“There are very few communities in Alberta can say they’ve got caribou a mile away,” says provincial government wildlife biologist Mark Heckbert. “There was even a caribou at Tags a couple of years ago.”
Heckbert speaks of the Slave Lake woodland caribou herd, one of 18 isolated herds left in the province. They are under siege and in decline. The province wants to do something about it, but the situation is so serious in some cases that the cure might be harder to take than the disease.
How bad is the situation? Bad enough that the province lists some as at risk of ‘immediate extirpation.’
In layman’s terms, that means ‘wiped out.’
Three of Alberta’s 18 herds are in that condition, including the Slave Lake herd. It consists of fewer than 100 animals, in a range extending from just northeast of the town of Slave Lake, east 30 or 40 kilometres through the muskeg, and then south along the west side of the Athabasca River to terminate in more muskeg far down in the South Mitsue area. Also at immediate risk are the Little Smoky and North Banff herds.
Heckbert has a radio telemetry map of the Slave Lake range, showing where 17 radio-collared animals have been recorded in the range over the past 3-½ years. It’s made from information picked up by a pilot who flies over the area once per month with receiving equipment aboard. Each collar has its own frequency, which Heckbert can relate back to a master list that tells him which animal it comes from. Plotting the readings on a map, he can see where each animal has been moving. If it hasn’t moved for a couple of months, it means it’s dead, and he has to go in and find the collar. Since the collars went on in 2002, six of the collared animals have died.
The map shows a concentration of red dots quite close to Slave Lake, not more than a couple of miles to the northeast in the muskeg and sand ridge area north of the river and east of the lake. There’s another concentration down at the south end of the range, with a few scattered in between. Heckbert sees the distribution as one of the ‘positives’ in a generally bleak picture.
“Generally speaking, caribou are found throughout their Slave Lake range. We know they can migrate through the whole range - including across Hwy. 2.”
Interestingly, the telemetry also shows a few isolated reading up on the Marten Hills where there is a large complex of bogs. It is not known as traditional caribou range, but rather falls about half way between the Slave Lake and Nipisi herd’s ranges. If animals collared elsewhere keep showing up there, Heckbert says he may have to reconsider the range boundaries.
That the animals can still move around without getting killed on roads is a good thing. Down in the Grande Cache area, the Little Smoky herd has not been as fortunate, with Hwy. 40 cutting right through its range with deadly results.
Hazardous road crossings are one factor in the steady decline of woodland caribou, but probably not the biggest. For this uniquely inadaptable animal, it seems just about everything intrusion is bad news. These include ‘linear disturbances,’ otherwise known as seismic lines, roads, pipelines and power lines. It’s been fairly well established, Heckbert says, that such corridors through caribou range help wolves and hurt caribou. Forest fires - while benefiting deer and moose, hurt caribou. They eat lichen that occurs in older coniferous forests, as well as that which grows on the forest floor in the black spruce muskegs.
“That stuff grows two millimetres a year,” says Heckbert.
Habitat disturbance therefore equals habitat loss for animals with low tolerance for change. Cow caribou never produce more than one calf per year. The calf mortality rate, Heckbert told the Slave Lake Forest Public Advisory Committee at a Nov. 16 meeting, is as high as 80 per cent. He thinks bears probably get some. Wolves get others. Starvation and cold may do others in.
With the Slave Lake and Little Smoky herds both under 100 animals (Little Smoky possibly less than 50), there isn’t much room for error. Any more bad luck (such as the Mitsue and Chisholm forest fires) might be enough to doom the Slave Lake herd. The novelty of fairly frequent caribou sightings for Slave Lake residents might turn into the spectacle of the extinction of a herd that might have roamed the muskegs east of the lake for 10,000 years.
So what can be done?
“What’s being discussed is dramatic stuff,” says Heckbert. “Not early intervention - that’s zoo stuff. Everything is on the table.” The dramatic stuff on the table includes control of predator populations - namely wolves. This the one, Heckbert says “that nobody wants to talk about.” Yet the provincial caribou recovery team does talk about it in its Alberta Woodland Caribou Recovery Plan.
It further includes the somewhat radical suggestion that there should be a moratorium on the granting of resource leases in some caribou habitat areas while recovery plans are developed. This is exactly what some conservation organizations are calling for, and criticizing the provincial government for not supporting. The Canadian Parks and Wildlife Society (CPAWS) said in a Sept. 26 news release that government and industry are not doing nearly enough to save the caribou. “When you look at the maps of the caribou locations based on radio telemetry, and the logging plans” says Helene Walsh in the CPAWS release, “it is as if the caribou herds are being deliberately targeted.”
That may be overstating the situation, but calling for a moratorium on logging in the territory of threatened caribou herds is not that far off what the caribou recovery team advocates.
But at this point the government does not seem willing to go so far.
“The only thing the minister refused to consider is a moratorium on leases,” says Heckbert.
There are plenty of less dramatic, but also important steps to be taken, some of which are already in process. One is a ‘best practices’ document produced by the recovery team, to which Heckbert says the oil & gas industry is responding well. It deals with access issues, reclamation of roads and the like. One area of success has been the reduction in seismic line impact, which has gone from the traditional eight-metre wide swaths down to 2 ½ metres and in some cases less than that.
Forest products companies such as Tolko Industries and Vanderwell Contractors - both of which have forest management agreements with the province that cover parts of the Slave Lake herd’s range - implement mitigation strategies according to the recovery plan recommendations. The strategies include scheduling logging to keep away from caribou habitat at crucial times of the year and to restrict access as much as possible. In Vanderwell’s case, the company has agreed not to schedule logging in certain sensitive areas for 20 years.
“We tried to target harvesting in the stand types he (Heckbert) felt were least valuable to caribou,” says Vanderwell forester Lorne Carson.
Will it work?
Time will tell, says Heckbert. In the meantime, Vanderwell is spending $18,000 on several GPS collars, to be fitted on caribou this winter. They’re much more expensive than the standard type of radio collar, but do their own recording, rather than simply emitting a signal that might or might not be picked up once a month by a pilot.
“Our plan for the GPS collars is....to see how caribou respond to cutting patterns,” says Heckbert. “Did we pick the right stands or wrong stands?”
In Tolko’s case, being a deciduous operator, it is largely out of the caribou picture. But not entirely, and managing for caribou is part of discussions currently in progress for renewal of the company’s detailed forest management plan - a document that will guide its management for the next 20 years.
Then there’s the issue of Tolko’s new Slave Lake mill. The company is going ahead with its new engineered wood products plant based on a conviction that there is a sustainable annual cut available in its FMA area that is considerably higher than previously allowed.
On the issue of the new higher harvest levels, “There was no discussion how we would handle cut levels in caribou habitat,” Heckbert says.
A proposed ‘by-pass road’ from Hwy. 88 across the muskeg country to the Mitsue Industrial Park east of Slave Lake is another issue Heckbert is concerned about. Proponents of the project cite safety concerns through Slave Lake and especially at the junction of Hwy. 88 and Hwy. 2, given the projected tripling of log haul traffic after Tolko’s new mill is finished in 2007. Diverting that industrial traffic makes sense, they say.
But looking at Heckbert’s map of caribou radio collar readings, it’s hard to see where such a road could go that wouldn’t take it right through the heart of caribou range. Speaking of the project, Heckbert told the public advisory committee in Slave Lake: “I expect to see a range of options. If the route is the same as proposed in 2003, the results would be predictable.”
Predictable decline seems to be the story of the past 30 years for most caribou herds in Alberta. Even in Banff National Park, where there is no industrial development, the herd is in danger of disappearing. But there are some of the same issues there, Heckbert says, such as roads, powerlines and recreational intrusion into caribou habitat.
Human activity and woodland caribou health, it seems, do not go together.

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