One local rancher with a passion for wild horses, Darrell Glover, estimates that only 8 per cent of colts survive their first year. Now they face growing threats from humans too. The province’s 2023 Feral Horse Management Framework calls for adoption, contraception and a limited cull. This, the government says, will protect rangelands by limiting the number of horses grazing native fescue grasses and contributing to erosion. But advocates such as Glover argue that impacts from oil and gas, forestry, ranching and recreational off-highway vehicles (OHVs) are the bigger threats to rangeland.

The horses’ very existence in Alberta is controversial. Tensions boiled over in 2025 in the foothills near Sundre, home to Alberta’s largest wild horse herds. Ranchers demanded that wild stallions be removed from Crown leases designated for grazing cattle. Outfitters argued the horses were destroying wildlife habitat. Wild-horse advocates countered that the Sundre zone is open to OHVs, which scar and destroy rangeland, with riders sometimes chasing and killing wildlife. They argued the horses themselves are often targeted, and called for stiffer anti-poaching measures.

Roughly 1,500 horses roam millions of acres across the Eastern Slopes of the Rockies.

The widening conflict invites the question: Who decides whether wild horses get to remain on the Eastern Slopes The horses have been here for hundreds of years, the descendants of domestic animals once used by First Nations, farmers, ranchers, hunters and the logging and mining industries. But the federal government doesn’t recognize them as a native species, so they fall under provincial jurisdiction. Under Alberta’s Stray Animals Act the horses are legally considered feral livestock. The province wants to shrink their population. “If 90 mares are darted with contraception, Alberta will lose 500 wild horses over the next five years,” says Glover.

At his ranch near Olds, Glover conducts citizen-science research and advocacy. In 2015 he founded the Help Alberta Wildies Society (HAWS). From 2018 to 2025 he chartered helicopters to follow the government’s survey paths, documenting a 10 per cent wild-horse population decline. He challenges the province’s contention that the population is growing, and believes a cull is unnecessary. He wants wild horses to be recognized as a naturalized species—a non-native organism that establishes a self-sustaining population in a new environment, without human help and without creating undue harms. This designation is distinct from invasive species such as zebra mussels.

The Canadian Species at Risk Act allows for protection of a naturalized species if it has been here for more than 50 years. Currently the Sable Island herd off the coast of Nova Scotia are the only wild horses classified as naturalized. Four other distinct wild horse populations remain in Canada, including those near Sundre.

On December 1, 2025, Banff-Kananaskis MLA Sarah Elmeligi presented a petition with over 15,000 signatures to the Alberta legislature. It asked the government to recognize feral horses as a naturalized species and to put a moratorium on their capture and removal until an independent management council is created.

Jenalene Antony is a writer, photographer and filmmaker who got her professional start as a reporter at the Yorkton News Review.

The post Wildies or Invaders? appeared first on Alberta Views.

Over the past five years Dr. Tyler May has noticed what he calls a “sizeable uptick” in sightings and interactions with grizzly bears in the area surrounding Manning, a town on Highway 35 next to the Notikewin River, approximately 600 kilometres northwest of Edmonton. May, born and raised in Manning, grew up on a small grain farm. His grandfather was a hunting outfitter and ran a trapline in the Chinchaga, an expanse of boreal forest directly west of Manning. After graduating from medical school in Dublin, Ireland, May moved back to the north in 2013 to work as a physician at the Manning Community Health Centre. Today, with his family, he manages a grain and cattle operation, raising 250 head on pastures adjacent to the boreal forest. “We’re seeing more signs of grizzly activity closer to where we live,” May says, citing regular sightings of tracks along the creek that runs through their cattle lease, bears caught on his neighbour’s trail cameras and a grizzly preying on a neighbour’s horse.

Most concerning to May, however, is an increase in livestock loss and injury from what he believes could be grizzly bear predation. He acknowledges it’s difficult to say for sure, when you’re running a remote operation. “Even if they’re on a kill, did they kill it or did it die naturally I haven’t seen a grizzly actually kill anything.” But this year he’s seen three injured cows with open wounds, which leads May to believe they’re being chased by something.

A moratorium on hunting has resulted in grizzly bear populations stabilizing

May admits his perspective is purely anecdotal. A population estimate conducted for grizzlies in the Chinchaga area in 2021 identified only 16 individual bears and estimated a density of 0.7 grizzlies per 1,000 km, which is the thinnest grizzly density in Alberta’s bear management zones. But May isn’t alone in his concerns. He and his neighbours aren’t inherently fearful of bears, he says, but rather of what he calls the “punitive nature” of Alberta’s laws: namely, that it’s been illegal to shoot or hunt a grizzly bear in Alberta since 2006. That’s what leads to the “shoot, shovel, shut up” mentality, he says, or the illegal killing, or poaching, that continues to be one of the leading causes of grizzly bear mortality in Alberta. “The sort of vigilante stuff, where people are taking measures into their own hands.”

In August 2024 May received an email from AlbertaRELM, the province’s regulatory body for hunting and fishing licensing, inviting eligible Albertans—licensed hunters—to become potential “wildlife management responders” to track and euthanize “problem” grizzly bears. “Just about everybody who hunts up here applied,” says May, of the local response to Alberta’s new grizzly management policy. “I don’t think grizzly bears have a lot of friends up here. They have a role to play [in the ecosystem], but people don’t want them in their yards—and for good reasons.”

 

Grizzly bears evoke polarizing emotions in Alberta. While some people perceive them as a symbol of an intact wilderness, an iconic species to be conserved, others view them as a “pest” or a “problem” to be removed. Research at the University of Alberta shows that Albertans, regardless of their stance on grizzly bear conservation, agree on the importance of “improving policy processes and decision-making” to build trust between different interest groups. In doing so, the province is more likely to achieve positive “outcomes for human–bear coexistence.” But the Alberta government has a track record of impeding constructive dialogue when it comes to grizzly bears, says human–bear conflict researcher Douglas Clark, particularly in the context of government “decision-making processes that leave everyone unsatisfied and angry at one another.”

In 2002, when the local grizzly population was about 1,000 mature adults, the province’s Endangered Species Subcommittee recommended that grizzly bears be listed as “threatened.” The Alberta government declined, though they did assemble a team of grizzly bear specialists to put together a Grizzly Bear Recovery Plan for seven different bear management areas (BMAs) across Alberta, with the goal of reducing human-caused bear mortality and human–grizzly bear conflict through mitigating food attractants, securing habitat and educating the public through a BearSmart program. The draft recovery plan was submitted in 2005—when the grizzly bear population had fallen to 700 adults—but the grizzly bear hunt remained open. Then, in a move widely covered in the media, the province’s leading grizzly bear biologist, Gordon Stenhouse, was reassigned from his position after speaking publicly about the plan’s failure to address the impact of the grizzly bear hunt. A few months later the grizzly bear hunt was suspended. It would take eight years after the initial recommendation for the Alberta government to finally list grizzlies as a threatened species under Alberta’s Wildlife Act in 2010.

A young grizzly foraging next to railway infrastructure near Grande Cache. Since the Alberta government banned the hunting of grizzlies in 2006, the population has stabilized, and even increased in some areas, though the bears are still considered threatened in the province.

Nearly two decades of a moratorium on hunting, coupled with conservation efforts, has resulted in grizzly populations stabilizing in some BMAs and increasing in others. In BMA4, which covers the Rockies and the eastern slopes from the Trans-Canada Highway to Rocky Mountain House, for instance, the number of grizzlies nearly doubled (to an estimated 88 bears). The latest population census, in 2021, estimated the grizzly population in Alberta to be between 856 and 973 bears—an increase, but not enough to be delisted as a threatened species.

Still, in recent years, hunting and outfitting associations have been lobbying the Alberta government to reinstate a limited season on hunting grizzly bears. “We should target problem bears first,” wrote author and hunter T.J. Schwanky in an op-ed published in Outdoor Canada in August 2021. “This could easily be done if landowners and Fish and Wildlife officials work together to give licence holders access to the bears.”

Nearly three years later, on June 17, 2024, Alberta’s minister of forestry and parks, Todd Loewen, quietly amended the Wildlife Act to authorize “hunting a grizzly bear” if the bear “is involved in a human–bear conflict situation,” or “is in an area of concern.” On July 9 the ministry issued a press release announcing a new grizzly bear management strategy involving “a new network of wildlife management responders to help stop dangerous and deadly grizzly bear attacks on people and livestock.”

According to the amended regulation, when a “problem” grizzly is reported, and a wildlife officer deems the new “grizzly bear management” strategy to be appropriate, a licensed hunter will be chosen from a list to kill the bear—so long as they can be “onsite within 24 hours.” By September 24, about 7,000 licensed hunters had applied for a slot. From that list, 30 hunters have been shortlisted, with 10 each in the north, central and south regions of the province. Hunters will be able to keep all parts of the bear except the gallbladder (which is highly coveted in Asia for its medicinal properties and illegal to export from Alberta).

Loewen told media that on average roughly 20 problem grizzlies are killed due to “negative human interactions” each year in Alberta, and that up to 15 could be killed annually under the new policy. But those numbers aren’t backed up by provincial statistics, which show that from 2013 to 2022 some 23 grizzlies were killed in self-defence and another 57 for agency removal—eight a year on average, significantly fewer than Loewen’s claim.

Critics argue the new strategy undermines efforts over the past two decades to mitigate and prevent negative interactions between people and grizzlies. Former fish and wildlife officers are calling it irresponsible, if not dangerous, to transfer the onus of managing human–wildlife conflict onto the public. Some conservationists argue the new plan is simply a backdoor way to reopen the grizzly bear hunt in Alberta, prompting the question: is the new strategy really about problem bears, or is it indicative of a political agenda?

 

After Loewen’s announcement, I talked to a current provincial employee formerly involved in grizzly bear recovery. They asked to remain anonymous but indicated that “government biologists” were not consulted by the minister or had any prior knowledge of the new program before it was announced by the government on July 9, 2024.

I requested an interview with Paul Frame, an Alberta carnivore biologist, or any other biologist working for the government, but was denied. Instead, I was referred to the minister.

In an interview, minister Loewen, a former hunting outfitter, was adamant that the new program isn’t a grizzly bear hunt, and that wildlife responders will be told exactly where and when to “try to take out one of these problem bears.” He says the new program was based on concerned feedback from rural Albertans about the safety of residents and livestock.

“There’s a lot of people living in an urban environment that just can’t relate to that,” says Loewen. “But if we have somebody that’s committing crimes in the city, well, we try to catch that person, we don’t just write it off. I think in both urban and rural [contexts], public safety is important, and people have the right to feel safe in their own homes, yards and neighbourhoods.”

Loewen told me that the new program offers Albertans the opportunity to manage problem grizzly bears while freeing up time for overburdened wildlife officers.

But many critics, including Lorne Fitch, a retired provincial biologist and conservationist, are calling the minister’s bluff, arguing that this new approach flies in the face of grizzly bear science and is nothing more than “political meddling.” Fitch says the new program exploits the rhetoric that “grizzly bears are everywhere” and plays on the fear of being attacked, even though the annual number of grizzly bear attacks on humans hasn’t increased.

“This is not something that came from biologists,” says Fitch. “It likely came directly from the minister, without any discussion.”

Prior to the minister’s amendment to the Wildlife Act, Fitch heard from colleagues in the ranching community in southern Alberta that Loewen’s press secretary had sent an email soliciting ranchers for complaints about grizzly bears. “Instead of having an open, transparent public meeting or forum in which there’s the opportunity for people to advance their concerns, you end up with a really slanted view of whether or not there’s a problem big enough to warrant this sort of a response,” Fitch says. “In other words, they were trying to pre-stage the answer—which was a bear hunt.”

A photo of hunters and black bears they’ve just killed, posted on the website of Red Willow Outfitters–founded by Todd Loewen and now run by his family. The company offers black bear hunts starting at $5,250. Loewen is Alberta’s Minister of Forestry and Parks.

 

Political meddling or not, there’s no question that grizzly bears and humans do occasionally come into conflict. But when does a grizzly become a “problem,” and are there other ways to deal with the issue besides killing the bear?

Over the past 30 years, biologist Jay Honeyman dedicated his career to mitigating negative encounters between humans and grizzly bears in Western Canada. In 2012 he started working with the government of Alberta as a large-carnivore biologist in the southern part of the province, specializing in reducing human–grizzly conflict. In 2022 Honeyman retired and his position hasn’t yet been filled. He agrees that the number of grizzlies in southern Alberta is on the rise: they’re moving eastward into more-developed areas. But hands down, says Honeyman, the number one cause of conflict with problem grizzlies is food-related. “Mitigation is about securing or removing the food that’s bringing the bear in, and then the bear moves on—you don’t have a problem anymore,” Honeyman says.

Throughout his career, he consulted with landowners and community groups to find ways to reduce interactions between grizzlies and humans, such as installing electric fences around beehives and livestock, erecting bear-proof garbage bins and granaries, or passing bylaws that prohibit bird feeders and require fruit to be harvested. The results These measures were often cheaper and more effective than sending out teams of wildlife specialists to euthanize a bear.

“It was very rare to revisit a place once these proactive measures were in place,” says Honeyman. “There are always going to be problems—weak bears, sick bears, injured bears, bears that just don’t get it—and they’ll have to be dealt with… but we can definitely reduce the amount of conflict that we’re having.”

While Honeyman cautions against calling the new wildlife program a “hunt”—and he doesn’t think it poses a risk to the overall grizzly bear population in Alberta—he does say it’s taking the province back into “reactive management” of dealing with problem bears: trap, move, euthanize. Only “now the public can help kill the bear as well,” he says.

Honeyman and other critics worry that randomly selecting an eligible hunter to track and euthanize a problem grizzly bear could have major public safety implications.

“Hunting a grizzly is not like hunting anything else,” says Alex Frank, who worked as a provincial conservation officer in northwestern Alberta from 1974 to 2009. He and his colleagues received years of tactical training to safely respond to scenarios involving problem or conflict grizzly and black bears, which could be unpredictable and dangerous. “Especially if you’re hunting an angry bear, they don’t just pop out at 300 yards so you can shoot it,” says Frank. “You’re not using a scope. Sometimes it’s close range—load and shoot.”

Far more dangerous, says Frank, is if hunters wound a conflict bear. “I wouldn’t want to be the CO (conservation officer) having to sit there and sweat about a hunter running around out there with a rogue bear,” says Frank. “I wouldn’t want them near it.”

Then there’s the issue of shooting the right grizzly bear, says Frank. It may not be so simple for a lay hunter to determine whether or not they’re targeting the bear responsible for conflict. “What happens when the hunter shoots the wrong bear, or just shoots the first grizzly he comes across—or even a black bear What about if they accidentally shoot a sow with cubs How does that work?”

“If you’re hunting an angry bear, they don’t pop out at 300 yards. It can be close range–load and shoot.”

Minister Loewen, however, told me that “hunters are already screened in Alberta in order to get a hunting licence,” referring to basic requirements that they pass a hunters education course and obtain a wildlife identification card. Loewen said citizen wildlife responders will only be called upon when that’s deemed safe by wildlife enforcement officers. He points to the case of the recent grizzly attack on an elk hunter in the Madden area on September 1, 2024. The grizzly was the same one that had caused the death of David Lertzman in 2021. “The bear had adolescent young with it, so it was determined that Fish and Wildlife officers would deal with this one directly themselves,” says Loewen.

Critics argue that the incident was an outlier. It’s incredibly rare for officers to be dispatched to kill free-roaming bears, says Honeyman. Today, more often than not, problem bears are captured in a culvert trap, tranquilized and, once sedated, pulled out of the trap and euthanized. It’s the safest and most humane way to dispatch a problem bear, he says.

As for the government’s new wildlife responder program?

“I don’t even see a scenario where it would be applicable in a safe and efficient manner.”

Honeyman believes the real issue is that the government has failed to implement priorities laid out in the grizzly bear recovery plan, which aims to reduce human–grizzly bear conflict, including hiring conflict specialists in the seven bear management areas and increasing funding for landowners to install electric fences and bear-proof garbage bins and granaries.

While Loewen cites the funding of prevention work, including with the Waterton Biosphere Reserve’s carnivores and communities program, these activities are unique to southern Alberta, says Honeyman. “None of these resources are present in the rest of the province, contrary to what the recovery plan says should be occurring,” he says.

Up in Manning, May told me he wasn’t aware of any programs that supported farmers or ranchers in northern Alberta with measures such as electric fences or bear-proof grain bins—and that’s because those don’t exist there. In the absence of mitigation efforts, May believes reopening the grizzly bear hunt is the best course of action. For now, he says, the wildlife responder program is a step in the right direction. “If I had to speculate, the ministry is doing what it can, hopefully without provoking the ire of people who are against this, while still trying to responsibly manage grizzly bears.”

Securing or removing food that’s bringing a grizzly in is cheaper—and safer— than killing the bear.

Hunting bears, says Andrea Morehouse, an independent scientist who’s been studying human–bear conflict in rural Alberta since 2011, is not an effective tool to reduce such conflicts. A recent study in Ontario, for instance, showed the number of negative interactions between humans and black bears failed to decrease after a spring hunt was introduced in addition to the fall hunt. While Morehouse agrees there are situations where lethal control is necessary, she says Alberta’s new wildlife responder program fails to address the root cause of human–bear conflict.

What’s imperative, says Morehouse, is that scientists and communities come together to identify local concerns and brainstorm long-term solutions for human–grizzly bear coexistence. “The tools already exist,” she says. “This is where government could put some funding to try and work on these issues.”

In rural Alberta, dead livestock, also called deadstock, is a major attractant for large carnivores such as grizzlies, and can increase the likelihood of human–bear conflict. Morehouse points to a study in southern Alberta that showed the efficacy of community programs that help farmers install bear-resistant deadstock bins and reimburse costs associated with deadstock removal.

But these necessary conversations between biologists and rural communities just aren’t happening in Alberta right now, say critics, including Fitch. He points to the silent “gag order” that’s preventing biologists from giving public presentations or speaking with hunting or angling groups in rural communities, and this is creating divisions. “Because of this political tension to control the narrative, there’s very little opportunity for biologists to go out into the communities and have conversations with people,” says Fitch. “And what it’s doing is creating suspicions about biologists.”

The provincial employee I spoke with agreed, calling it a “low point” in the Alberta government’s history of wildlife and ecosystem management. “This isn’t about grizzly bears,” they said of the new wildlife responder program that targets so-called problem bears; it’s about party politics. “This is an example of the government trying to mobilize their political base.”

Trina Moyles is the author of Lookout: Love, Solitude and Searching for Wildfire in the Boreal Forest (2022).

Photography by Darrel Comeau
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Read more from the archive “The Mystery of Ursus arctos” July/August 2017.

Update from CBC  “Grizzly killed through Alberta’s new hunting program” Oct 27, 2025.

Update from CBC  “All Options On the Table” Nov 3, 2025.

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The post Problem Grizzly or Problem Politics? appeared first on Alberta Views.

So are many of the birds. A walk through my old neighbourhood shows that the yards and gardens are as lush and well vegetated as they were 60 years ago, but birds seem fewer. Once-common species are missing; the cheery “chi-bik!” call of the least flycatcher, for example, is rarely heard now. But new birds that are there weren’t even in Alberta bird books back then.

Alberta has changed dramatically over the decades. Inevitably wild rose country’s birdlife has also changed. Our decisions, after all, shape their destinies too. The changes among the birds we live with amount to a sort of ecological report card on our ability to create what novelist Wallace Stegner once described as “a society to match the scenery.”

Where scenery is concerned, my old hometown has eaten a lot of it. Once confined to the sheltered confluence of the Bow and Elbow rivers, Calgary now sprawls across most of the wild prairies, sloughs and shrublands where I once built my lists of prairie birds. Urbanization has eliminated long-billed curlews, Baird’s sparrows, meadowlarks and ferruginous hawks. Other birds, however, now thrive in the urban forest that has grown up along city streets. We still have birds, just different ones.

Calgary’s estimated seven million trees provide habitat for a host of bird species virtually unheard of back when a much smaller Calgary lacked that sheltering canopy. Baltimore orioles forage in the tops of the elms that arch over residential streets. Blue jays chatter in back alleys, vireos sing through the long summer afternoons. House finches and Eurasian collared doves—recent immigrants to the province—nest in backyard spruce trees and feast at bird feeders. Calgary’s forest has turned an otherwise hostile urban environment into a place where at least some woodland birds have found new homes.

Cleve Wershler, a Calgary-based ecologist, lists off some of the birds that thrive in his urban landscapes: house wren, yellow warbler, American robin, northern flicker, black-capped chickadee, cedar waxwing, chipping sparrow, red-breasted nuthatch, common grackle, black-billed magpie. It’s a similar story in most of Alberta’s older cities and towns. As trees, parks and yards matured, birds moved in. Some are as fascinating as they are relatively unknown. Northern saw-whet owls, for example: round little birds whose distinctive repetitive call sounds like a saw being whetted with a file. If you live in Edmonton, chances are these little owls are your neighbours.

“Saw-whet owls appear to be quite common in the Edmonton river valley,” says Geoff Holroyd, a former Canadian Wildlife Service endangered species biologist who now chairs the Beaverhill Bird Observatory, east of Edmonton. “But in the historical records, they weren’t there at all. If you look at pictures of Fort Edmonton from 150 years ago, there’s not a tree in sight. They were all chopped down for firewood and building materials. So that means our forest is only 150 years old.… Those regenerated forests now allow flickers and pileated woodpeckers to build their cavities, which are then used by secondary cavity nesters like saw-whet owls. In the 1990s, when we made a concerted effort to find owls on the Christmas bird count, we got the highest count in North America.”

Growing Populations (Clockwise from top left): Robin, peregrine falcon, Northern saw-whet owl, raven, white-faced ibis. Alberta’s cities have urban forests where some woodland birds can now thrive. Irrigation reservoirs have produced new lake and shoreline habitats in Alberta, helping some water bird populations grow dramatically.

Holroyd hastens to add that, where forest birds are concerned, cities aren’t all good news: “A lot of the forests in the Mill Woods area have been cleared and are now subdivisions. The forest tracts I used to know south of Edmonton are gone. So we’re still chopping forests down, but where we haven’t it’s recovering and more diverse than it used to be.”

Holroyd points out that birds need more than just nesting trees in order to thrive in an urban environment. “When I moved to Edmonton there were nighthawks and purple martins in the city, but within a few years they were gone, and they’ve been gone for decades now. They were able to tolerate the initial invasion of humans, but the growth of the city wiped out their feeding habitats, and of course the spraying for mosquitoes interrupts the food chain for both of them.”

Myrna Pearman, the public face and voice of the Ellis Bird Farm near Red Deer until her retirement in 2020, says it’s not just urban birds that are doing well in Alberta. She notes that water impoundments such as irrigation reservoirs have produced new lake and shoreline habitats in parts of the province where they were once scarce. “Some water bird populations have increased dramatically—white-faced ibis, American avocet, black-necked stilt, American white pelican, osprey and black-crowned night heron. Ducks that benefit from nest boxes, especially common goldeneye, have also increased.”

But for all that some species have benefited from the new habitats we’ve created, the overall bird conservation picture is grim. A comprehensive analysis released in 2022 by the North American Bird Conservation Initiative shows that three billion fewer birds survive on this continent than when I was a young birdwatcher. Among those facing the strongest headwinds are grassland birds and aerial insect-feeders such as swallows and nighthawks.

Our native Alberta prairie birds are now less than half as abundant as they used to be. Swallows and other aerial insectivores are down by almost 60 per cent. It would have been inconceivable in the 1960s to imagine barn and bank swallows ever becoming scarce. Today both are listed as species at risk.

“Burrowing owl, long-billed curlew, ferruginous hawk, loggerhead shrike, chestnut-collared longspur and upland sandpiper all used to nest commonly in the Calgary region as late as the 1960s and early 1970s,” says Wershler. “With the loss of native grassland habitats, these are all now rare or non-existent.”

Pearman says the most discouraging land use trend she has seen in her time as an Alberta naturalist is the spread of canola farming and other monocrop agriculture. “Old farmyards are gone, fencelines are gone; there’s no more habitat.”

Declining Populations (Clockwise from top to left): Barn swallow, long-billed curlew, burrowing owl, common nighthawk. These prairie birds used to nest commonly in the Calgary region as late as the 1960s and early 1970s. But with the loss of native grassland habitats, they are now rare or non-existent.

Where prairie birds and insect-eating species are concerned, it’s not just the loss of nesting habitat and shelter that’s causing trouble. Poisoning is an even more insidious threat. Bald eagles, peregrine falcons and other raptors, as well as some songbird species, became endangered in the 20th century because of a highly toxic pesticide, DDT, that accumulated in the ecosystem to the point where birds could no longer produce young. Public concern led to that pesticide being banned. The renewed abundance of those birds is one of the great conservation successes of the past few decades.

But the agrochemical industry found replacement pesticides that are devastating in other ways. Neonicotinoids are a class of biotoxin even more effective than DDT at killing insects. Neonics are widely used now, not only as sprays but as seed treatments. Nearly every canola and corn seed planted in Alberta is painted with the new poisons which, being water-soluble, quickly wash into wetlands and streams.

Geoff Holroyd points out that neonics have been banned in Europe, and were the subject of a proposed ban here. Under pressure from the agrochemical industry, Health Canada backed down. “Research on the prairies has shown that the highest level of neonicotinoids in ponds is in the spring. They are in the soil; the snow melts, that flushes them into the ponds, and you get the highest levels and it’s still lethal. It’s killing the midges and aquatic insects that are the food of aerial insectivores such as tree swallows.”

“It’s one thing to have neonicotinoids available for treatment if you have an insect problem,” says Holroyd. “But just to prophylactically have them on every seed is irresponsible.”

He, Pearman and Wershler all agree that intensive prairie agriculture accounts for a lot of the harm to native Alberta grassland and wetland bird species. Some of the effects are obvious—vast monocultures that no longer provide habitat for prairie birds—while others are more subtle and unexpected.

“Tree swallows eat aquatic insects that are getting hit by neonicotinoids,” Holroyd says. “But barn swallows eat larger insects such as flies that would normally live in cow manure. Producers treat livestock with ivermectin to get rid of parasites. It remains active in their bodies and droppings for about six months. Cow pies, within six months of cattle being treated with ivermectin, aren’t used by insects. So cow pies no longer produce dung beetles and other large insects that feed barn swallows, burrowing owls and other species.”

The poisoning problem is a fairly straightforward fix. Banning DDT brought back endangered birds of prey. Banning the prophylactic use of neonics and ivermectin would help bring back insect-eating birds that have only recently become rare. But solutions to other challenges facing Alberta birds are more elusive. Climate change is the big one.

On the upside, Holroyd points out, a changing climate brings new birds into the province. “With climate change, birds are going to keep moving farther north. We’re seeing an increase in egrets, for example. The first white-faced ibis was at Beaverhill Lake in 1999, and now you can see flocks of hundreds.”

But for most birds, climate change offers a new set of problems. Pearman’s decades-long monitoring of mountain bluebirds shows that, because of earlier snowmelt, they now return to Alberta weeks earlier than before. That can create what Holroyd calls a “climate trap”—the sudden spring blizzards that birds used to avoid simply by staying south now cause many of those birds to freeze or starve. “Around Ellis Bird Farm,” says Pearman, “mountain bluebird populations have never recovered from the catastrophic spring storm of 2008.”

Meadow voles often breed under the snow. As snow-free periods become more frequent in winter, vole populations decline. Returning birds of prey no longer have a key food source. On the other hand, rivers that used to freeze over in the winter now support large wintering flocks of ducks and geese which in turn help sustain bald eagles, prairie falcons and other birds of prey that no longer need to migrate from the province at all.

Climate change yields winners and losers, just as landscape changes and the use of agricultural chemicals do. Sadly, many of the losers are songbirds, shorebirds and other native species that give our province its unique nature. The winners include ravens, magpies, gulls and other scavenging species that are able to profit from others’ losses.

The dawn chorus of birdsong is an experience that seems to be fading into Alberta’s past.

Awakening to a dawn chorus of native songbirds can feel like the whole world is shouting for joy. Sadly, among the many changes to Alberta’s birds, that morning chaos of birdsong is an experience that seems to be fading into the past.

Myrna Pearman says she no longer hears hermit and Swainson’s thrushes or ovenbirds on morning rambles near her home at Sylvan Lake. “While walking the woods, the spring birdsong of years past seems to be much quieter.”

Geoff Holroyd concurs: “The dawn chorus isn’t there. I was just out at Gregg Lake [northwest of Hinton] and you’d have to stop and listen, hear one bird, and then go on and hear another species and another—there isn’t the cacophony of song that there used to be.”

We could get it back—if enough Albertans cared enough about birds to demand better pesticide regulations, reformed land use policies and action on climate change. And in fact both Holroyd and Pearman see encouraging signs that this could happen.

Interest in birding exploded during and after the pandemic. Pearman’s Backyard Bird Feeding: An Alberta Guide sold out its first printing in less than six months. The second is almost sold out too. The Beaverhill Bird Observatory can barely keep up with public demand for its talks and nature walks. Holroyd says that nighttime owl adventures attract 70 people at a time, and the observatory hosted over 1,700 visitors in 2023. The off-site 2024 Beaverhill Snow Goose Festival drew 1,500 participants.

People who experience birds in their lives care about their well-being, Holroyd says, but they also need knowledgeable coaches who can take the experience and tease the meanings out of it. That’s what the Beaverhill Bird Observatory tries to do with its public programming, and it’s why Holroyd and Pearman deliver dozens of talks to thousands of curious Albertans every year.

“We need people to care about and understand every bird species, not just the most colourful or charismatic ones,” says Pearman. She’s right. As Alberta continues to change, so will its birds. How diverse and abundant they will be is entirely up to us. The first step is simple. Go outside, meet some birds, fall in love.

Kevin Van Tighem is an author, naturalist and former superintendent of Banff National Park (2008–2011).

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Not that it helped. Grasshoppers have bedevilled human plans and their crops ever since. The biggest outbreak of desert locusts in seven decades is attacking eastern Africa even now. An estimate in 2020 reckoned that, every day, a single swarm in Kenya of 200 billion insects was eating as much as the human population of Germany. Food across the region has become precarious for millions of people. The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization calls the current surge “a scourge of biblical proportions” and has launched a locust hub webpage to track swarms by satellite.

In the past several years, South America has been hit too, its first locust plague in six decades. And in North America grasshopper outbreaks have struck the three prairie provinces, parts of British Columbia and the US west in recent years. While these haven’t caused as much loss as the African outbreak, the eruptions carry reminders of the panic of the Dirty Thirties, when pitiless swarms of grasshoppers in the prairies ate not just the remnants of wizened crops but also clothes off farmers’ limbs.

And things are poised to get worse. Droughts and heatwaves, fuelled by climate change, are on the rise. These ramp up the ability of some grasshoppers to produce eggs. Warmer temperatures also push the insects’ metabolisms higher, meaning they need to consume even more food than normal.

But while the crop-gobbling has an ancient hold on the human imagination, it’s only one part of the complicated grasshopper story. Canada has more than 100 species of grasshoppers, and only a few of them are capable of episodically ripping through a quarter-section. As unlikely as it may seem, many other types are instead critical to preserving the highly endangered grasslands ecosystem. Grasshoppers, for example, are an essential food for wild birds. Some, such as the Turnbull’s grasshopper, which gorges on Russian thistle, eat only weeds.

“If you were able to easily see the flow of energy through a grassland,” says John Acorn, an entomologist and lecturer at the University of Alberta, “you would see it flowing through the very abundant grasshoppers—flowing from the sun to the plants, through the grasshoppers and into the birds and other insects.”

And alongside other threatened insects, including such pollinators as bees and butterflies, some of those ecologically indispensable grasshoppers seem to be in freefall. Climate disruption, habitat loss and dramatic shifts in bird populations are all in play.

“Some very weird things are happening, and some are good but some potentially are very bad,” says University of Lethbridge entomologist Dan Johnson, who is funded through the Canadian Agricultural Partnership and is one of the world’s foremost experts on grasshoppers. Some species, for example, are expanding their range. And in Alberta’s north, for some species the typical five-year pattern of growth followed by decline is now squished into two years. Reasons unknown.

While there are no comprehensive studies that show exactly how insect populations on the prairies are changing, the red flags are disquieting. Johnson has been monitoring grasshoppers for many years at the Alberta Conservation Association’s Silver Sage Project south of Manyberries, for example, and has tracked a grim decline among some of its 40 species of grasshoppers. Many types of mountain grasshoppers are becoming sparser, and so is a non-pest group called band-winged grasshoppers, a favourite repast of birds.

Ironically, Johnson says, pest-control measures that decades ago killed off many types of grasshoppers are now used far more parsimoniously. One would expect that trend to lead to increases in the populations of non-pest grasshoppers. But it’s not happening, for reasons he continues to examine. “If the only thing that was hurting grasshoppers was us spraying, then right now they’d be back in record numbers and everything would be cooking out there in the ecosystem,” Johnson says.

While we don’t know exactly how grasshoppers are faring, the fate of the grassland songbirds that rely on the insects for food is better known. The 2022 State of the World’s Birds report, published by BirdLife International last September, tracked a 42 per cent drop in grassland birds in North America from 1968 to 2018. In sheer numbers, that’s roughly 700 million fewer birds in just 50 years.

The disappearance in Alberta has been stark. In the 1990s Johnson would routinely spot vast numbers of a dozen species of birds as he conducted insect surveys. “Now, you go to the same sites, and it’s just like the dead zone,” he says. “So, where are they?” But the disappearance of birds—like the let-up in chemical spraying—hasn’t helped grasshoppers either.

All of this matters, Johnson says, because counterintuitive as it may seem, as goes the grasshopper, so goes the prairie. One study, for example, shows that grasshoppers make up more than 85 per cent of the diet of nestling chestnut-collared longspurs. Another found that for sharp-tailed grouse, a key indicator of the health of the prairies, grasshoppers are a diet staple. Endangered burrowing owls rely on grasshoppers, and so do prairie owls of all sorts. Grasshoppers “hold up the food web,” Johnson says. “Without them, massive loss would happen.”

Psoloessa delicatula, Brown-spotted range grasshoppers, overwinter in soil and grass as miniature hoppers, emerging in early spring just in time for baby birds to feast on them.

Grasshoppers are marvels of evolution. Every continent except Antarctica has them, and each one features the good-hopper/bad-hopper morality play. The 600 or so species that inhabit North America likely evolved in Mexico or in the mountains of Nevada and Arizona during the last Ice Age. Then, propelled by powerful back legs and leathery forewings, they walked, jumped and flew northward as ice sheets retreated.

They’ve developed a suite of quirky survival skills, Johnson says. Most of them lay eggs an inch or so under the ground toward the end of the summer, producing a single new generation a year. The embryo grows inside the egg for a while and then puts the brakes on, going into hibernation during the coldest parts of winter. They survive because they’ve mastered the trick of making what amounts to antifreeze in their blood. Once the weather warms up, the embryo finishes growing and pops out of the egg.
But others take a different tack. Some, like the brown-spotted and velvet-striped grasshoppers, hatch before the cold weather and spend the winter in bits of soil and grass as miniature hoppers, emerging in early spring, just in time for baby birds to feast on them.

“And even after being aware of this for decades, I have absolutely no idea why they’re not dead,” Johnson says. “I mean, I can see living a day or two at minus 10, with the wicked cold and wind and drying conditions. But all winter It’s like a miracle.”

These different life cycles have evolved so that if one species of grasshopper gets into trouble, another can take its place in the food chain. This diversity is evolution’s prime mechanism for building resilience, rather than stability, in an ecosystem. But the reasons why one population thrives while another fades away remain mysterious.

“I go out every weekend in the summer and just make sure I’m familiar with what’s happening with all the species,” Johnson says. “Which ones are up this year, which ones are out, which ones are late, which ones just completely disappear. And even after 30 years of chasing them around and trying to keep tabs on them, I don’t know why.”

For millennia, the triggers for grasshopper swarms were equally opaque. But ever since humans began farming, we’ve been all too aware of the havoc the swarms could bring. Tales of locusts infuse ancient Egyptian, Chinese, Hebrew, Roman and Greek texts. “Due to the extent of their devastation and the spectacular nature of their migratory swarms, locusts have left an indelible mark since ancient times in the minds, beliefs, literature and arts of many cultures all over the world,” write locust specialists Michel Lecoq and Arianne Cease in February 2022 in the journal Agronomy. Both the Bible and the Qur’an cite locusts as one of the ancient plagues of Egypt, a divine retribution for sin. China alone has been recording locust outbreaks for 3,000 years, logging more than 800 separate events. In North America, six voracious swarms of the notorious and now extinct Rocky Mountain grasshopper, each lasting at least two years, struck the Great Plains between 1818 and 1875 alone, shaping tales of the settlers forevermore.

More recently, the X-Men comic book franchise introduced the villain The Locust. This evildoer creates a swarm of giant locusts with an ionizing “magno-ray” to devour crops. “Feed well, my pretties,” he coos. “Feed well! Now only I, your leader, am present to hear your song of mounting menace! But soon the world shall know the meaning of that sound… and live in terror of it!”

Some farmers have told me, ‘Wow. Now I get it. We should conserve some grasshoppers and just not bother spraying.

But magno-rays aside, where does a swarm come from In 1921 the Russian entomologist Boris Petrovitch Uvarov finally decoded the mystery. It turns out that about 25 of the planet’s 6,700 grasshopper species can alter themselves from benign, shy insects into the terrifying swarms of locusts that devastate crops—but only under pressure from very dense grasshopper populations. The drier and more abandoned an area, the better for incubating swarmers.

These hoppers change colour, size, shape and even brain size, essentially shapeshifting into eating machines. The process is called gregarization, meaning that they transform into what’s known as their “gregarious” phase, the opposite of their “solitarious” phase, and then band together into dense, marauding mobs of insects.
The behaviour of some species can shift within mere hours. They move fast, too: hordes can migrate hundreds of kilometres in one night, eating everything they come across. That includes the leaves off trees and handles off shovels.

On the grasslands, the attacks have spawned generations of ingenious eradication campaigns, including bounty systems, grasshopper “armies,” burning, beating, drowning, plowing eggs into the soil, crushing them with horse-drawn “hopperdozers,” dynamite, flamethrowers and poisons of all kinds. A popular formulation in the 1930s was sawdust, bran and arsenic.

Today, chemical insecticides are still the go-to to control pest grasshoppers. But these poisons are shorter-lasting now, far more targeted and more regulated, to prevent persistent damage to the landscape.

As well, in an attempt to prevent outbreaks, nations now monitor desertified areas to find out whether they’re becoming cradles for locusts. Some countries have established early-warning systems that trigger immediate insecticide programs. Arizona State University has set up the Global Locust Initiative to make sure knowledge about outbreaks remains accessible across the world. That’s especially important now, because climate disruption is likely to reverse any recent progress in controlling outbreaks, making the events more frequent, more severe and more apt to strike in new locations, according to the Agronomy article.

Alberta maintains a pest-grasshopper population map and forecast, plus a late-August count of adult grasshoppers capable of laying eggs, conducted by agricultural fieldmen—professionals with applied agricultural or environmental science backgrounds. The Bruner’s spur-throat grasshopper, for example, could be shaping up to be a problem this summer in the Peace River region, and crop-pest grasshoppers have been on the rise in the warm, dry south and eastern borders over the past two years, carrying risks of an outbreak.

A mountain bluebird bringing food to its babies. One study shows that grasshoppers make up more than 85 per cent of the diet of nestling chestnut-collared longspurs.

Modern safeguards aside, the old evil-grasshopper battle stories remain tenacious. And, in Alberta at least, they’re taking hold once more. Despite many types of grasshopper appearing to be in decline, hotter weather is encouraging still other local species to multiply.

“I would say that in the last six months, more than at any time in 10 years, the news services and the people I bump into, they’re all just grasshopper, grasshopper, grasshopper,” Johnson says. “It’s back on their radar, and it wasn’t for a long time.”

It’s his cue to remind people that a grasshopper is not necessarily a blight. It could even be a blessing. To that end, he’s put together illustrated guides explaining the differences between good and bad.

Johnson’s basic message If the grasshopper sings, or if it flies before June, or if it has brightly coloured or black hind wings that you can see as it flies, it’s not a crop-eater—meaning farmers shouldn’t spray.

Pest species, on the other hand, hatch in late May and early June. They are brown or black and always have little wing buds rather than large wings that fold back. One of the big hungry ones with a fondness for grasses, cereals, pulses, canola and safflower is the two-striped grasshopper, with its characteristic twin lines of spots running along the back.
Johnson also posts grasshopper ID photos prolifically on social media. “I throw them on to try to get people that follow me interested,” he says. “And some farmers have said, ‘Wow. Now I get it. You know, this is really interesting. We should conserve some and just not bother spraying.’ It’s much better than it used to be.”

As for Acorn, he marvels at how grasshoppers manage to continue to play a key role in the grasslands ecosystem. They sing the soundtrack of the prairies, he says. What you hear on a warm summer evening in Alberta is mainly stridulating grasshoppers, rubbing a small, roughened surface on their hind legs against the front wings. Some make soft, lisping sounds in the grasses, while still others emit sharp calls across the wind, nestled up at the side of warm cliffs.

To him, it’s a lesson in being humble. In honouring the unexpected. And in being careful how we treat this tremendously complex world we find ourselves inhabiting.

Alanna Mitchell is a journalist, author and playwright fascinated by how science, art and society intersect.

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Taber, where the eye-watering tang of manure slaps you in the face as soon as you open your car door, sits at the literal centre of all this boundlessness. It is a Footloosian town of about 8,500 residents with a healthy reliance on the agribusiness industry and an extraordinary variety of Christian churches: Catholic, Lutheran, evangelical, reformed, LDS, Jehovah’s Witness, Baptist and Mennonite, to name a few. Plowed fields as level as the Uyuni salt flats spread in every direction, and a drive along the township and range roads reveals the poultry processors (14.5 million broilers per year), confined feeding operations (500,000 head of cattle), French fry factories (two billion pounds of potatoes), and sugar beet plants (105,000 tonnes of refined sugar) that turn the fruits of the land into food products and ROI.

Most of the dizzy pheasants had to be prodded—even tossed—out of their hay shelters, while shooters unleashed a barrage of pellets in their general direction.

Apart from these observations, and the fact that some 40 per cent of the population prefers speaking a Germanic language at home rather than English or French, the only other remarkable thing about Taber is the existence of the harmless-sounding but ultimately troubling Community Standards Bylaw, which prohibits, among many other things, swearing or spitting or loitering, or even gathering in groups of three or more in any public place “where a Peace Officer has reasonable grounds to believe the assembly will disturb the peace of the neighborhood….”

As an habitual spitter and occasional curser, and a journalist inclined to discuss, in places both private and public, the vagaries of the world with a wide range of strangers, often in groups larger than two, I was a little concerned that these (likely unconstitutional) prohibitions would interfere with my documenting the goings-on in and around Taber during the 2019 edition of the much heralded pheasant festival. I would just have to be on my best behaviour.

Be apprised, though, that the Taber Pheasant Festival is not your average bird festival. Unlike dozens of other avian extravaganzas held every year in almost every part of North America, the Taber version is not really about celebrating or learning about or even watching pheasants; it’s about killing them. It’s the single biggest hunting festival in this country, with almost 1,000 hunters and their obedient retrievers congregating for a week of hounding the world’s most popular game bird.

The Taber Pheasant Festival is put on by the Alberta Conservation Association, a sportsman-run, hook-and-bullet non-profit and “delegated administrative organization” that gets a percentage of provincial hunting and fishing licence revenues to do what governments usually do in other jurisdictions: conduct research, promote hunting, fishing and trapping, and conserve fish and wildlife populations and the habitats on which they depend, especially through partnerships with private landowners.

One of ACA’s primary focal species is the pheasant, specifically Phasianus colchicus, known as the ring-necked, or common, pheasant. On a ride out to ACA’s Enchant Demo Project, where ACA has helped improve upland game bird habitat on a 1,460-acre farm, Ken Kranrod, ACA’s vice-president, told me that a big part of what they do is help repair the damage done by modern agriculture. At Enchant, their habitat improvements—a new wetland, habitat strips of leafy cover along crop edges—have increased grey partridge densities to some of the highest in North America. It is now a model for how other landowners can make cost-effective changes that don’t affect their bottom lines.

A parallel effort is the Provincial Pheasant Release Program, which ACA took over in 2014 after the Alberta government decided to mothball it. Despite Brobdingnagian productivity, and the fact that ring-necks usually do well in agricultural areas, southern Alberta is hard-pressed to grow wild pheasants, and the government was tired of throwing good money after bad in an increasingly futile attempt to create a self-sustaining population. “They don’t really overwinter that well because they’re not from this climate,” Kranrod told me as Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue played in the background. Undeterred by these inconvenient facts, the ACA took over the complicated task of raising and releasing what’s now 30,000 pheasants each year at a variety of sites in Alberta, because, well, hunters really like killing pheasants.

According to Pheasants Forever (120,000 members), the first ring-necked pheasants arrived in North America in 1881, transported from their native range in China by one Owen Nickerson Denny, the American consul-general in Shanghai at the time. Most died along the way, but Judge Denny released 29 more the next year on his brother’s farm in the Willamette Valley near Portland, Oregon. Many more birds were released over the years, some imported from China, some from English gamebird farms, and they began to flourish in Oregon and up into Washington. During Oregon’s first pheasant season, in 1892, hunters reportedly killed 50,000 roosters on opening day.

Hunters everywhere clamoured for more. This was long before anyone worried about the deleterious effects of invasive species. Fish and game agencies dutifully answered the call, releasing thousands upon thousands of mostly farm-raised pheasants everywhere the habitat would support them. Now there are as many as 30 million pheasants living in 40 US states and six Canadian provinces, more than half of them in South Dakota. Hundreds of thousands of hunters kill millions of them every year. But tinkering with nature on such a grand scale often invokes the law of unintended consequences. Despite the existence of tens of millions of birds, numbers have been declining in most areas since a peak in the early 1960s, mostly because entrepreneurial spirit and the cult of economic efficiency have turned pheasant-friendly family farms into corporate megafarms with little to no wildlife habitat, pheasant or otherwise.

Nowhere has been hit harder than Alberta. When I went into Marksman Guns & Sports in Lethbridge to buy some pheasant loads for the festival, Ted Feller, the owner, reminisced about the glory days. “We have 10 per cent of the pheasants we had 40 years ago,” he said, with a thinly veiled tone of disgust. “I’m 62 years old. When I was a teenager, there were pheasants all over the place. Now they’re almost gone.”

The Taber Pheasant Festival is, in part, an antidote to this trend, promising its hunter participants the perfect combination of camaraderie and opportunity. Participants sign up to hunt on four dozen or so farms, private land that is otherwise off limits even to local hunters for the remainder of the season. Each hunter can hunt as many as three half-days during the week, at three assigned release sites that are duly populated with 20 ring-necked pheasants each and every afternoon. In the evenings, social gatherings—the Game to Gourmet Culinary Tasting on Monday, Scotch Tasting and Wing Wednesday, and a banquet and silent auction on Thursday—allow hunters to share stories over drinks and experience the bliss of well-prepared Phasianus colchicus recipes: pheasant empanadas, pheasant wings, roast pheasant with dressing and gravy, Asian noodles with pheasant meatballs, smoked pheasant mac ’n’ cheese and, my favourite, butter pheasant.

Perhaps the most interesting part of the whole event is the Novice Shoot, which is offered the first weekend, in a field by Fincastle Lake, to educate people about the critical role of hunting in conservation and introduce neophyte hunters to the intricacies of finding and killing upland game birds. “You have a young kid and he comes out and you get the wash of colour and the cackle and whatnot,” said Kranrod. “Pheasants make it so easy and controlled and exciting. They’re a great species to introduce kids to the world of hunting and how that integrates into the world of conservation, which includes habitat conservation and enhancement, working with landowners, the circle of life, all that. That’s why we wanted to get involved.”

At 53, I was no young kid, but I had come to hunting late in life, long after I had left Alberta for other climes. I hadn’t grown up in a hunting family, and like many denizens of suburbia, I had a rather low opinion of the practice. But when I relocated to Missoula, Montana, in the mid-2000s, most men (and some women) I knew hunted, not for sport or trophies, but for food. They eventually convinced me that, done right, hunting is the least-bad way to put wild, organic meat in one’s freezer. While I had opportunistically killed the odd grouse with my bow while hunting elk and deer, I had never hunted upland game birds in the traditional way, which is to say wandering hither and yon in open country with a shotgun crooked over my shoulder. This was my chance to learn.

When I drove out to Fincastle on Sunday morning, the makeshift parking lot was already full of trucks and SUVs. It was a beautiful blue-sky prairie day, and the big white tent and tangerine festival banners billowed in the inexorable breeze. I was a tad late, having had to backtrack for my forgotten camera and then taken a wrong turn off the highway on my return, but the staff at the registration table happily wrote out my nametag, returned my $20 registration fee and assigned me to group A4.

Although it is not required, I had brought my own shotgun, an ancient pump-action Stevens Model 520 made in the late 1920s. A dear friend and mentor had rescued it from his brother-in-law’s basement and gifted it to me, and I’d had a gunsmith refurbish the rusty old weapon into hunting shape. It was more of a goose than a pheasant gun, but I couldn’t wait to try it. When I pulled it out of my Suburban, somewhat self-consciously, the gun handler that would carry it over to the shooting range gave a low whistle, as if I’d handed him an artifact I’d just dug out of the prairie sod.

“Wow, that’s a, a beautiful gun,” he said, as he turned it over in his hands. He made sure it was unloaded, gave it a few shakes, and pumped the action open and closed a couple of times. “I dunno. It’s a little loose in places. I’m guessing you can use it, but it’ll be up to the shooting instructors.”

At the range, shotguns were already blazing. Group 2 was up, and tiny children as young as 10 were blasting clay “birds” flung from three automated trap machines at astonishing speeds. I searched the crowd for my fellow A4s and found the three of them talking together as they waited their turn at the firing line. They were all bird-hunting newbies from Calgary. One, Curtis, hunted deer, and we swapped stories about coming to hunting late in life. He turned and introduced me to Chris, his father, who lived in Coventry Hills, one of the ever-multiplying subdivisions that had sprawled north from what was the edge of town when I’d grown up there. Then, it was still farmer’s fields and coulees, decent pheasant habitat I’d wager, which we explored on our BMX bikes, looking for snakes and ducklings to catch and smoking the odd illicit menthol cigarette, all while keeping a watchful eye out for older boys inclined to spit in our faces or shoot at us with pellet guns.

Chris, who looked fit and spry for the 60 years he said he was, had gone out with Curtis after deer, and had learned to crave the outdoor exercise and thrill of the chase. The only firearm he owned was a short-barrelled tactical shotgun for home defence, and he was keen to try the fancy autoloaders provided at the Taber Pheasant Festival, some of which were intricately engraved works of art that cost more than $3,000.

I watched father and son take turns thumping clay targets. Curtis creamed them with lethal precision, but Chris had some trouble hitting the mark. I watched as his gray-haired instructor showed him how to better position the gun and swing it from right to left after the clays. When I walked up to the firing line, my instructor, Phil, asked me if I’d ever fired a shotgun. I told him I hunted big game, and was reasonably competent with high-powered rifles, but that I’d never shot a scattergun at moving targets. Phil patiently walked me through the differences: Your feet should be squarer than when shooting a hunting rifle, he said, your weight forward slightly and your knees bent, like the stance assumed when playing defence in a basketball game.

“You gotta be smooth,” he said. “Unlike a rifle, where you have a lot of time to aim, and you pull the trigger softly, you want to follow the clay with the barrel and kinda slap at the trigger without stopping your follow. But you gotta be smooth.”

The key, I learned, is to get the butt of the gun high up on your shoulder and press your cheek lightly to the stock. Instead of a reticle in a scope, a tiny bead at the far end of the barrel is your guide. I whittled it down to a three-step process: raise the gun, follow the bird, slap the trigger.

“Pull!” I said when I was ready. The clay flew from the trap to my right and arced serenely across the sky in front of me. Raise. Follow. Slap. The gun boomed and the orange clay shattered to the ground. After four in a row, Phil slapped me on the back. “Good job. I can see you’re getting the muscle memory. Once you shoot enough, you’ll be able to throw up your gun exactly the same way every time.”

I spent an hour honing my skills and then walked over to the tent to get a bite to eat and ready myself for the next phase of my education. Instead of inert, metaphorical birds, the targets were now live pheasants.

What I’d witnessed the day before, when my friend Katie Morrison had done her novice day, can only be described as a shitshow. On a separate shooting range right in front of the billowy tent, three handlers grabbed a rooster each out of a crate, which they shook vigorously before stuffing them into piles of hay. Two shooters were oriented so each had a chance at the birds when they flushed without endangering the handlers or the crowd of eager shooters and proud parents, who watched their child hunters with bated breath.

Most of the dizzy pheasants had to be prodded—even tossed—out of their hay shelters, while the two shooters unleashed a barrage of pellets in their general direction from a distance of 10 or 20 yards. At least half the birds were saved by the inexperienced inaccuracy of the shooters and flew off to hide in the tall grass 100 yards away. Some dropped from the sky with a thump; others were “winged” and tried to hobble off, only to be brought back flapping by eager retrievers. A half-dozen or so ran off into the parking lot to hide beneath the fleet of pickup trucks.

Now it was my turn, and I was having serious second thoughts. I am a reluctant hunter at the best of times, and it always breaks my heart when I walk up to a deer or an elk I’ve killed in the wild. The core ethic of hunting is supposed to be “fair chase,” which (in theory) says animals should have a reasonable opportunity of escaping their fate. What I was being asked to do was as far from this ideal as one could get.

My handler passed me my old shotgun, an innocent I knew had never notched a kill. I could see a frightened pheasant looking around furtively over the top of its modest redoubt, its human tormentor just a couple of feet behind it. Pheasants evolved to conceal themselves in grass and shrubs (what hunters call “cover”), and when they feel threatened, they prefer to run for it if they can. This poor thing doesn’t know what to do, I think. It can’t hide, it can’t run, and it sure as hell doesn’t want to fly, and there’s Curtis, off to my right, champing at the bit to get on with it. Behind us, 50 or so onlookers are waiting to see if these two grown men can actually hit more than the broad side of a barn.

Just as I began thinking about missing on purpose, the handler pokes at the pheasant. It hesitates—another poke—and then leaps into the air on my side of the makeshift range, its wings beating furiously to pull it out of danger. Muscle memory takes over and the gun goes up, high on my shoulder. Follow. Slap. Boom. The pheasant plummets to the ground, its neck bare of any semblance of flesh or feathers. At least it died quickly, I think, but I can’t bear to do it again. I raise the gun on the last two birds, but there was little follow and no trigger slap. When Curtis downs the last of his two birds, the crowd applauds politely, as if Tiger Woods has just dropped yet another birdie putt at the Masters.

After memorializing Curtis and his birds on my memory card, we wandered over to the field-dressing station, where a bevy of chefs taught us how to turn these beautiful birds into lean, earthy meat similar to chicken. As we pulled and cut and bagged, I asked how they were enjoying the festival. “It’s great,” Curtis said, as he picked feathery down from a pheasant breast. “It’s like a guided hunt but you’re not paying anything.” His father was even more enthusiastic. “I’m hooked!” he said. “I’m going to have to sell my gun and buy one I can hunt with.”

I looked up to see thousands of snow geese swirl their way onto the surface of Fincastle as a cacophony of shotgun blasts permeated the air. Off to the side, a couple of older men sniggered about the fact it’s a miracle that no animal lovers had ever shown up to protest.

In the afternoon, Katie and I decided to take my gun for a walk to see if we couldn’t scare up some pheasants on the south end of CPR Reservoir, an agricultural impoundment just west of Taber. It was thick with cattails and shrubs, perfect pheasant habitat, but a half-dozen orange-clad hunters were already coursing through them with their dogs. The only birds we saw were two dead roosters that had been shot but not picked up.

On our way back to the Suburban, a dual-axle pickup pulling a horse trailer drove up the road toward us. It stopped and a middle-aged man hopped out.

“Are you hunting pheasants?” he asked.

“We are,” Katie said, “but we’re not having much luck.”

“Would you like to see some pheasants?” he asked.

We looked at each other, a little confused, and walked over to the truck. Two young boys climbed out of the cab and joined their dad, who introduced himself as Henk. They were farmers in the area. The younger of the boys, Lennard, who was 9, had raised some pheasants they wanted to release, part of an ACA program that pays 4-H members to turn one-day-old chicks into mature pheasants.

“But he’s a little worried about it,” Henk said in a slight Dutch accent. “He doesn’t really want them to be killed by hunters. So we might go somewhere else.”

I wondered for a moment what Lennard would have thought about the novice hunt, and then asked if we could watch them release the birds. Lennard lowered his head and worried his hands a bit, and then smiled shyly and nodded his agreement. Henk opened the trailer door to a dozen or so roosters standing on the floor, and Lennard jumped in and walked to the back. He spread his arms like a conductor and then took two steps forward: the birds flushed into the air and rushed out the door, a blizzard of whirring wings and brilliant colours that disappeared into the leafless brush so quickly it was almost as if they had never existed at all.

I share Lennard’s concern about the welfare of his hand-reared pheasants. Although I was enjoying myself at the festival—the food was excellent, the people were friendly and the opportunity to shoot as much skeet as you wanted (for free!) was a real treat—the truth is that whether or not Lennard’s roosters were shot by hunters, the chance any of them will live to enjoy next summer is pretty close to zero. And it’s not just because Alberta’s winters are cold. It’s frigid where pheasants evolved in China. But the habitat there is better and they’re truly wild birds, not what an acquaintance of mine calls “lost chickens that can fly,” for which reason he refuses to hunt Alberta’s pheasants.

This perception among some hunters, that released birds are somehow a diminished and domesticated form of the real thing, is backed up by a significant amount of research. Although pheasant farms claim to respect the birds they sell, they are basically bred and raised like the broilers over at Sunrise Farms, north of Taber. And this, it turns out, makes them a whole lot less capable of surviving in the wild.

Dr. Joah Madden, a zoologist and leading pheasant expert at the University of Exeter, near London, has spent much of his career trying to tease out the reasons raised-pheasant survival rates in the UK, where 40 million are released every year, are so deplorably low. “About 25 per cent of them are dead before the first trigger is pulled,” he said.

What he has found is not particularly surprising. The stressful conditions in which the birds spend their early weeks make them more susceptible to disease; their inability to adequately forage for wild foods, especially during harsh winters, makes them more likely to die of starvation; and their naïveté and inexperience with perching makes them easy targets for predators. It’s even worse in Alberta: Just 1 per cent of the farm-raised pheasants released in Alberta, whether by 9-year-old kids or the professionals from MacFarlane Pheasants Inc., survive the winter, and the few that do are hard pressed to reproduce. Essentially, they all die whether or not they evade the hunter’s gun.

These facts raise uncomfortable questions that are all but unavoidable at Canada’s biggest hunting festival. For instance: Is it alright to sacrifice semi-domesticated sentient animals for our recreational and culinary enjoyment Is it OK to introduce children to “the world of hunting” and “the cycle of life” with an experience that is not really hunting at all Am I simply being churlish to even bring it up?

Before I had left the Novice Shoot, I stopped Tedd Walcott, the instructor who had taught Chris how to shoot, to ask him to carry my shotgun back to my Suburban. Walcott is a chiropractor from Lethbridge, and a senior shooting instructor and part-time deer-hunting guide who specializes in one-day hunts for novice hunters. I thanked him and his colleagues for their tutelage and invited him to Montana to hunt antelope with me. When I expressed my reservations about shooting caged birds, he sighed. “I know,” he said. “It’s totally artificial. But we train people to hunt, and it gives them some confidence to get out. And if we only hunted wild birds, we wouldn’t hunt.”

Maybe that’s the lesson, then. If hunters think hunting is a tradition special and important enough to maintain, then maybe we need to make sure our elected representatives protect enough habitat to support wild populations of the native game we seek, including economic incentives for private landowners to do the same. And if we don’t or can’t, maybe we explain to our children the hows and whys of our failures, and the consequences of a system run amok, rather than invent something that actually subverts the very values (i.e., respect for nature) we claim to be trying to teach them.

I rose early the next morning and drove east in the dark to Release Site #31, a half section of land between Highway 837 and 40 Mile Coulee, where a sign four feet square greeted me with the knowledge that Jay and Ryan Doolittle owned the land and Black River Outfitters had sponsored the site, for which I was exceedingly grateful. I was also excited, as I always am in the early morning dark on a hunting day, even though I hate getting out of bed before the sun rises. But I’ll be honest: The serious second thoughts had returned with a vengeance.

During my research, I’d heard actual hunters tell all kinds of awful stories about hunting released pheasants. On the online Alberta Outdoorsmen Forum, there were more than a few disparaging critiques of hunters and their dogs waiting for the release truck to leave, and then descending on the farm-raised birds that had been, and I quote, “released for the slaughter.” I’d also watched a couple of YouTube videos of people standing over frightened birds and then nudging them into the air with a gentle foot, only to blast them at 10 feet as they made a half-hearted attempt to flush. After the Novice Shoot fiasco and my experience with Lennard, my discomfort had grown to such an extent that last night I’d had to drink an entire bottle of red wine (Erath Pinot Noir 2017, “with a hint of wintergreen melding with savory meatiness”) just to get to sleep.

But here I was, in the dark, 336 miles from home, parked at the northeast corner of SE Sec 26 Twp 9 Rge 13 W4M. As the first grey light slipped over the horizon, I began to make out the nature of the enigma before me. Every hunt is just a puzzle to be solved, a unique concatenation of wind direction and topography and vegetation and food and water that, if you’re paying attention, tells you where your quarry is likely to hide and how you can get close enough to kill it.

Release Site #31 looked promising. The breeze was light and from the northwest. A broad, shallow coulee sloped down to the southeast. Much of the place was bare, probably from overgrazing of livestock of one kind or another, but the patches of cattails and wild rose and snowberry preferred by pheasants were well dispersed throughout the property. The map I’d been given showed ponds at the west end, near where the outlines of gnarled trees were just now emerging in the pinkish light. Unlike every other hunt I’d ever been on, I also knew that the ring-necks had been dropped off the afternoon before, and they didn’t know the place any better than I did. The drop-off would require a truck, and the truck would require at least a modest two-track onto the property. A quick scour of the map indicated it came in from the northeast corner and headed for the ponds and trees.

Still, there was no hurry. I was only taking my gun for a walk, as most hunters happily describe a day on the hunt, and I was sure there would be much to see along the way. I didn’t have a dog, so I was going to have to cover as much ground as my two old legs would let me. I tromped through wild rose thickets at a half run, hoping to surprise a pheasant that had never encountered a predator before.

Ninety minutes later, not far from where the two-track entered the property, I heard a series of hoarse and foreshortened croaks, repeated every 10 seconds or so. I didn’t know what sound a pheasant cock makes, and perhaps they were really cackles, but I figured this might just be it, so I politely shooed away some mule deer I had been watching and followed the croak–cackles toward the trees. I was certain it was just below the rise, and so I hoisted the butt of my shotgun high on my shoulder in anticipation of the raise-follow-slap routine. But no birds rose from the grass, and the attenuated croaks continued in the distance. I crept forward like a marine in a Vietnamese rice paddy, and soon enough I saw the rooster perched on a dead branch high up in one of the trees, not far at all from the little road. I was 20 yards away, and happy that it had learned to perch so quickly.

I crept forward like a marine in a Vietnamese rice paddy, and soon enough I saw the rooster perched on a dead branch.

Here was another conundrum. Wild pheasants, I’d been told, are wily critters that don’t easily give themselves up. They’ll run through the grass and shrubs for half a mile or more to avoid having to fly, but when they do, they burst out of cover at more than 40 miles an hour. This is what makes the pursuit of pheasants “sporting”—and why shooting them on the ground is frowned upon. What about in a tree I stared down the barrel of my shotgun and waited so long for this loquacious rooster to fly that my shoulder muscles ached and my arms shook. I lowered the gun to my side and stamped my feet—and still the bird croaked. I waited impatiently for what seemed like forever, and then raised my gun again. This time I shouted, and it finally leapt from the branch. There was hardly a follow and nary a slap. Boom. I dropped it dead with a single shot, but I felt no sense of pride for having done so.

It was now 10 a.m. I had half my limit and three hours before the next group arrived, but I was losing whatever motivation I had ginned up earlier in the dark. I wandered through the old trees and beat through the bushes. A quick lap around the biggest pond revealed few cattails and zero pheasants. I’d had enough. Time to head back to the truck.

As I pop over the next rise, four clueless, splendiferous pheasants drink from a pond like a herd of sheep.

Originally from Calgary, Gailus now lives in Montana. He is the author of The Grizzly Manifesto (RMB, 2010).

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The post Hunting the “Wild” Pheasant appeared first on Alberta Views.

The helicopter skids skimmed the toothy tips of the olive- and ochre- and pine-beetle-red-tinged jack pines. My eye plunged straight down, scavenging the snow-covered ground for any sign of movement. My dad sat in the front seat, listening for a radio signal coming from the collars worn by female caribou. Biologists had to rely on radio collars and telemetry technology to track the herds through dense bush. You’d never find them without telemetry. Caribou don’t want to be found. Through my headset, I could hear a beep—beep—beep, faint as a heartbeat.

“Forty-five degrees to the left,” said my dad, and the pilot responded.

Beep-beep-beep. The beat grew louder and faster as we drew nearer.

“Caribou!” The word leapt out of my mouth.

My eyes locked on the sudden movement of a small herd on the run. The caribou wove in and out of the black spruce. Long legs gracefully propelled their creamy bodies forward through the deep snow, buoyed by wide, highly evolved hooves that acted as snowshoes. The females bore small, velveteen antlers. The calves followed in their tracks. My dad counted them—three females and two calves—and pencilled down the numbers into his logbook. Every winter, for as long as I could remember, he’d flown above the boreal forests, listening for the pulse of woodland caribou.

Counting ghosts.

The caribou fled, desperately trying to lose themselves in the bush. I wanted to watch them for the rest of my life. They emerged from the brush onto a frozen lake: tiny black silhouettes against the world. They didn’t run; rather, they floated across the lake. Such an elegant escape.

“Every time I see caribou, it’s like I’m seeing them for the first time,” said my dad.

“And the last.”

When I was 6 years old, I spent a week camping with my dad and older brother along the mosquito-heavy shores of Slave Lake. I recall the childhood wonder of being inducted into a world that seemed to belong to boys and men. I wanted to claim their rituals as my own. Every day opened and closed with a campfire. In the cold, dewy mornings, I’d worm my way out of the four-man tent and poke the glowing coals with a stick, as dad prepared oatmeal in an old pot. He tried to braid my hair the way my mom did but my corn silk hair came defiantly undone.

Camping on the land was an education in simplicity. Take only what you need. You don’t need much. Food, water, shelter. Dad recited poems by Robert Service—there are strange things done in the midnight sun—from memory. We craned our heads back to taste stardust, count constellations and worship the northern lights.

Nature is the poetry of survival. The old truth slipped under my skin.

More practically, my dad showed me how to swing a hatchet and split thin strips of birch into kindling. “Widen your stance,” he’d say firmly. Even today, I can’t pick up an axe without the fear of the blade biting into a kneecap. He demonstrated how to forage for old man’s beard, the mint green lichen that grows in delicate hanging skeins from the lowest rungs on old-growth spruce. The lichen is a lifeline for woodland caribou. It enables caribou to survive the harsh subarctic conditions of Canadian winters. They paw through belly-deep snowbanks to feast on the fragile, nutrient-dense lichen. My dad pointed out that what fed woodland caribou also catalyzed our campfires.

He raised me like a son. My dad taught me everything he taught my older brother: how to track prey, pull the trigger, dress a grouse. The forest was sacred text he showed me how to read and love. We baited lines and cast and waited. He pointed out the bald eagles that plunged and skimmed the surface of the lake, talons opening and clenching, sometimes around a fish, sometimes just air. Fishing wasn’t necessarily about catching fish. It was about waiting and witnessing everything else you couldn’t have anticipated: a moose cow and calf emerging from the bush, a lone raven speaking an old language of throat croaks and clicks that sounded of equal parts mischief and grief.

I suspect I wasn’t an easy daughter to raise. I was born with a loose mouth and an animal heart. I lashed out at the world when the world cut through my thin hide.

We witnessed the wild—the nothingness and the everythingness—with all of our senses. A way of listening that is rarely practised, let alone passed down to children these days.

Growing up in a small northern community, I didn’t want to be a girl. I ran with a wolf pack of boys. We catapulted our bodies off boulders into the murky swimming hole. We piled onto the snowmobile and gunned the engine, etching our illegible longing onto the pages of snowy alfalfa fields. We built forts, climbed trees, dug around in old bear dens, slung mud at one another and slunk home at dusk, hungry, panting and wearing the wild proudly on our weathered limbs.

I was a girl-boy on the brink of growing breasts. I was starting to understand the world had a different set of expectations for the bodies of girls. Seek shelter. Prune and preen. Keep and be kept. Home and hearth. Nurture. Tend. Beauty. But breasts were just a nuisance, and the kind of home I dreamt of was a lean-to made of black-spruce walls and a moss-covered floor. The prescribed feminine domesticity felt like a sharp-jawed trap. I wanted to claim the habitat of boys, ranging wide and far, and test myself against the wild. I didn’t want to pine after validations of being pretty. I cut off my corn-silk hair. I wore sports bras and my older brother’s hand-me-down ’90s grunge wear. I wanted to be brave, tough, quick-witted and physically capable. I cast my girl-boy body into the unsheltered elements without apology.

My dad never objected. He only waited and watched.

I suspect I wasn’t an easy daughter to raise. I was born with a loose mouth and an animal heart. I lashed out at the world when the world cut through my thin hide. I winced at the slightest whiff of authority. If it was a question of fight or flight, I dug my heels into the earth and bared my teeth. I fought anyone who would fight me. I whipped any kind of object—hairbrush, juggling ball, butcher’s knife—at my brother’s head. I threw words like stones. I feared that I wasn’t the kind of daughter my parents would long for: a girl who was pretty, predictable and pleasant. I wandered beyond the fragmented range of girlhood. I chose the wild, and the wild imprinted upon me.

But my dad rarely reacted to my girl-boy-wolf snarl.

I have only one memory of his demeanour of calm transforming into anger. I can’t remember what I did to set him off, but one day he shook my shoulders and growled. I froze. I was too shocked to fight back. I packed up a bag with all of the necessities to run away from home: a pocketknife, peach and a few Archie comics. I fled on foot to the river and hid in the bushes, waiting. I bit into the peach, the juices ran, and my hands became gummy with dirt. Then I saw him through the bush. I hid like a feral cat. He walked by, unaware. His face was stony and solemn. He looked so worried, and I realized, studying his furrowed brow, that he loved me. I wanted to cry out, “I’m here, Dad!” But I turned myself into a girl-boy-ghost and said nothing.

One evening, my dad brought home an orphaned black bear cub. A hunter had accidentally shot the mother. The cub was headed for a zoo. A few kids from our neighbourhood gang came over and we all watched, wide-eyed and in wonder, at the bear cub, a black ball of fur, that tumbled around the concrete basement floor. The following week dad brought home three orphaned coyote pups that whined, woofed, played, pissed and shit everywhere. The neighbourhood kids were losing their minds. “Do you guys live in a zoo?” they asked, astonished.

Later that summer my dad received an urgent call from a neighbour. A lone moose calf had been separated from her mother by the river’s powerful current. We raced down to the river, where the calf was alone, pacing the water’s edge and bleating frantically for her mother. My dad and his colleague caught the tiny calf and tied her legs together. My dad wrapped his blue jacket around the calf’s head to shield her frightened eyes. The calf fell calm. They placed her in the back of a truck, drove across the bridge and down to the riverbank to reunite the calf with her mother.

For 40 years my dad worked as a wildlife biologist with the Government of Alberta.

In 1985, the year I was born, he was already flying over the boreal forest, counting caribou. His job survived the political reign of Ralph Klein, leader of the Progressive Conservative party, who made a mockery of environmental conservation. Klein made that clear as day when he jokingly referred to the cause of global warming as “dinosaur farts.” In those days, oil and gas were booming. Industrial development was moving like a freight train, particularly in northern Alberta, where they couldn’t suck the oil out of the ground fast enough. It was a dog-eat-dog world up north, another kind of Klondike gold rush for resources, which resulted in rapid forest loss. Rich men were made. The oil town of Fort McMurray boomed from 6,000 residents in 1971 to 34,000 by 1989. Alberta’s boreal forest was, without any political hesitation, open for business. But what would it have been like to be a scientist, or biologist, working to protect natural ecosystems in the province?

My dad would have witnessed the forest he loved being chopped up and sold off for logging, oil and gas and agricultural exploits. He was also counting fewer caribou. Even by the early 1990s, the science was clear. The loss of habitat in Alberta’s boreal—the crude carving up of forest—was taking a toll on caribou. They had nowhere to hide. The network of new cutlines and pathways through the forest favoured easier access for predators.

Caribou could no longer outrun the wolves.

The Government of Alberta muzzled scientists who spoke out about caribou. Biologists documented their dwindling numbers but lacked the power to speak and act. One biologist who wouldn’t keep his mouth shut suddenly lost his job. They fired him after he donated an old office typewriter to a non-profit organization. “Theft of government property,” they supposedly claimed. The government didn’t want to take action on woodland caribou. Doing so, of course, would have meant pulling back the reins on the pace of logging and oil and gas development.

I can remember how my dad’s uniform badges changed from “Fish and Wildlife” to “Sustainable Resources.” New name, new badge. As a child, I was aloof to the political significance behind all of the name changes. I didn’t yet understand the power of language. Now I know: When you fail to call something by its true name—wild life—you don’t have to respect it as a living entity. Instead you give the wild an inanimate name. Resources. A name that doesn’t breathe, or roam, or have “herd memory,” as my dad would say. A name that would grant us the moral licence to extract, exterminate and ignore the pulse of the forest.

“We’re just window dressing,” he said after a long day of hard meetings with government officials in which yet another expanse of Crown land had been sold off for development.

I saw the grave expression on his face. It seemed to say: We are losing. We are losing everything. I was beginning to realize that his job wasn’t about saving orphaned cubs and pups and moose calves, but rather, trying to convince politicians, companies and landowners that they should care about the boreal forest. Why caribou and biodiversity in the boreal mattered far beyond economic profit.

“Where there used to be forest, you can’t even find a chickadee,” he said angrily.

Our severed forests are scarred by cutblocks, well sites and roads. There are seismic lines, cutlines and power lines. There are pipelines and rail lines. These lines run parallel and diagonal. They are competing lines that intersect, fragment the bush and help predators track their prey with ease.

When wolves pack up for the hunt, they isolate out the calves. Even with caribou’s specially evolved hooves, wide as snowshoes, they can’t compete. Their numbers are flat-lining. We’ve designated woodland caribou, provincially and nationally, as a “threatened species” but not yet an endangered one. Such a name would mean that politicians would actually have to do something to save them from extinction. Without curbing the rate of deforestation, scientists say, we will lose caribou. They will become only a memory to us.

“Caribou are like canaries with antlers,” writes Lorne Fitch, an Albertan biologist, in an essay entitled “ ‘A Modest Proposal’ for Alberta’s Caribou.” They are “sentinels marking the changes brought about by the pace and expanding footprint of our economic aspirations.”

Research by the Alberta Biodiversity Monitoring Institute reports that Alberta has the highest rate of forest disturbance of any large Canadian province. Parts of Alberta, particularly in the northern foothills, are disappearing at rates that exceed deforestation in the Amazon rainforest. According to the United Nation’s Environment Programme, worldwide, upwards of 200 species of plant, insect, bird and mammal become extinct every 24 hours. Locally and globally we are on the brink of losing a wilderness of biodiversity.

The song of woodland caribou is a song for hundreds of thousands of other species.

Meanwhile, politicians continue to dodge responsibility. In March 2018 the Government of Alberta stalled caribou recovery efforts—specifically, the designation of a provincial park that would provide refuge for caribou herds in northwestern Alberta. They claimed that the federal government ought to foot the bill. The decision could go to court, which would become a lengthy process. Time that woodland caribou no longer have.

“On my darkest days,” my dad said recently. “I just don’t feel hopeful.”

Woodland caribou herds are small, fragmented and forever in flux. My dad once told me that they follow ancestral routes and patterns on the land, relying on herd memory, instinct passed down from grandparents to offspring to their offspring, and so forth. During early summer in the boreal, female caribou break away to give birth beneath the cover of black spruce. They drop calves and hide from predators. They raise their calves as discreetly as possible until the gangly legged calves are strong enough to flee from wolves. Their very survival depends on dense, old-growth forest. Caribou teach their young how to return to the same vanishing places where they were born.

Am I so different?

The magnetic pull north to the boreal is beyond my control. It’s become a longing so deep in my bones that I’ve dropped everything to surrender to the black spruce of my childhood. In recent years, I’ve returned to northern Alberta, where being on the land makes me feel at home, where the memory of who I am—a girl-boy-turned-woman—beats the strongest, and where I am compelled to speak out for sacred places and beings without a voice.

When I flew over the forest with my dad and witnessed the flight of the caribou, I felt something we don’t have an adequate word to describe: a blend of beauty, tragedy and, perhaps, anticipatory grief. I’ll never forget how the caribou sprinted across the frozen lake, weaving tracks in and out of one another, their lines undulating like a horse’s tail. Nature knows no straight lines, I thought to myself. From above, I tried to make sense of their message in the snow.

We belong here, they wrote.

Recently my dad retired after 40 years of counting caribou in northwestern Alberta.

These days, I overhear him counting aloud to my niece, Brielle, his apple-cheeked granddaughter, who can’t yet walk. I watch him playing with her, kneeling on the floor and bringing himself down to her level. Brielle wiggles her larva body overtop his outstretched legs.

“You have to do ‘floor time’ with her,” he explains, “If you want to really connect with her.”

The sight of my dad observing, so carefully, his granddaughter’s nature makes me realize: He never raised me like a son, nor did he raise me like a daughter. My dad raised me according to my own nature, the wild parts of me that are ungendered. Tough and capable. Tender and vulnerable.

He gave me the land and space I needed to grow. He let me roam and range far beyond the boundaries of girlhood. He showed me how to feel at home on the land and draw meaning from the wild marrow from the bone, but never to take more than I needed.

My dad taught me to listen in a way that is being forgotten today. He showed me how to make myself very still, hold my ear up to the forest and listen for the pulse.

Trina Moyles is a Peace River-based writer and fire-tower lookout. “Herd Memory” won the 2019 Jon Whyte Memorial Essay Award.

The post Herd Memory appeared first on Alberta Views.

Wild boar populations have now expanded well beyond the counties Gilbertson worked in. Alberta officials receive reports “all the way from north of Peace River to Vermilion and all points in between,” says Perry Abramenko, an inspector at Alberta Agriculture and Rural Development and the lead on wild boar management for the province. Boars have spread across all counties between Grande Prairie and Lesser Slave River, and have been sighted in watersheds abutting Banff and Jasper national parks. They have been found in most counties between Edmonton and Calgary, and several counties near the Saskatchewan boundary, including the Cypress area, where some find refuge in coulees. While their exact numbers aren’t known, the range of wild boar has grown exponentially over the past three decades, due in part to a sow’s year-round, rapid-fire reproduction rate of up to 12 piglets (two litters of six) per year. This perpetual population explosion brings with it an ever-increasing risk that wild boar will harbour a multitude of diseases, in addition to wreaking havoc on sensitive ecosystems, species at risk and entire forest communities. It’s why, under Alberta law, wild boar outside the confines of farms are designated as “pests,” says Abramenko. “It’s the same designation we give Norway rats.”

The Government of Alberta aims to eradicate wild boar and is currently piloting a program to that end. If the effort doesn’t succeed, Alberta may suffer the same ecological destruction and economic fate as many countries across the globe.

Few people know the high stakes associated with a wild boar population better than Dale Nolte. Based in Fort Collins, Colorado, Nolte is the manager of the national feral swine damage management program as part of the United States Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service. Through his program, Nolte manages everything from public education about wild boar to operational removals of large sounders. He estimates at least six million feral swine live in the US, mostly in the southern states (e.g., Texas and Florida) and California.

“Feral swine tear up habitats,” he says. They are the worst kind of ecosystem engineers—rooting, wallowing and trampling their way through forests and marshes. They contaminate soil and water, mow down native vegetation and make way for invasive plants. In the US their presence has been linked to the decline of nearly 300 native plants and animals—250 of which are species at risk. And they are doing it in multiple habitats. Before they were removed from Keewaydin Island in Florida, wild boar in some years dug up and ate every single one of the eggs laid by endangered green sea turtles. Farther north, in prairie states, they continue to eat the eggs and chicks of ground-nesting lesser prairie chickens. They’ve trashed the delicate wetland habitat of the Hine’s emerald dragonfly and trampled the tallgrass prairie and glade habitat that Mead’s milkweed depends on. “The are having a tremendous impact on efforts to recover endangered species,” says Nolte.

Free to breed like mad and roam their surroundings, bands of boar bust into feed stores and plunder crops.

It’s no different in Alberta. The swine have already begun to wreak havoc on sensitive prairie ecosystems, says wild boar researcher Ryan Brook at the University of Saskatchewan. “They love wetlands—the vegetation, eggs, nesting waterfowl, goslings, ducklings, frogs and salamanders. Everything wetland is right down the hatch.”

That’s a concern in the “Prairie Pothole” region—a series of wetlands across western and southern Alberta “that are important breeding areas for waterfowl,” says Ruth Aschim, a doctoral student with Brook who did some of her research on the local wild boar population. The pothole region is home to 600 species of plants and animals, more than 50 of which are at risk, and some of the wetlands are located in current Alberta boar habitat—what Aschim calls the fringe between aspen forest and agriculture, especially in the counties of Barrhead and Lac Ste. Anne. Here the boar have the protection of the forest but can emerge to hit up wetlands and crops, often under the cover of darkness.

Crop damage and other agriculture losses from wild boar are significant. Abramenko says a producer in Lac Ste. Anne County had to reseed a third of his oat crop because of wild boar damage. And while claims have just begun to come in across Canada, Nolte says agricultural losses to wild boar cost the US at least $1-billion in damages every year. Exact numbers are hard to calculate because of the many ways wild boar can cause damage and affect profit. Nolte points to a case where, over a 90-day period, wild boar inhaled $1,250 worth of one Texas producer’s cattle feed. “You don’t want to lose that [money], but a big feedlot can withstand it,” says Nolte. But further investigation revealed the losses were much higher. Not only were the pigs eating the cattle’s feed, but they were harassing the cattle and aggressively blocking their access to the feeders. The producer had kept careful records of cattle weight gain before and after the boar raids began. Before the boar, cattle were gaining an average of two pounds per day, but in the presence of boar, only one pound daily. In the end, the producer lost an estimated $27,000 in pounds of beef over the 90 days. Abramenko suspects livestock harassment is happening in Alberta as well—but because many boar are active only at night, farmers may not know about it.

In addition to agricultural losses, wild boar cost the US another $1-billion in damages across numerous other sectors. They destroy infrastructure, including levees for flood control, says Nolte. Claims have come in for landscaping around homes, parks and golf courses. There are costs associated with the protection and recovery of wildlife. Insurance agencies are estimated to annually pay out US$36-million in property damage and personal injury claims related to wild boar.

Another massive cost could come from the spread of diseases and parasites to domestic pigs. Though boar are hairy and have longer snouts, they are essentially the same species, in the way huskies are the same species as poodles. Diseases and parasites can move easily between them. Fences have done little to prevent wild boar from getting into domestic pig pens, says Brook, who’s snapped photos of them doing just that in Saskatchewan. Andrew Heck of the Alberta Pork Council says one of their biggest concerns is the potential for wild boar to spread African swine fever (ASF), a highly contagious virus that causes high fevers, damages the vascular system and kills large numbers of infected animals. There is no cure. The World Organisation for Animal Health is sounding alarm bells as ASF spreads seemingly unimpeded through Russia, the Caucasus and now China. It has not yet been detected in Canada or the US, but is a reportable disease in both.

The Pork Council is also concerned about porcine epidemic diarrhea (PED), another viral disease of pigs that causes watery stools and vomiting. It sometimes kills piglets. Though it’s been in Canada since 2014, PED showed up in Alberta for the first time this year—there have been four documented cases since March 18, though one was later deemed a “false positive.” “Wild boar could spread it if they were to come in contact with the disease anywhere in the province and then move it from one site to another,” says Heck.

While a PED outbreak would potentially be costly, most pork farmers could recover, Heck says. “But ASF would devastate the industry.”

Nolte too has his eye on ASF, as well as a number of other diseases that pose a threat to agriculture and also to hunters who handle wild boar. For example, US feral swine carry the bacteria that cause brucellosis, a reportable disease in North America, which can cause abortions in pigs and flu-like symptoms in humans. Brucellosis and other diseases of similar concern are well managed by the agriculture industry. In contrast, feral swine are free ranging and have unique opportunities for contact with people, wildlife, livestock and their habitats. As their populations continue to balloon, so do opportunities for infection.

For all of these reasons, The Alberta government is taking a number of actions to beat back wild boar populations. They’ve recently implemented minimum containment standards for boar farms. Owners are required to install either a single fence that is partially buried in the ground, or a double fence. Both need to be 1.5 metres high and include an electrified wire that packs a 4,000 volt punch. “Pigs have wet snouts. It’s quite effective,” says Abramenko, adding, “They’re smart enough to learn after the first shock.”

While working on minimizing escapes, the province is also piloting a number of projects to aid in eradication. They are learning from past endeavours. Early attempts to manage the population through a hunting bounty from 2003 to 2014—$50 per set of ears—did not appear to slow their spread, according to Brook’s and Aschim’s research. In fact, across the continent, hunting in general has done little to beat back boar populations, and often exacerbates the problem. “When people go out and shoot only one or two out of a sounder, then [the surviving boars] disperse into new territories, become nocturnal and become very wary of humans,” says Abramenko. “It makes it almost impossible to eradicate them.”

“You need to be doing what we call whole-sounder-removal,” says Brook. “You find 12 animals, you kill 12 animals.” Abramenko is on board and is currently testing a number of techniques to bait whole sounders into electrified traps. It’s not as easy as it seems—wild boar are incredibly smart, and wary of new structures and smells. It can take days for them to accept the traps and move freely in and out, particularly as a group. The traps are equipped with cameras that Abramenko can monitor from his phone, along with remotely controlled gates he can shut as soon as the whole sounder is inside. Once captured the boar are humanely euthanized and taken to post-mortem labs for necropsies and disease testing.

Abramenko is also testing the use of camera-equipped, remotely piloted aircraft (RPAs), or drones, to more easily track boar, especially in the winter. One of the RPAs has an infrared camera that can detect boar travelling through vegetation. Ultimately this will help the team find boar more quickly when a formal operational management program is established. Abramenko says this will happen in a year’s time, after one more year of piloting the program “to get more experience.”

One of the barriers to eradication will be to get wild boar hunters to support the effort. “They’re fun  to hunt,” says Nolte. “I get why people want to do it.” Swine can also be quite tasty, adds Gilbertson. But there are downsides for hunters, too, especially if they also enjoy hunting other game. In the areas Gilbertson likes to hunt in Alberta that also have wild boar, he says, “there is no question a lot fewer white tail deer are using those areas.” Nolte has observed the same thing in the US, where he says feral swine have been “totally destructive” to other game species such as deer and wild poultry.

The Alberta Fish and Game Association, an organization that “advocates the common interests of ethical hunters,” says it will support any decision the government makes about wild boar.

Wild boar are essentially the same species as domestic pigs. Diseases and parasites can move easily between them.

Still, “there are people that don’t want erad-ication—they enjoy hunting boars too much,” says Abramenko. If the information he’s collected in the pilot program supports it, hunting restrictions may be part of the suite of actions he recommends next year for inclusion in a provincial wild boar management plan. For Brooks, the way forward is clear: “The reality is you can’t have a meaningful conversation about eradication if you have sport hunting.” 

Regardless, the sooner a management program is formalized, the better, says Nolte. “The advice I would give is to put a plan together and start taking care of a problem in its infancy. Don’t wait until you have a major issue to address. I just can’t believe feral swine won’t do quite well in Alberta. Populations [will] continue to increase.”

Jasper-based Niki Wilson writes mainly on science. Comment on this story: letters@albertaviews.ca

The post Boar War appeared first on Alberta Views.

Their NFB film Being Caribou earned acclaim at the Calgary International Film Festival, the Vancouver Film Festival and the Wild and Scenic Film Festival in Nevada, introducing this important issue to hundreds of filmgoers. In September 2004, Jennifer Esser, managing editor of Wild Earth, a magazine published by the Wildlands Project, interviewed Heuer about the journey, the film and the fight to save the Porcupine caribou herd.

JENNIFER ESSER: For five months you migrated on foot with the Porcupine caribou herd. What inspired you to make this trip?

KARSTEN HEUER: I had a three-season assignment as a park warden in the extreme northwest corner of the Yukon, in Ivvavik, a national park established to protect the Canadian portion of the Porcupine caribou herd’s calving grounds. The Porcupine caribou herd—about 123,000 animals—is the same herd that uses the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska for their calving grounds. Ivvavik borders the Arctic Refuge.

As I was experiencing this caribou herd coming through every spring on the way to the Arctic Refuge and coming back every summer as they returned from their calving grounds, there was always a curiosity in my mind: where exactly were they going What were they doing When they migrate through, they’re coming through for days. And it’s not just the caribou; there’s a stream of life that’s coming along with them, whether it’s golden eagles or jaegers looking for calves to pick off—or the grizzly bears ambushing them in the willows along the rivers—or wolves and foxes trying to isolate individual animals as prey. I couldn’t sleep when they came past: there’s 24-hour daylight and the dramas are happening constantly. When they finally disappear over the ridge, it’s pretty hard. The landscape that was full is suddenly silent, and you miss it.

I felt a yearning to keep going with them, which translated into a lot of research about the caribou. I learned more about the potential oil and gas development in the Arctic Refuge that could threaten their calving grounds. What bothered me about all the stories, documentaries and articles was that none of them addressed what these caribou go through during their migration to the calving grounds and their return to the wintering grounds. The story of the caribou hadn’t been told.

So my wife, Leanne, and I (she had experience with migration as well while she was working on a film project) started hatching this crazy idea to try to migrate with the herd, to try to be caribou. We decided to try to bring the landscape alive, telling a story through the eyes and ears and movements of an animal. Our intent was to move with the caribou herd for anywhere between four and seven months as they migrated and to try to become part of the herd. Because caribou don’t migrate along the same routes every year and don’t depart or arrive at the same times each year, we couldn’t really plan our route. We couldn’t plan food caches, since we didn’t even know how long we’d be out there.

That was a really tough thing to get our minds around—to let go of the very human approach of having goals and objectives and a plan.

Besides letting go and just following the caribou, what were some of the other challenges you faced?

Initially we were overwhelmed with all the unknowns, and our lack of experience in subarctic environments. We have quite a bit of experience in mountains below treeline in more temperate regions, but here we were going into one of the remotest places on Earth, having to put our complete faith in the caribou. As we slowly surrendered to the caribou, some wonderful things started to happen.

When we got to the calving grounds we had an incredible experience where animals were giving birth outside of our tent. We couldn’t move. They had become so skittish during that time that we couldn’t even get out to go the bathroom. So we’d go to the bathroom in our cups. We would have to wait until the animals had moved off a little bit and crawl on our bellies to the river to get water for the next two days and then crawl on our bellies back, and talk in whispers. For 10 days we couldn’t get out of our tent. They are extremely sensitive as they’re having their calves, and protective of their newborns when the calves aren’t that mobile. We saw golden eagles come in and try to get some calves. Grizzly bears came in and caused complete havoc.

We followed the caribou as they left and got into the bug season. We were moving so fast, among a huge rush of animals, that we were sleep deprived, traveling all hours of the day and night. We’d nap for an hour or two, walk for five or six, nap for an hour or two. Our whole sense of time got messed up. We didn’t know what day it was or what time of day it was because of the 24-hour daylight. We were constantly surrounded by caribou or behind caribou or on their fresh trails. They’re shedding their winter coats at that time, so we had hair in our food, hair in our sleeping bags, caribou hair everywhere, like you get sand everywhere when you’re at the beach.

And we were hungry. By that time we were two and a half months into the trip, and we couldn’t possibly carry enough food to replace the calories we were burning. Between this perpetual state of hunger and the sleep deprivation, we were quite dizzy, and it was almost like we were entering into a different state—much like a shaman might go on a fast and work himself into a trance.

We would lose the caribou once in awhile and, initially, we would to try to find them using an analytical method—visual tracking, looking for signs such as tracks and droppings on the tundra, and sometimes calling up on our satellite phone to other biologists, trying to determine where the few satellite-collared animals were. But as the trip progressed and we got into this unique state of consciousness, we started to plug into different signs and signals and we started to have vivid dreams and visions—of where we would find caribou next when we’d lost them. We started following those dreams and visions. We would tell them to each other before we headed out and then exact scenes that we had described to each other would play out.

There was also a vibration in the landscape, and it wasn’t from the hooves; it was more like a singing through the landscape. You felt it more than you heard it. We would hear it when the caribou were in large groups. It was subtle at first, but as the layers of our lives dropped away, our senses were sharpened. We started to tune in to this sound—which I call thrumming—and that began to inform our decisions about where we went when we had lost the caribou, and we would find them. It was a really magical development in the trip.

In the span of five months, these two white people from the city of Calgary, which is where we both grew up, had another dimension opened up to them. Our experience matches the description Gwich’in people talk about, a distant time when people could talk to caribou and caribou could talk to people. And we felt that—it was unbelievable. How do you come back from a trip like that and go to Washington, D.C.—which is what we did—and communicate that to Representatives and Senators and their aides How do you explain what’s at stake I think that’s what we’re really struggling with even now in trying to capture our caribou experiences in a film and in another book.

I imagine that experience permanently changed your view of the world.

It’s like Leanne and I are strangers in our old lives. Even the people that are closest to us, our parents, don’t really understand that we’re not the same people anymore. This other possibility opened up to us—and then we came back and felt it close again behind us. As we got inundated with all the advertising and everything else that fills the human world, we felt the barriers go up again, and of course we were cut off from that other world. The dreams and the visions and the thrumming stopped, and a big loneliness and depression came in to fill that space.

I think we experienced in a shortened period of time what many Native cultures have experienced over the last many decades—it’s a ripping from between worlds. Now Leanne and I are faced with the quandary of how we bridge back and forth—how do we exist in both?

Did you try to observe ecological patterns such as herding behaviour, and to understand the thrumming from a scientific perspective?

Certainly. You can envision the herd as different groups of hundreds and sometimes thousands of animals. At the calving grounds is really the only time when the whole herd—123,000 animals—is together. The rest of the time they’re split up into a few groups, but those groups co-ordinate their movements. Despite being hundreds of miles apart, all groups will shift and head south at the same time. There is a huge level of co-ordination. There’s some level of communication going on that we don’t understand, some communication that’s able to transcend those distances. I think the thrumming is an infrasonic wavelength, just on the edge of human hearing, which is also what elephants use to communicate over long distances.

There’s a story that biologists and First Nations people tell about how four bulls that were marked in this huge caribou herd came together in different places. It wasn’t always the same place, but it was always these same four bulls that came together at around the same time of year from hundreds of miles away from each other. There’s no explanation for that. There’s also no information about caribou communication in the literature, which is incredibly exciting to me as a scientist. I think some of the greatest discoveries in science are really mystical as well. They not only bring to light new facts about animals, but new dimensions about the world, and open up a new breadth of possibility. I talked about this thrumming to some caribou biologists and they were really excited, but I don’t feel the need to know the mechanics of how it works; it does work.

Migration might be understood not simply as a movement of animals, but as a flow of natural process. Can you tell us more about this river—not just of caribou, but of life?

When that caribou herd moves across that landscape, it’s towing an entire ecosystem with it. That’s what this idea of connectivity is getting at—allowing animals the freedom to continue to move, allowing ecosystems to be dynamic. There are all the obvious things that move with the caribou—the wolves and foxes and grizzly bears and birds—but there are things we don’t see, as well. For example, all the bugs that go along with them once the bug season starts. The caribou movement is dispersing these bugs across the landscape, and the bugs are feeding the hundreds of species of birds that are nesting on the tundra. The caribou are eating in one place and defecating in another, so there’s seed dispersal going on, and redistribution of nutrients.

When you start thinking about the services that 123,000 animals constantly on the move are doing, it’s overwhelming. The ecology is very complex, and the problem is to try to communicate all this to elected representatives in a way that their eyes don’t glaze over. What Leanne and I have discovered is that storytelling is an ancient human tradition and it’s part of our genetic makeup. What we’re trying to do is distill some of the wonder and this overwhelming complexity into relatively simple and inspiring stories to try to reignite awe about the natural world.

Are you working right now to try to influence policy-makers directly, and are you trying to educate the general public as well?

We have tried to lobby in the conventional sense—put on your suit, polish your shoes and walk the halls of Congress and Capitol Hill in D.C. and Ottawa and provincial legislatures in Canada—but you go into those meetings and the person has just had the American Automakers lobby there and you’re the next meeting and you’ve got five or ten minutes to communicate your point. Leanne and I have come to the conclusion that that’s not our strength. Our role is to inspire the masses and try to bring these stories to the bottom of the political process, if you will. We try to motivate and mobilize that constituency.

Is that what you’re trying to do with the projects you’re now working on—a film and a book, as well as ongoing speaking engagements?

On the calving grounds, Leanne and I had this terrible feeling we just shouldn’t be there, that it wasn’t right and we would never go back. The only way we could justify being there was by staying in our tent and by having a firm commitment to bring this story to a lot of people and to make a difference for caribou. We feel a huge responsibility to share our insights. The truth—which sounds kind of romantic and naïve—is that my heart is telling me to find a way to explore further what we felt with the caribou and the thrumming and the visions. But that wouldn’t mean we’d go back to the calving grounds.

I believe that that other dimension—whether it’s what the Koyukon Indians in the Yukon call distant time or the aborigines of Australia call the dream time—exists. My desire is to access it more deeply and to learn from it, but that’s selfish and meanwhile it’s at risk. We scientists talk in terms of minimum viable populations and connectivity and these relatively formal terms, but there is so much mystery. Now we have to try to communicate that it exists. We’re certainly not the first people to do this, but we might be able to help to bridge some distance between worlds—a mental distance. These are long journeys on the ground, but really they’re journeys from the head down to the heart. Our role is to try to help people along those journeys for themselves. 

Did you see evidence of oil and gas development, or was the territory relatively pristine Were there any barriers across the caribou’s migratory path?

We saw a bit of evidence of past oil and gas development: some old tracks on the tundra from seismic exploration, and a couple places where fuel barrels and firing wires and other debris from oil exploration was left. But overall you can probably count on your fingers how many times we encountered those things. We were in a huge, wild area—you can probably count the number of such places that still exist in the world on your fingers as well.

There were no trails, no roads, and apart from a couple of cabins and a ranger station, no human structures. Yet there’s all this history on the land: we’re following the caribou across these mountain hillsides and passes where there are trails carved into scree, rock and the earth that are like trenches. There’s caribou dung in layers and some of it’s covered in lichen.

Archeologists have identified some of the crossings that the caribou use today as the same river crossings used by caribou and native people to hunt the caribou as long as 23,000 years ago. So, what Leanne and I experienced was this very short segment of a huge circle of life that’s been going on for thousands of years. To describe it in numbers, to compare that kind of history to a six-month supply of oil for the U.S.—the highest estimate of oil and gas that could be under the ground in their calving grounds—it’s just a ridiculous decision in our minds. 

We know the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge is at risk. What about  other areas the caribou use—are those mostly protected areas?

A lot of the caribou herd’s territory is protected. Ivvavik National Park and Vuntut National Park in Canada are directly adjacent to each other and adjacent to the Arctic Refuge. All of it is wilderness except for the million and a half acres in the calving grounds. There are some other agreements in place for much of the rest of their migration route. While it’s not the only one, the Arctic Refuge really is the biggest missing piece in the puzzle. We’re not very far from having achieved something really special here and it hasn’t come easy so far: Adolph Murie, Margaret Murie, Bob Marshall worked hard for the establishment of the Arctic Refuge. The intent wasn’t to have oil and gas development in the middle of it, in one of its most sensitive areas. This work has been going on for over eight decades and we really need to finish the job.

Are you hopeful that the refuge will be protected Do you think it’s a likely outcome?

It’s a necessary outcome. When I talk to people and get feedback after lectures and after pieces have aired on television about the trip, my sentiment is that the majority of people feel the same. So if development happens on the refuge, it will be a huge tragedy, not only for the caribou and for everything else that depends on that area, but also for democracy—because if it happens then democracy doesn’t work.

The post Being Caribou appeared first on Alberta Views.

My work focuses on conflict, but the goal is human-wildlife co-existence. Tremendous work has been done to mitigate conflict: installing fencing and under- and overpasses, removing wildlife attractants from communities (e.g., bearproof garbages, removal of fruit trees), education (e.g., WildSmart) and restoring habitat. Digital photography and social media, however, have contributed to poor behaviour, such as selfies with animals. The narrative changes from appreciation for the presence and existence of that animal to being about the person—with the animala commodity for that social media post. —Dan Rafla

The post Conflict Between Humans and Wildlife appeared first on Alberta Views.

“Just tell me that you don’t have a halibut jig tied to the tail wheel this time.”

“What’s he talking about?” Myrna demanded.

“Ha!” laughed Charlie. “He’ll tell you later.”

Charlie Russell died on May 7 in Calgary due to complications following a five-hour surgical procedure. Charlie used up his nine lives long ago, but his death at 76 was still shocking to those who knew him well. Few people have lived as intensely as this man, or as dangerously. He has flown in some of the worst conditions on earth and walked or crawled (with a broken back one time) away from both a hang-glider and an ultra-light crash, and over time he prevailed in a number of forced landings. He is, he was, internationally famous for the ground-breaking work he and the artist Maureen Enns did at Kambalnoye Lake, Kamchatka, in Russia, living in close proximity with brown bears and raising orphaned cubs which not only survived the wilds but eventually reproduced. A mentor to many naturalists, his experiments in “exploring the possibilities of trust” challenged the prevalent orthodoxy of his day, which held that bears that have no fear of humans are always extremely dangerous, and that all bears are unpredictable and therefore always a threat to humans. Yet he was wise enough to know that what he learned working with those wild bears in BC and Kamchatka, in true wilderness settings, should not be applied by the layman to human-influenced bears in our southern national parks.

Charlie was raised in bear country and learned all the skills of mountain bush craft and horsemanship guiding hunters on his father’s pack-train. In 1960 Charlie and his brother Dick roughed it through Canada and Alaska to help Andy Russell make his groundbreaking film Grizzly Country. After studying photography in New York, and a stint living in New Zealand with his first wife, Margaret, Charlie took up ranching at Hawk’s Nest, his family home. But his heart wasn’t in it and he spent a lot of his time working on conservation projects, such as the Waterton Biosphere Reserve initiative. Many bears were dying at the hands of ranchers and hunters in southwest Alberta at that time. This bear of a man, Russell, was angered by the carnage, for as he often growled, “Anything that hurts the bears, hurts me.” He became the first Canadian rancher to deliberately move cattle carcasses to safe places on his ranch near the park boundary, so that bears could feed on them without being shot.

Eventually Charlie gave up on ranching, and in the 1990s he took a job guiding tourists on grizzly-bear-watching tours in the Khutzeymateen inlet of BC. Charlie’s superb talent at reading ursine body language, and his sensitive, ego-free approach to all wildlife, allowed for close encounters of the ursine kind. Myrna and I are two of the many people that have sat with him on a big driftwood log at the water’s edge as a female grizzly grazed on sedges at our feet, unafraid of us, and offering no threat to us. As a former park warden, I helped to capture many bears, but I never felt as reassured around them as I felt in Charlie’s company. His skill as a bear guide led to an offer in 1991 to work with filmmakers Jeff and Sue Turner of Princeton, BC. With Charlie’s help, they shot a famous BBC documentary on the Kermode “Spirit Bears” of Princess Royal Island. Charlie worked on documentaries, wrote books, collaborated with conservation groups and biologists and helped shape public opinion to push for a grizzly sanctuary in both the Khutzeymateen and Kamchatka and a protected area for Kermode bears on Princess Royal Island.

In 1993 the Turners’ plan called for Charlie to provide and pilot an ultralight plane, capable of water landings, to be used as an aerial camera platform. Charlie and his late son Anthony Russell began building the plane at Hawk’s Nest—all over Hawk’s Nest, since he didn’t have a big enough barn for the project. Every building on the place had a piece of the plane in it and Charlie was getting increasingly frantic to get the thing riveted together as a deadline for departure for the island loomed. On a snowy March day, I joined filmmaker Jeff Turner to help Charlie with some last-minute detailing. We worked all day; darkness found us riveting the cockpit canopy carefully onto thin steel tubing. I suddenly stubbed my toe on a snow-covered object. “Shit! What’s this thing, Charlie?” Charlie peered down at it for a second, distracted, bent down and swept the snow off it with his boot. “It’s just the in-flight computer.”

“Oh, is that all it is Wow. I thought I had stepped on something important.”

I worried about that computer later that spring, when Canadian Geographic commissioned me to write a feature article on the Kermode bears with Charlie to supply the photos. As a result I spent about four weeks that summer and fall on the island, hosted by the Turners at their camp. One did not just swan around taking notes with the hard-working Turners, and I soon found myself humping camera gear through the rainforest with Charlie. The white bears were living up to their reputation as ghosts of the rainforest, staying out of sight and waiting for the coho to run. Charlie had already befriended both black and white bears he encountered in the bush, and could identify individuals by size, shape and colouration. One day, we were sitting on a log taking a break while a black bear fished in a desultory manner nearby. The rains, and the main run of salmon that rain would trigger, had not yet begun. Charlie grinned at me, ran his fingers through his thick black hair, then leaned over in a bear-like manner and stirred the water with a calloused paw, peering  intently into the stream. The black bear splashed over and took up a position next to him almost touching his shoulder. I froze, too startled to get my little Balda camera out of my pack. The bear peered intently into the water, and then, realizing there was no fish in sight, backed away slowly, giving Charlie a sidelong glance. His body language said, “Dude—that is not funny.”

We were working one day in a creekbed, picking our way among slimy boulders and fish guts, stringing up a thousand feet of climbing rope between fir trees for an overhead camera sequence. Charlie pointed out a giant flat topped boulder in midstream. “I was playing with a bear on that rock one day, and things got out of hand.”

“Playing?”

“Yeah. I was up there taking a break, and he came down the bank, spotted me, and came up to visit.”

“To visit?”

“Yeah. I’ve come to know him pretty well. I could tell he was feeling playful. He was really inviting me to wrestle. I wasn’t sure if I should, but he was so friendly. Anyway, he stood up. He had a really mischievous gleam in his eye, and I thought what the heck. So I got ready to grapple with him. God, they are so strong! He just knocked me right over. I landed on those boulders.”

“Jesus Christ!”

“Yeah. I could tell he was surprised. I looked up, and he was peering down at me. I think it really puzzled him, how weak humans are. He didn’t mean to hurt me. I was really banged up for a while there.”

“Jesus H. Christ on a crutch. You were playing King-of-the-Castle with a bear?”

“Yeah. I think I went a bit too far that time,” he added, sheepishly.

Those who know Charlie’s books might say he should have known better. He had wrestled with a bear before, in Waterton Park in the ’80s when he and his son, Anthony, then age 11, wandered in between a black bear sow and her cubs. The little sow attacked, and Charlie and Anthony were soon in a tag team bout with her. She knocked Anthony down and Charlie went after her with fists and boots. When she got on top of Charlie, Anthony, armed with a piece of elk antler he had found earlier, whacked her over the head. She then bit Anthony on the behind, and Charlie again attacked until the sow finally retreated. The sow was fine, and the humans escaped with bruises and puncture wounds, but Charlie always said that Anthony had saved his life that day.

As a former park warden I helped capture many bears, but I never felt as reassured around them as I felt in Charlie’s company.

But about that halibut jig. We were sitting in the cook tent over coffee one morning with Sue, Jeff and their daughter Chelsea, when Charlie popped the question I had been dreading. “Will you fly with me?”

Charlie knew I hated flying. I nearly choked on the coffee, set the cup down. “I’d be happy to,” I lied.

The two us, both heavyweights, climbed into the little plane and strapped in, while Jeff Turner pushed us away from the pier. We had a windscreen in front of us, but were otherwise open to the weather. The motor sits behind the passengers on this craft. There was no intercom, so once the motor started conversation was by sign language. We taxied down the inlet and I could see why it was going to be hard to keep this plane aloft just by force of my willpower alone, since there were no armrests to grip in white-knuckled fear while will-powering. Charlie punched me in the shoulder, a big grin on his face, and opened the throttle as we raced down the inlet. This is a short takeoff plane, but our run seemed to go on forever, and we did not lift off the water. Frowning, he slowed down and we taxied back to try it again. I can’t recall how many times we attempted take-off; it seemed like 10 but was probably only three. At last we returned to the pier, the motor idling. “Well, I guess it’s just not in the cards today,” I said, happily.

“No problem,” said Charlie. “I know what we need. Just stay in the plane while I get it.”

He hurried up the beach to camp, and soon returned with his fishing tackle box in one paw. As I watched, puzzled, he pulled out a lead halibut jig with its attached hook, and tied it to the tail-wheel with some fishing line. “We’ve got it now,” he said with a happy grin as he settled back behind the controls.

“We’ve got it Are we trolling for halibut now?” I asked, mystified.

“Ha! We’re going to catch some air.”

Once more we hurtled down the inlet, two porkers making the ultralight nose heavy. But this time, the halibut jig was just enough tail weight (at 17.6 ounces) to pull the tail down allowing the wings to catch some lift. And we flew around and around up above Princess Royal Island and Laredo Inlet looking for white Kermodes, and scared the hell out of some tourists in a yacht in an 80-mph swoop. And except one time when I took a ride in a sailplane, I felt about as close to being an eagle, and like an eagle, oblivious to fear, as I have ever been.

In Kamchatka Charlie learned how to find a hole in the fog and spiral his plane up into the clear sky. He made many personal sacrifices in choosing to devote his life to finding a way through the foggy notions people have about bears and our relationship to nature. The best way to honour Charlie is to make some new holes in the fog of misunderstanding that keeps people from living at peace with nature, and therefore with ourselves.

This article was originally published in The Tyee, June 1, 2018. Sid Marty is a writer and long-time resident of southern Alberta. He has published five books of non-fiction and three of poetry. His Leaning on the Wind: Under the Spell of the Great Chinook and The Black Grizzly of Whiskey Creek were finalists for Governor General’s Awards.

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