Deep in the Tonquin Valley of Jasper National Park, Parks Canada biologists are on a mission.
They are out to investigate a potential caribou kill site as part of an ongoing program to monitor wolf kill rates in the park.
But its not an easy task
not only is it a 50km hike through difficult back-country terrain,
searching for the licked-clean cast-offs of last winter’s hungry wolf pack feels like finding a needle in a haystack.
But the biologists have come prepared….
using GPS data from collars on the wolf pack,
the biologists use their own GPS unit to guide them to within meters of where the wolves might have made their kill.
Should be right around here
The biologists search the site, but no carcass can be found;
meaning that the wolves most likely used the area last winter as a bedding site, and not for a feast.
Its good that we're liberal with definition of what a kill site is
because we’ve had situations where we’ve been to a site and there have only been 2 or 3 hours that the animal was at the site,
and we’ll get there and there will be a kill, and what has happened is that the GPS can’t quite reach the satellite due to either cover or a big cliff or rocks somewhere around
so it helps us find where the cutoff is between a bed and a kill.
But finding no kill is certainly not disappointing…
because woodland caribou herds in the Rocky Mountains don’t have many more members to lose.
Our last census was 87 and there could be as many as 96, so just under a hundred here in Jasper,
we figure back in ’88 there was about 175 so we’ve had a decline since then.
Banff National Park of course, there was only about 5 and all of them were killed in an avalanche,
so odds are they have been extirpated in Banff National Park.
So within Canada there’s a lot of different types of caribou and the one on the quarter is the one that people probably grow up learning about and seeing
but most of the time when people think about caribou they think about barren-ground caribou
- large herds, migratory animals, moving to the coast to calve, and then back,
but woodland caribou generally live below treeline in Canada, don’t have large migrations, don’t move to the coast and don’t live in large groups.
A lot of people are surprised to learn that we have woodland caribou as far south as jasper and into southern B.C and even down into the United States.
For the woodland caribou that spend time within the mountain national parks, Parks Canada is actively doing research to learn the best way to maintain stable populations.
They have come up with five key threats to caribou.
The first of the threats, and the one that is being managed most, is altered predator prey dynamics.
This threat starts with having a stable, over-inflated population of elk in the park.
And having increased numbers of elk sustains more wolves – more wolves that can kill more caribou.
The second threat is increased predator access.
So caribou live up in these high reaches of the mountains, especially in winter time they use this space to separate themselves from wolves.
When we create tracks that go into caribou habitat, we create a perfect trail, a wolf can access caribou habitat easily and this increases risk to caribou
The third threat is human disturbance,
In Jasper National Park we’ve lost about 13 caribou since 1988 on the Icefields parkway;
This is a fairly preventable loss and ends up being a fairly large factor to the population decline, so we’ve worked on speed zones in those areas.
When we're hiking and accessing areas that are caribou habitat, sometimes caribou react and run great distances from us.
The fourth threat is habitat loss.
We don’t see a lot of that within the national parks, but one example is potentially fire - which changes habitat for caribou.
Outside of the national park were talking about things like cut blocks, pipelines, and seismic lines,
The fifth threat is small population size, and as proven by the loss of the entire Banff herd in just one avalanche,
normal impacts on small populations are magnified, making each animal precious.
Caribou are a really cool species that are highly adapted to a unique environment.
They have really unique features and they live in places where really only they can survive.
They are connected to us in so many ways, culturally connected, economically connected,
they're probably one of the first deer species that we grow up learning about just because of the fact that they are on our money.
They are good indicators for an ecosystem and for when an ecosystem is in trouble.
And for all these reasons I think we should all be involved in learning about caribou, and participating in caribou recovery,
giving our opinions about caribou when we are asked, and just staying informed about caribou and caribou ecology.
(Text) To learn more, visit pc.gc.ca
(Text) Music by Aidan Knight, Kevin MacLeod
(Text) Special thanks to: Marcia deWandel, Shelley Bird, The Nature Conservancy of Canada for photos of cutblocks, Mark Bradley for wolf photo, Steve Malcom for fire photos, Colin Koerselman, Lindsay Gergel