On Dec. 10, 2015, a helicopter crew chartered by Parks Canada
managed to drop their cannon-fired nets on two wolves fleeing over
snow-covered Summit Lake in the upper Rocky River valley of Jasper
National Park.
The objective was to equip the captured animals with neck collars and
GPS telemetry. Released again after treatment, these wolves were
expected to rejoin their local pack and transmit their travels to a
biologist in the Jasper Park warden office.
As apex predators, wolves are an important link in the park’s
wildlife ecology by keeping the elk herds in dynamic balance with their
food supply. Unfortunately, both radios soon failed. However, about two
months after capture, one of the collared wolves was caught in a snare
set by an Alberta trapper outside the park.
This wolf, probably in the company of its pack, had travelled from
the upper Rocky River down to the lower Athabasca valley, a distance of
some 50 kilometres, plus a further 15 km past Pocahontas to the park’s
eastern border.
The snaring of this park wolf became public knowledge after the
trapper handed over the wolf’s collar to the provincial Fish &
Wildlife officer stationed in Hinton, who, in turn, notified the Jasper
warden office. The details given were that the animal had been caught
west of Hinton.
Earlier that winter, a radio-collared park cougar also died in a
snare west of Hinton. As it so happened, someone working in the area
found a trapper’s bait pile at Brule, which is indeed west of Hinton,
but only a hundred metres or so away from the park’s unfenced border.
The bait site contained the carcass of a traffic-killed elk, several
dead chickens and other carrion.
The use of bait sites is a common practice of trappers operating in
the Alberta foothill forests along the eastern boundaries of Jasper and
Banff National Parks. The baits are maintained over extended periods so
that carnivores such as wolves get used to a free meal.
When the fur season opens, the trapper sets any number of steel
snares across all access trails through the bushes leading to the bait.
In this way, entire packs of wolves can be caught, as well as a range of
non-target animals. Photographic evidence has revealed that some snared
animals suffer horribly for days or even weeks.
From the perspective of the Alberta Fish & Wildlife division, the
provincial harvest of fur-bearers is a traditional industrial activity.
The average number of wolves trapped annually along the eastern
boundaries of Banff and Jasper National Parks was 74 over the past five
years.
The paradox of trappers is that they kill what they love. Their usual
hard-nosed defence is that predators need to be thinned out. Otherwise
they would die of starvation anyhow.
But the matter assumes quite a different perspective when snares are
set on the boundary of our national parks, which are the time-honoured
sanctuaries that are supposed to be inviolate to commercial hunting and
trapping.
The notion of establishing a protective buffer zone around Jasper
National Park is not new, but today’s need is all the more urgent
because several rural counties, livestock groups and hunting clubs are
paying a bounty of $100 to $500 on dead wolves.
A buffer zone all the way between Alberta and our mountain parks may
not be practical in view of the rugged topography and the understandable
opposition from provincial interest groups. But a protective zone of
several kilometres wide at strategic spots, such as the end of the
Athabasca River valley, seems to be an idea for which the time has come.
Dick Dekker is an independent wildlife ecologist who
has studied wolves in Jasper National Park for more than 50 years and
published extensively on Jasper wildlife.
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