted in major disturbances, such as lowflying helicopters, on already depleted caribou herds. "They are stressed out," says Morin, who is campaigning for a large wildlife sanctuary in the area.
The only solution to this complex debate is to stop arguing and start working together, says John Kansas, project coordinator of the Greater Jasper Ecosystem Caribou Research Project. The project, launched in 1986 by several Alberta biologists and backed by the World Wildlife Fund, is funding Brown's Jasper caribou study and promoting an adopt-a-caribou program involving Alberta schools. More importantly, in conjunction with the Alberta Fish and Wildlife division it has formed a technical working committee, comprised of various interest groups, that is searching for a sustainable development solution to the caribou's plight in Alberta. "If government resource managers, industry and public groups can get together and come up with a way to allow some level of development while preserving caribou in Alberta," says Kansas, "then we can handle any wildlife issue."
