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.

They were seeing a doomed species. Deliberately and wastefully slaughtered by a newcomer people, within barely two decades North America’s great bison herds—once totalling more than 30 million—were all but gone. Only empty grasslands and bleached bones remained.

Annual Métis bison hunts, in Brown’s day, sometimes filled more than a thousand Red River carts with bison meat. Those hunts had ended by 1880 for lack of bison. The US Army had overseen the killing of millions of the great beasts; desperate Indigenous people and wasteful colonizers had hunted down the scattered survivors. By 1889 barely 1,200 North American plains bison remained.

Although a few hundred wood bison survived in the far north, the continent’s largest land mammal was gone from the plains, foothills and mountains of what would become the province of Alberta. Soon even the bleached skulls and bones vanished, gathered up by settlers and sold for fertilizer.

To the Indigenous people of this place, the empty plains and forests were a silent horror. Their cultures, languages, spiritual traditions and livelihood were all, to varying degrees, tied up in those massive beasts. Losing the bison was like having their very souls torn out. But Canada’s first prime minister, John A. Macdonald, thought it a very good thing. “I am not at all sorry,” he said to Canada’s House of Commons in faraway Ottawa. “So long as there was a hope that bison would come into the country, there was no means of inducing the Indians to settle down on their reserves.”

Alberta became a province at a time when wild nature was considered a godless waste awaiting the plows of immigrant farmers to bring it to its God-intended use. Alberta’s natural ecosystems were simply raw material for future commerce. The people whose identity resided in the land and its bison were in the way.

With the bison gone, those people retreated to Indian reserves to live as paupers. Bison range got turned upside down and planted to wheat. Much of it was fenced and filled with domestic cattle. When hungry wolves and bears had to shift from wild prey to domestic meat too, the newcomers put out strychnine baits. Ravens and eagles fed at the poison baits and the skies grew emptier. Insects and amphibians that had lived in bison wallows and dung became rare; some, like the Rocky Mountain locust, went extinct. The prairie wind hissed with the hollow lament of ghosts.

Everything had changed. Now, however, the bison are coming back. Everything may be about to change again.

In Alberta, unlike other provinces and territories, wild bison can’t officially exist.

It could be argued that bison have been back for a while. Starting with a small herd that the Canadian government bought from Montana rancher Michel Pablo and installed between 1907 and 1912 in Elk Island National Park and just south of Wainwright, the number of fenced-in bison in Alberta grew steadily through the 20th century. The Wainwright Buffalo Park was closed in 1939 but Elk Island has since become the world’s most important bison conservation facility. Commercial herds have also grown to feed a growing demand among consumers for high-quality meat. Many of Canada’s more than 120,000 captive bison are now raised on Alberta ranches.

But as Lethbridge-area bison rancher Cody Spencer points out, commercial bison contribute little to either ecosystem health or Indigenous cultural renewal; they are simply livestock. Spencer feels there is both room and a real need in Alberta for wild bison too. Alberta’s regulatory regime, unfortunately, doesn’t allow that. With the exception of two small herds—one in the Hay–Zama Lakes region on the Northwest Territories boundary and another south of Wood Buffalo National Park—bison are conspicuously absent from the province’s wildlife regulations and its formal listings of species at risk. In Alberta, unlike other provinces and territories, wild bison can’t officially exist.

Colin Kure would like that situation to continue. Kure ranches cattle near Rocky Mountain House and is active in the Alberta Fish and Game Association. He speaks for both the ranching community and many hunters in protesting the recent reintroduction of wild bison to Banff National Park. Parks Canada brought 10 bison cows and six bulls to the park’s remote Panther River valley in 2016 and put them into a fenced pasture where, the following spring, the cows gave birth to the first calves of what will soon be a free-ranging herd. Parks Canada plans to turn the bison loose in 2018, with strategically placed fences to keep them from heading east into the foothills where Kure and other ranchers pasture their cattle.

Ranchers worry that government fences won’t stop those bison. They expect the big animals to become a costly problem: competing with domestic livestock for forage, breaking down ranch fences and spreading disease. Some hunters fear that bison could displace valued big-game animals such as bighorn sheep and elk from long-treasured hunting grounds, including the Ya Ha Tinda grasslands along the upper Red Deer River.

“There isn’t a fence in the world that will hold bison if a pack of wolves gets on them. And a fence that’s permeable to elk, deer, bighorn sheep and moose certainly will not contain bison… Those animals will move,” Kure wrote in a letter meant to mobilize public opposition to the plan.

Bill Hunt is Banff National Park’s resource conservation manager responsible for the bison restoration initiative. He respects Kure’s concerns. His staff spent two years trying to perfect a fencing design that would work in the park’s wilderness landscape. Ranchers who raise semi-domesticated bison have found that six-strand barbed-wire fences, especially when buttressed with one or two strands of electric wire, will keep bison confined. It’s the other animals that are a problem: those fences stop them too.

The Banff recovery team couldn’t come up with a fence that would stop bison but let other animals move freely through their home ranges. Instead, they are counting on a high-tech solution. The eastern escape routes for park bison are fenced with industry-standard fences, but where monitoring has shown that those fences block trails that are important for elk, sheep and other animals, parks staff tie the six strands up into two strips, creating a gap big enough for wildlife to slip through. All the original bison wear radio-collars that send out a warning signal when the bison wander close to those critical fence-crossing locations. When bison are nearby, park biologists unbundle the wire to block the animals until they wander deeper into the park again.

No fence in the world will hold bison if a pack of wolves gets on them. And a fence that’s permeable to elk, deer, bighorn sheep and moose certainly will not contain bison.” —Colin Kure, cattle rancher

It’s a labour-intensive and costly approach, and it will only work as long as the original radio collars work. Parks Canada isn’t collaring calves born in the park, so uncollared bison will soon outnumber the original bunch. And critics still point out a big weakness in the fencing plan: rivers draining out of Banff National Park flood every spring. Fences are bound to wash out. Bison will escape eventually.

Still, Hunt suspects that fears about wide-ranging bison may be overblown. “Historically bison were a nomadic species but I think a lot of that was the sheer number of animals. They would deplete a food resource and move on. So right from the get-go, managing herd size has always been a key concept here.”

The Panther River experiment is premised on the idea that bison born in Banff to young cows who had their first calves in Banff will consider those high valleys their home ranges. It’s the same approach tried successfully in Grasslands National Park a decade ago. Then, by keeping herd size within the capacity of the mountain grasslands to feed them, park staff hope the bison will have little inclination to wander.

How to keep the herd size down There really is only one answer: hunting. Although wolves hunt them successfully in places such as Wood Buffalo National Park, bison are hard to kill. Wild carnivores usually prefer smaller prey. Hunting—either by Indigenous people or licensed sport hunters or both—will have to play a role.

“There are lots of hunters in the Panther Corners area [downstream from the bison reintroduction area] already,” says Hunt. “There’s access for horse-drawn wagons. We’re hoping there wouldn’t be any bison shot when the herd is small and every animal is genetically important, but when the herd gets a little larger, hunting would be a fantastic thing. Not only would it help with population goals but it might encourage bison to stay inside the park.”

The sticky issue remains: What is the status of a park bison when it wanders across the boundary “In Alberta,” Hunt says, “bison are considered livestock. Because our program is to restore them as wildlife, our bison are not livestock. They’re classified as wildlife in Banff. If and when they do leave the park, they would be non-status.”

That means they can be shot on sight—something that appears unlikely to change soon. Alberta’s Wildlife Act authorizes the minister to change the status of a species of animal only on the recommendation of an advisory committee. But the Endangered Species Conservation Committee has been inactive since before the last election, caught up in the government-wide review of agencies, boards and commissions that has been dragging on since 2015. Wild bison that wander out into the Alberta foothills will remain unprotected and unmanaged until the government gets around to classifying them as wildlife.

While those worried about wild bison are focused on Banff’s new herd, they should also look farther south, where wild plains bison—unmanaged by parks staff—will soon almost certainly reappear.

In the spring of 2016 a herd of 87 bison went by truck from Elk Island National Park to the Blackfeet Reservation in northern Montana to serve as the nucleus of a new free-ranging conservation herd. The herd, which has already grown to more than 150, ranges a large ranch on the northern edge of the Blackfeet reservation—adjacent to the Alberta border. Although some new fencing went up around the boundaries of the ranch before the new herd’s arrival, it’s not nearly to the standard of Banff’s fences. Blackfeet bison will likely wander freely into southern Alberta within a couple of years.

Ranchers north of the border are worried. As one area rancher confided to me: “It took me a while to understand the spiritual importance of the bison to the Blackfeet, and I do. But I don’t know what to expect. Those bison are going to end up nose to nose with Alberta cattle. Are they diseased Who knows Nobody has talked to us.”

Disease concerns are understandable. When the Pablo–Allard bison arrived in the Wainwright reserve, area cattle herds already harboured tuberculosis and brucellosis. The cattle infected the bison and the diseases spread quickly in the overcrowded reserve. A few years later, in what came to be known as the century’s biggest conservation blunder, Canadian bureaucrats decided to close the reserve and ship young animals north to the Peace–Athabasca delta, where the world’s last known population of wood bison had recently been found. They rationalized that the young bison might be disease-free. They were wrong. The new immigrants not only contaminated Wood Buffalo National Park’s wood bison with plains bison genes, they also spread the cattle diseases into the herd.

Yellowstone National Park’s bison are infected with brucellosis too. Unlike tuberculosis, brucellosis is harmless to bison. In cattle, however, it causes cows to abort their calves. American authorities have repeatedly slaughtered bison that wandered out of the park towards cattle herds, triggering controversy. Ironically, analysis has shown that whenever brucellosis shows up in the area’s cattle it’s from elk, not bison.

Where the Banff and Blackfeet bison are con-cerned, at any rate, Alberta ranchers have little to fear. Both herds originated from Elk Island National Park, where rigorous disease testing and herd health measures have been in place for almost a century, partly in response to the Wood Buffalo disaster. Bill Hunt says Elk Island bison are the gold standard for conservation herds: genetically pure and disease free. “It can’t get any better in terms of where those bison came from. They’ve been maintaining a disease-free status for decades.”

If bringing bison back to even a small part of their original Alberta ranges is proving complicated and controversial, why even bother?

Retired park warden Wes Olson spent decades working with bison, first in Elk Island and then as the “buffalo cowboy” who coordinated the successful 2005 reintroduction of plains bison to Saskatchewan’s Grasslands National Park. “Bison are a keystone species,” he says. “They affect every other species that lives there.”

One example: in areas with bison, almost a third of all bird nests are lined with bison hair, the second-warmest natural insulating material in North America. The hair not only increases egg hatching rates, it then protects nestlings from predators by masking odours. The absence of bison may help explain why many native grassland bird populations are in trouble.

Another example: bison dung supports over 300 native invertebrate species—a lost food resource for birds like sage grouse, which are now critically endangered in Alberta. Cattle droppings, on the other hand, support few bugs because most cattle are medicated with ivermectin and other chemicals toxic to invertebrates.

Bringing back bison may help bring back not only bugs and birds, but frogs too. The big hollows worn into prairie by wallowing bison fill up each spring with snowmelt and rainwater. Toads, frogs and insects breed in those temporary wetlands. Restoring that critical habitat may help recover at-risk amphibian populations.

Albertans are able to coexist with elk. We know how to manage the issues. Why would bison be any different Agricultural conflicts may be less than feared.” —Cody Spencer, bison rancher

“Albertans are able to coexist with elk,” says bison rancher Cody Spencer. “There are issues, but we know how to manage them. Why would bison be any different?” Pointing to the fact that farmers and ranchers already share land with wild bison in central Saskatchewan and eastern Utah, he says a study south of the border offers good evidence that agricultural conflicts may be less than feared.

In Utah’s Henry Mountains about 300 wild bison share the range with domestic cattle. When areas where their cows congregate began to show signs of chronic overgrazing, ranchers suspected the bison were to blame. Researchers decided to monitor animal distribution and measure grazing rates using fenced enclosures. They found that the bison consumed barely 14 per cent of the available grass, mostly in areas where cattle seldom go. Jackrabbits, surprisingly, were the culprits—eating more than a third of the available cattle forage.

Spencer suggests that bison could even enable us to rethink the whole range-agriculture industry. “It’s awfully costly trying to force-fit cattle into our ecosystems,” he says. “There are all the costs associated with calving, pesticide application, winter feeding, predator conflicts. You don’t have those costs with bison.”

Wild bison ranging freely in the Alberta foothills and prairies will create new opportunities—certainly for those who opt to hunt their own meat, but possibly even for ranchers interested in shifting from babysitting cattle to harvesting semi-wild bison. Regardless of how we exploit the recovered herds, though, a keystone species will once again shape ecosystems that have been without it for a century and a half. The changes may prove profound.

No less profound will be the impact on Indigenous cultures. “What would happen if you took the cross away from Christianity?” asks Blackfoot elder and teacher Leroy Little Bear. “The buffalo was one of those things. The belief system, the songs, the stories, the ceremonies are still there, but the buffalo is not seen daily… The younger generation do not see buffalo out there, so it’s out of sight, out of mind.”

Little Bear played a pivotal role in drafting the Northern Plains Buffalo Treaty, which led in part to the Blackfeet bison reintroduction. Initial signatories in fall of 2014 included the Siksika, Piikani, Kainai and Tsuu T’ina first nations as well as Assiniboine, Gros Ventre, Sioux, Salish and Kootenai tribes from south of the Medicine Line. The Stoney Nakoda and Samson Cree signed on the next year. It was the first treaty among Indigenous nations in over 150 years.

“The Buffalo Treaty is historic,” says Little Bear. “A treaty among just Indigenous cultures to work together on common issues: conservation, culture, education, environment issues, economics and health research. In the centre of that is the buffalo.”

“Our elders said, we want to restore the buffalo. But it’s a big job. We can’t do it on our own. We need partners.”

Marie-Eve Marchand is one of those partners. She was a founding member of Bison Belong, an advocacy network that sprang into life in 2009 to pressure Parks Canada to follow through on its commitment to bring bison back to Banff National Park and to build public support for the initiative. That work successful, Marchand now provides administrative support and media coordination for the Buffalo Treaty. “We eliminated the beaver and the bison, both keystone species,” she says. “Now we’re turning that around.”

Marchand likes to cite Chief Wesley of the Stoney-Nakoda, who said at one Treaty discussion that the bison is important on many levels. “Think of it as our Walmart,” he told her. “But think of it also as our Church.”

“With the return of the buffalo,” Leroy Little Bear adds, “those things that were part of those regularly occurring patterns in nature, the buffalo was part of it. So we’re bringing back those regularities, and those regularities are part of what anchors our societies.”

“But there’s a whole lot more. There’s also their larger role in the ecosystem. As a human species, we play a very small role in that ecosystem. And it’s a big job to bring about an eco-balance. So we need help and the buffalo will do that. Is Alberta ready for that Probably not.”

Probably not. But if wild bison really are coming back to the western foothills and southern prairies, a lot of things will change—likely for the better. If we think of bison recovery as part of Alberta’s efforts at reconciliation with First Nations, it might change us too.

Kevin Van Tighem is a writer, Alberta Views columnist and former superintendent of Banff National Park.

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Of the seven grizzly bear management areas in the province, BMA1—at nearly 42,000 km²—is the second-largest. It’s the only high boreal grizzly habitat in Alberta, saturated by bogland and tight stands of mixed coniferous and deciduous forest. The Chinchaga is also the most remote grizzly habitat in the province, with few roads in much of the vast territory. Even so, for over 20 years Fullerton has been working in this tough landscape, studying and managing one of Alberta’s iconic species.

Using pliers, Fullerton carefully plucks a tuft of coarse hair and places the sample in a small envelope for safekeeping. “This is a grizzly bear’s version of Facebook,” he says playfully, explaining how bears rub their backs against trees, power poles and vertical structures to leave behind their scent as a message to other male and female bears in the area.

The behaviour is also a way for scientists such as Fullerton to learn about the bears: a single strand of the grizzly’s hair will be sent off to a laboratory for DNA analysis. By collecting samples from 200 different sites, Fullerton hopes to identify where grizzlies are appearing and reappearing on the landscape, with the overall goal of determining their population in BMA1. The ambitious research technique has never been attempted in the Chinchaga. Fullerton calls the study “groundbreaking.”

Across the province, grizzlies are considered a “threatened” species under Alberta’s Wildlife Act and Regulation. In 2010, when bear numbers were estimated to have fallen below 1,000, scientists and environmental groups lobbied for this designation and for government to take actions towards their recovery. (Alberta’s grizzly hunt had already been suspended, in 2006.) According to the most recent provincial Grizzly Bear Recovery Plan, from June 2016, only 700 grizzlies remain in Alberta. Recent research in southwestern Alberta by Andrea Morehouse of the University of Alberta found that 67 grizzlies live in BMA6, while another study by fRI Research concluded that grizzly numbers in the Banff and Jasper parks area, or BMA3, increased from 36 to 74 between 2004 and 2014.

Bears rub their backs against trees and power poles to leave behind their scent as a message—“a grizzly bear’s version of Facebook.”

While the province is currently attempting to rebuild grizzly bear populations, serious challenges remain in the Chinchaga, as biologists and policymakers lack a scientific baseline. And Fullerton says the rugged territory isn’t the only obstacle to conducting research in the Peace Country. “Some people have said the Chinchaga just isn’t a productive grizzly bear range. It’s thought to be too wet,” he explains. “It’s true there could possibly be a lower population density here compared to the mountains or foothills. But we just can’t say for sure.”

According to the biologist, one school of thought in the local scientific community is that the grizzly population in the Peace Country is a result of bears migrating from BC. Another theory is that many of the bears are originally from southwestern Alberta. Historically, the province used to relocate “problem bears” (those in persistent conflict with humans) to the remote Chinchaga, although that practice no longer occurs. But Fullerton suspects his research could prove these theories wrong.

“Over the years, we’ve heard about repeated sightings of sows (females) with cubs in this area,” says Fullerton. “One of our trail cameras recently caught footage of a grizzly sow with two cubs. When I noticed a third cub come out of the bushes, I was ecstatic. That’s a sign of a productive habitat.”

As part of the hair-snag project, Fullerton and his team have launched a “citizen science” tool—a smartphone app called GrizzTracker—to encourage local land users, including foresters, oil and gas workers, wildfire fighters and ranchers, to report sightings of grizzlies. The app allows citizens to pinpoint exact GPS locations, and, if safe, to take a photograph. Ideally GrizzTracker will provide Peace River biologists with additional information on grizzly bear distribution across the landscape.

Jim Witiw, a senior forester at Daishowa-Marubeni International Ltd., is participating directly in the grizzly bear initiative. DMI helps fund the research in the Chinchaga, and their staff carry the GrizzTracker app in the field to record sightings. Witiw hopes results from the study—a better understanding of how grizzly bears are using the landscape—will help inform best practices for forestry and natural resource extraction.

“There’s a different set of mortality risks for grizzly bears up here,” says Witiw, explaining how seismic lines, cutlines and other industry features in the Chinchaga increase opportunities for human–bear conflict. “The goal is to gain enough information to deliver a locally appropriate bear management plan to contribute to the province’s aspirations of recovery.”

Environmental groups, including the Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society, also support the research initiative in BMA1. Tara Russell, a conservation assistant with CPAWS’s Northern Alberta chapter, hopes the results force the government to address the negative impact of seismic lines on “keystone species”—animals whose removal drastically changes the habitat, such as grizzlies and woodland caribou in northwestern Alberta. “Grizzly bears are the canary in the coal mine,” says Russell. “They’re an indicator of our larger ecosystem. When we start losing top predators, it can have a huge detrimental effect down the trophic cascade.” Prey such as elk, for example, would benefit from the loss of grizzlies—but an elk boom could then lead to a decline in vegetation, including willows, whose shoots the ungulates eat. “It’s incredibly important that we protect grizzly bears,” says Russell.

Fullerton and his team plan to wrap up the hair-snag collection by the end of September. He looks forward to analyzing the results and more clearly understanding how many grizzlies live in the Chinchaga—though he knows his work is only just beginning. “For every stone we turn over, there’s another question about why and how grizzly bears live in this unique ecosystem,” says Fullerton as we retrace our steps back to the ATV we rode in on. The sun is drawing closer to the earth, casting shreds of golden light through the trees onto the spongy forest floor. Weather permitting, Fullerton will be back in the Chinchaga tomorrow, collecting hair samples and checking trail cameras at other snag sites.

Some groups, including the Alberta Fish and Game Association, hope counts such as these eventually justify a resumed hunt. “I think [research results] will start some pretty lively discussions in this province,” Fullerton says, smiling. “The end goal will always be the conservation of grizzly bears.”

Peace River’s Trina Moyles writes on social and environmental justice. Her Women Who Dig is forthcoming from U of R Press.

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In the waning days of July 2014, Alberta Minister of Environment and Sustainable Resource Development (ESRD) Robin Campbell had the privilege of doing something few of his predecessors had done: announce the recovery of a once-threatened species. “I’m pleased the trumpeter swan can now be removed from the threatened species list,” Campbell wrote in a press release. “This success is a testament to the hard work, careful planning and commitment of Albertans to preserve our province’s biodiversity.”

Mark Heckbert, Alberta’s species recovery team leader for the trumpeter swan, worked on swan reintroduction at Elk Island National Park east of Edmonton as his first job out of university. “It’s very special for me,” Heckbert says. “I was fortunate enough to hold a mature adult trumpeter swan and release it into one of the wetlands. Now there are seven breeding pairs, and 30 birds return each spring.”

Reintroduction of trumpeter swans to Elk Island was part of a larger recovery effort. In 1946 a summer survey discovered 100 swans near Grande Prairie. They raised their young on lakes and wetlands in west-central Alberta, then migrated south to Yellowstone for the winter. A North America-wide hunting ban stopped the outright slaughter of these majestic birds, and by 1985 there were almost 400 swans breeding in Alberta’s Peace Region.

Still, Alberta Fish and Wildlife worried that human disturbance and habitat loss posed a significant threat to the long-term survival of the Alberta flock. That was why, in 1987, the Canadian Wildlife Service, Parks Canada and the Friends of Elk Island Society began reintroducing trumpeters to Elk Island National Park.

Also in 1987, the Alberta government listed the trumpeter swan as endangered under Alberta’s Wildlife Act. Sixteen years later, in 2003, a multistakeholder team developed a recovery plan for provincial lands where the birds’ habitat was being ransacked by residential development, recreation, logging, grazing, agriculture and the oil and gas industry.

Nesting swans are hypersensitive and will abandon their nests at the slightest disturbance. Despite this, says Heckbert, “Trumpeters are a relatively simple species to manage. They just need clean-water wetlands and quiet to raise their young. Our job was to do what was necessary and feasible to make sure there was enough good breeding habitat available to them.”

Alberta protected habitat by preventing development near water bodies preferred by breeding swans. Because the setbacks were small, Heckbert says, it was easy to get timber, agriculture and oil and gas concerns to comply. Although the guidelines don’t apply to private lands, education and outreach activities encouraged landowners to conserve trumpeter swan habitat. Conservation organizations including the Nature Conservancy and Ducks Unlimited purchased suitable habitat to protect it. South of the border, conservation efforts such as supplemental feeding protected the swans on their wintering grounds and prevented mass die-offs during severe winters.

Today, roughly 1,800 adult trumpeter swans and 1,000 cygnets spend their summers on 685 water bodies in Alberta.

The number of threatened species is increasing, with no meaningful law or political will to protect them.

If the trumpeter swan success story were typical, Alberta’s government would be an international leader in species-at-risk recovery. Unfortunately, nothing could be further from the truth. In 2012 Ecojustice, an environmental law firm, released Failure to Protect, a report card on Canada’s species-at-risk laws. Alberta earned failing grades. “Alberta’s laws still have the same flaws we identified in our 2012 report,” says Sean Nixon, a staff lawyer for Ecojustice. “We gave them an F in 2012, and we would again.”

Not only have things not improved, they’ve gotten worse. The number of species listed as either “threatened” or “endangered” increased from 24 in 2009 to 33 today. The problem, Nixon says, is that there’s no meaningful law and little political will to protect species at risk in Alberta. Canada has ratified the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity (1992), which mandates the protection of threatened and endangered species. By entering into a National Accord for the Protection of Species at Risk (1996), both the government of Canada and the provincial governments have committed themselves to establishing legislation and policy to prevent species from becoming extinct as a consequence of human activities. Alberta, however, is one of two provinces that still lack dedicated endangered species legislation.

The problem with Alberta’s Wildlife Act is that it does almost nothing to actually protect species at risk. Most perplexing is how ad hoc and arbitrary the process is. The Act uses the term endangered species but does not define it, except to imply that it is whatever the minister of the day deems it to be. Despite the fact that the Alberta government claims 16 species are “currently listed as threatened under Alberta’s Wildlife Act” (including four species Campbell added to the list—western grebe, Athabasca rainbow trout, bull trout, pygmy whitefish—when he downlisted the trumpeter swan), there is no definition of a threatened species in the Wildlife Act nor any method described by which a species can be listed as endangered or threatened.

The Act does require that an Endangered Species Conservation Committee (ESCC) make recommendations on which species should be listed as endangered. But there is no statutory obligation or a clear timeline for the minister to even respond to such recommendations, never mind list a species or develop a recovery plan to protect it from further harm.

The capricious nature of Alberta’s species-at-risk management may explain why only 33 of the province’s 5,000-odd native species are listed as threatened or endangered, when Environment and Sustainable Resource Development’s own searchable database describes 453 species as “may be at risk.” The reasons for this designation, when given, include small population sizes, few occurrences and restricted distribution. In almost every case, the at-risk species’ habitat is under threat from urbanization, recreation, logging or oil and gas development, not to mention climate change.

The provincial government has not even bothered to list 24 Alberta species that are currently protected by the federal government’s Species at Risk Act:

Bert’s predacious diving beetle. Bolander’s quillwort. Canada warbler. Chestnut-collared longspur. Common nighthawk. Dusky dune moth. Eskimo curlew. Five-spotted bogus yucca moth. Gold-edged gem. Greater short-horned lizard. Half-moon hairstreak. Haller’s apple moss. Little brown myotis. Loggerhead shrike. Non-pollinating yucca moth. Olive-sided flycatcher. Red knot rufa. Rocky mountain sculpin. Sage thrasher. Smooth goosefoot. Sprague’s pipit. Verna’s flower moth. Western harvest mouse. Yucca moth.

Twelve of the above species are endangered, and yet the Alberta government that manages most of their habitat has not begun to protect them. This may be because the ESCC includes several representatives from groups that would be affected by recovery efforts, such as the Alberta Association of Municipal Districts and Counties, Alberta Beef Producers, Alberta Fish and Game Association, Alberta Forest Products Association, Alberta Irrigation Projects Association, Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers, Western Stock Growers Association, plus ESRD itself.

While some species at risk have not been listed, others have gotten recovery plans before they were listed. In 2002 the ESCC recommended the grizzly bear be listed as a threatened species in Alberta, but for eight years the government did not accept that recommendation. Meanwhile the minister approved a recovery plan for grizzlies. The grizzly bear was eventually listed as threatened, but the government’s own status updates indicate that the habitat protection components of the recovery plan, namely restricting human access in grizzly priority areas, have never been implemented.

Other listed species endure a haphazard management approach that defies logic. The wood bison, for example, once widespread across northern Alberta, was almost extirpated. Now some 800 wild, free-ranging wood bison wander Alberta’s northern forests, while an additional 3,500 live in Wood Buffalo National Park. At the federal level, all wood bison are listed as “threatened,” but in Alberta only the 400 or so free-ranging wood bison in the Hay-Zama Bison Management Area are listed as an endangered species by ESRD. Despite having that designation, the small Hay-Zama herd is still subject to hunting, and no recovery plan has ever been developed. Free-ranging bison living elsewhere in Alberta are not listed as endangered and can be shot on sight.

The biggest failing of Alberta’s Wildlife Act is this: It includes no mandatory protection for the dwindling and degraded habitat on which species at risk rely. The only mandatory protective measures listed are various limitations on hunting and a stipulation that no one may “wilfully molest, disturb or destroy a house, nest or den of prescribed wildlife or a beaver dam in prescribed areas and at prescribed times.” The areas and times, of course, are up to the discretion of the minister.

“For the vast majority of Canada’s at-risk species [over 80 per cent], habitat loss is the main reason for their decline,” Ecojustice’s Nixon says. “A law that fails to protect habitat is guaranteed to fail in protecting and recovering the province’s endangered wildlife.”
The few species-recovery success stories in Alberta tend to be outliers and anomalies that result from international action and from local efforts that don’t inconvenience industrial development. The peregrine falcon bounced back, in part because DDT was banned across the continent. The swift fox, once totally wiped out in Alberta, was brought back by reintroducing almost 1,000 animals into what is left of its prairie habitat. Likewise, the whooping crane was rescued with a captive breeding operation and the protection of its habitat in both Texas and Wood Buffalo National Park.

“It’s not that effective protection for endangered species under the Wildlife Act isn’t possible,” says Shaun Fluker, associate professor of law at the University of Calgary. “However, there’s little transparency, no predictability and no accountability in government decisions about protecting endangered species in Alberta. So while effective legal protection might be possible, it isn’t very likely either.”

Piping plover. Western silvery minnow. Short-horned lizard. Ord’s kangaroo rat. Small-flowered sand verbena. In every case, it’s the same story. Alberta’s prairies, foothills and forests have been fragmented and otherwise encroached upon to the point that they can no longer sustain their wildlife populations without immediate intervention. Sometimes a species is listed; occasionally a strategy is developed; maybe some voluntary guidelines are suggested to staunch a wound. But rarely is the necessary cure—habitat protection—enacted.

The most obvious example of the failure of discretionary species-at-risk management, and the one that belies the government’s claim it is working hard and planning carefully to protect species at risk, is the plight of Alberta’s threatened woodland caribou population. These animals were first listed as endangered 28 years ago, but despite a series of recovery plans intended to increase the population, no action has been taken to protect the caribou’s remaining old-growth habitat. Hence, the population has plummeted. There are now only 2,000 caribou in 16 isolated herds, 10 of which are in free-fall. Meanwhile, the Alberta government, which has promised time and again to prevent the disappearance of caribou, has, since its 2004–2014 caribou plan began, auctioned off some 33,000 km2 of caribou habitat across the province (an area two-thirds the size of Nova Scotia) for new oil and gas leases. About 80 per cent of Alberta’s northeast caribou habitat is now leased for oil sands development.

“If we do what we’re doing now, everything will continue to decline,” says biologist and University of Montana professor Mark Hebblewhite, who has been researching the caribou for a decade. “At least half these caribou herds will be gone in 50 years, especially in the oil sands area. What we’re doing to the planet is just incredible.”

There is something morally repugnant about extirpating entire herds and populations of animals in an age when we should know better. And yet it is entirely likely that these caribou populations—and many other species besides—will be greatly diminished, if not extirpated. A crime if ever there were one.

The tragic tale of another bird, as uniquely beautiful in its own way as the trumpeter swan, even more poignantly reflects Alberta’s failure to protect. Like woodland caribou and wood bison, greater sage grouse were once plentiful, occupying the entirety of North America’s great plains. Males are renowned for their dramatic courting ritual, puffing up their chests and inflating bright yellow neck sacs as they strut around to impress waiting females.

Today, degradation of their sagebrush-dominated habitat has put these grouse at risk everywhere in North America. But nowhere is their existence as precarious as in southern Alberta and Saskatchewan, where sage grouse occupy just 6 per cent of their historical range. In 1998 the Alberta government released a sage grouse status report with a grim message: The species had experienced an 80 per cent decline over preceding decades, with a remaining population of just 320 individuals, which “may be near levels that are non-viable.” Two years later the Alberta government listed the population as endangered, but grouse numbers continued to plummet.

Alberta’s Wildlife Act includes no mandatory protection for the habitat on which species rely.

Why Unlike the case of the trumpeter swan, provincial politicians couldn’t be bothered to protect sage grouse mating grounds (known as leks). Instead, the province continued to allow overgrazing and industrial development, including the drilling of 1,500 oil and gas wells in prime sage grouse habitat. Like trumpeter swans, sage grouse are extremely sensitive to human disturbance. The cumulative impacts of cows, wells, pipelines and roads increase chick mortality and force adult sage grouse to abandon what is left of their lekking habitat.

By 2012 there were only 14 sage grouse males in Alberta (18 in Saskatchewan), and the overall population was estimated to be only 100 birds. By any measure, greater sage grouse recovery is a failure as grand as the trumpeter swan’s success.

According to Cliff Wallis, a lifelong naturalist and professional biologist, and vice-president of both Nature Canada and the Alberta Wilderness Association, the descent of sage grouse and woodland caribou to the brink of extirpation is a testament to the Alberta government’s lack of commitment to protecting species at risk. “Most action is on paper, not on the ground, and the actions they are willing to take are cosmetic—not fundamental land-use change and restoration efforts. We have been tinkering around the edges, relying on ineffective operational guidelines for industry to implement rather than on prohibitions on certain activities and land use.”

Just when it seemed the Alberta government would push the greater sage grouse over the edge of extirpation, however, a group of environmental organizations forced the federal government to come to the rescue. Although most plants and animals are the jurisdiction of provincial governments, the federal government has its own species-at-risk program, and the greater sage grouse has been listed as endangered under the federal Species at Risk Act (SARA) since 1998.

Unlike Alberta’s Wildlife Act, SARA was designed specifically to protect plants, animals and other organisms whose existence is in jeopardy. Its listing process is more detailed and transparent than Alberta’s. SARA’s most problematic flaw is that, under most circumstances, it only applies to lands managed by the federal government, including national parks and military bases. The federal government has been known to miss obligatory timelines by years and to refuse to designate and protect critical habitat, as was the case with sage grouse. Although Ottawa has legal jurisdiction to mandate protections on provincial land, where most sage grouse habitat is located, it had never done so. Until now.

Sage grouse occupy just 6 per cent of their historical range. Only 14 males remain in Canada.

In 2012 Ecojustice helped four conservation groups, including the Alberta Wilderness Association, to take Canada’s minister of the environment to federal court over his continued failure to protect greater sage grouse and their habitat. Eventually the Federal Court of Appeal ordered the government to make public the decision on whether to recommend emergency protections for the sage grouse.

In November 2013 the federal cabinet issued an emergency protection order to do what the Alberta government should have done 20 years ago: protect the sage grouse’s habitat on provincial and federal lands alike. The order prohibits construction or expansion of roads, fences and structures, and it forbids the operation of vehicles or facilities that make excessive noise.

Wallis says that, after years of inaction from the Alberta government, the federal cabinet was left with “no choice” but to step in and recommend emergency protection—though Wallis is not convinced it will be enough. “It’s a good start in preventing new industrial activity and inappropriate land use on public land, but the emergency order does not apply to private land, does not provide sufficient buffer for critical sage grouse habitat, and doesn’t supply any new funding to help landowners and leaseholders speed recovery.”

Despite the success of trumpeter swan recovery, and the slender hope that recent efforts will save the sage grouse, it is clear that Alberta’s Wildlife Act and most of its policies are little more than a shell game meant to hoodwink the international community into believing Alberta, and Canada, are satisfying their obligations under the UN Convention on Biological Diversity.

Many experts believe the only real solution to Alberta’s species-at-risk crisis is for the government to pass legislation that makes listing species at risk and protecting their habitat obligatory rather than discretionary. When an attempt was made to contact Kyle Fawcett, Alberta’s former minister of Environment and Sustainable Resource Development, his press secretary, Parker Hogan, emailed to say that the PC government had no plans for considering a “made-in-Alberta species-at-risk law.” Instead Hogan extolled the virtues of Alberta’s species-at-risk process and emphasized the “range of options, from regulatory tools to voluntary stewardship,” that has failed the PCs for four decades.

The fate of some of Alberta’s plants and animals is no doubt hopeless. If there is solace anywhere, it is in the NDP’s shocking victory in the 2015 election. Rachel Notley has promised “to strengthen environmental standards and enforcement …based on independent science and international best practices.” If there’s any truth in these words, then a “made-in-Alberta species-at-risk law” that makes habitat protection mandatory may well be on the horizon, and the deliverance of the trumpeter swan will simply be the first of many.

Jeff Gailus is a regular contributor to Alberta Views and the author of Little Black Lies (Rocky Mountain Books, 2012).

The post On the Brink appeared first on Alberta Views.