Balancing nature's ways
Wildlife-management team in Jasper National Park tries to deal with elk, wolves and other animal challenges
Ed Struzik
Canwest News Service
Monday, May 26, 2008
CREDIT: Ed Struzik, CNS
Wolves, such as this one that don't flee when people or cars come near, worry Jasper Park officials. Their fearlessness could lead to them getting hit by traffic or having to be destroyed if they start killing people's pets in town.
JASPER NATIONAL PARK -- Two days after Christmas, Peter Banfield was driving from Jasper to Banff, listening to Jennifer Warnes singing a Leonard Cohen song on his CD player, when he was stopped by a wolf standing on the centre line.
"It was three minutes after midnight and there was not a car on the road," Banfield recalls.
"So I powered down the window to see what it was up to."
A day doesn't go by when Banfield doesn't think about what happened next. "The wolf looked at me and listened for a moment. Then it lowered its head and barked three or four times. When Warnes began humming to the sound of the saxophone on the CD, the animal launched into a spine-chilling howl."
Thoroughly mesmerized, Banfield was tempted to stick around. But fearing a car or truck might come by and hit the animal, he drove off.
This isn't the only close encounter people have had with wolves in Jasper in recent years. The animals have been showing up near picnic grounds, in campsites and alongside highways and trails, feeding on animals killed either by them or by traffic.
Not all the encounters have been quite as inspiring as the magical moment Banfield experienced. A few hikers and cross-country skiers have found themselves on a trail or a frozen lake being followed or eyed by wolves.
"Typically, one animal, maybe a black wolf, will appear on one side of a trail," says Wes Bradford, Jasper's wildlife and human conflict specialist.
"It's not a dangerous situation, but it can be spooky if you don't know what's going on."
Wolves have always been part of the natural ecology of the Athabasca, Miette and Maligne valleys in Jasper. But the five packs working the townsite area nowadays represents a high point in the cycle. Natural as their presence is, the resurgence is being aided, in part, by a long-term Parks Canada management strategy that is putting the wild back into Jasper's valleys.
Over the past decade, biologists and wardens have closed some key trails and worked with Jasper Park Lodge to realign its golf course so wolves and other predators can move in and out of the valleys more easily. They've also taken to "hazing" the elk, waving hockey sticks and using BB guns to scare them from taking refuge in town.
Not only has this resulted in more wolves working the area around the townsite where they can get at the elk, it has also forced Parks Canada to get tough on those animals that show no fear of humans. "We're no longer giving wolves free meals," says Bradford. "If an elk or deer are killed by the side of the road, we haul it away.
"If a wolf shows no fear of humans, we do what we need to do to make sure they don't do it again."
The drive to put the wild back into Jasper had more to do initially with public safety than it did with ecological integrity. A seemingly tame elk, for example, can get pretty aggressive, especially when females are protecting their young.
This wasn't a problem when garbage-hunting bears deterred elk from coming in to feed on the lawns, parks and picnic areas in and around the townsite back in the 1970s and early 1980s. But it became a monumental one once Parks Canada wardens forced the scavengers to either give up or get out. Without bears to worry about, elk quickly made themselves at home, and many of them weren't interested in being good guests.
Over the years, Jasper's elk have flattened car tires, punched holes in radiators, and smashed windows and windshields.
Between 1989 and 1999, nearly 600 people reported being attacked or chased by ornery elk, 36 had to be treated for serious injuries.
One of the first things Parks Canada did to correct this situation was to relocate some of the more troublesome animals away from the townsite.
In 1999, some 50 elk were shipped off to the Swan Hills area, 40 to the wilds around Nordegg, and 10 more to a more remote region of the park.
But most of these elk weren't interested in giving up the good life in town, where there was plenty of food and no predators to worry about.
Thirteen of the 50 animals that were transported to Swan Hills quickly decided they'd had enough of the wilderness when they heard the sound of a train heading towards the lights of the town centre. The next day they were found huddled in a schoolyard, munching happily on grass beneath the snow.
Then 10 of the animals that had been moved to a more remote area of Jasper returned to their old stomping grounds. This forced Bradford and his colleagues to go back to the drawing board to consider other, more natural solutions.
Public education and the hazing of elk proved to be extremely successful in reducing the number of dangerous encounters with picture-taking tourists. Last year, for example, elk attacks were down by about 75 per cent from their highest levels. But the hazing didn't do much to control the rising elk numbers.
That's when Jasper's wildlife-management team came up with the idea of closing trails and setting up wildlife corridors to make it easier for wolves, cougars and bears to move through the valley bottoms. One of the first and biggest targets was the Jasper Park Lodge golf course.
For more than 70 years, the two-metre-high fence around the world-famous site prevented wolves and other predators from moving in and out of the valley. But it didn't stop elk, which consistently found weak links in the fence line to make their way onto the well-manicured grass.
Convincing the manager of the lodge at the time to realign the golf course wasn't easy. He and other company officials were concerned that golfers would complain.
But not only did most golfers react positively to the corridor, or not notice it was there, the predators almost immediately exploited it.
"We didn't expect it to happen so quickly," says Brenda Shepherd, the Parks Canada ecologist who worked with Jasper Park Lodge's groundskeepers to design and create the corridor.
"It was an overnight phenomenon. But you can see why they did what they did. In the past, the fence forced the wolves and other predators to go up high along the benches of Signal Mountain to get from the Valley of the Five Lakes over to the Maligne River area. But once they saw that this corridor gave them a shortcut to the elk they were trying to get at, they took to it right away."
Shepherd says wolves and other predators are now doing their part to control elk numbers. But she, Bradford and biologist Mark Bradley acknowledge there are still too many elk around to allow them to sit back and rest easy.
The other reason something more needs to be done about elk numbers is that many of them continue to be a problem in the townsite.
"We can keep running the elk out of town, but you can bet that many of them will be back the same day," Bradford says.
So once again, Bradford and his colleagues have gone back to the drawing board.
For now, all eyes are on Banff, where national-park officials are considering a plan to have first nations hunters from the nearby Stony Reserve come in and thin out the elk population. If that works and proves acceptable to the public, Jasper may also consider the idea, but not before consulting local residents, environmental groups and other stakeholders in the area.
Whatever happens down the road, Bradford is certain there will never be one perfect solution for Jasper's many wildlife-management challenges. "It's inevitable that when you put people and wildlife together in the numbers we get in a national park, there's always going to be conflict," he says.
© The Vancouver Sun 2008