The Best Way to Save Caribou Can’t Just Be Killing Wolves

The proposed road is called the Anahim Connector and its proponent, British Columbia’s Ministry of Forests, says it would be a “secondary fire-exit route” linking isolated First Nations and rural communities in the remote Anahim Lake area with Vanderhoof and Highway 16 to the northeast.

But it would be much more than just an optional escape route for residents in the event of an unwelcome wildfire.

Approximately 20 kilometres long and located in a remote region of the vast and sparsely populated Chilcotin Plateau, the road would also link two existing mainline logging roads, making it easier for timber-starved forest companies to cut down and extract some of the region’s last remaining natural forests.

And it would do something else that the Forestry Ministry, under pressure to expedite logging permits and stop the hemorrhage of forest sector job losses, does not go into any detail about on its web pages devoted to the project.

It would slice between the Tweedsmuir and Itcha-Ilgachuz woodland caribou herds, two populations whose numbers are already vastly diminished due to decades of logging activity.

“This is going to be bad for caribou. I don’t know how bad. I don’t know when the bad is going to happen. But I’m basing that opinion on lots of evidence,” Chris Johnson, a leading authority on woodland caribou, told The Tyee in response to questions about the proposed road’s impact.

Johnson is a registered professional biologist and professor at the University of Northern British Columbia who is widely cited by his peers for his research on woodland caribou. He is also a member of the Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife in Canada, the body that makes recommendations to the federal government on threatened and endangered wildlife species.

Across B.C., caribou populations have declined precipitously and in a troubling number of cases been extirpated, meaning they are gone altogether from the forests they once inhabited.

In each case, the declines follow a sad, well-trodden path that Johnson and others know too well.

Resource roads are punched into new areas of forest. Logging ensues. For a brief time following logging, the opened areas are attractive foraging grounds for moose and deer. As deer and moose move in, wolves do too. The wolves use the roads to more easily track and kill their prey. Any caribou in the area then fall prey to the wolves as well. Because caribou cows have only one calf at a time, while moose may have two and deer three, caribou numbers plummet rapidly. Caribou “recovery” efforts then focus on killing wolves, while the logging and road-building that created the problem in the first place typically carries on.

Whether we can move off of this well-worn path to extinction by making a paradigm shift in the way B.C.’s forests are managed remains to be seen.

On the one hand, the provincial government says it is committed to a new biodiversity and ecosystem health framework for the province, one that will ensure the “conservation and management of ecosystem health” across a spectacularly diverse array of ecosystems.

On the other, Forests Minister Ravi Parmar’s marching orders from Premier David Eby include ensuring “the prompt, efficient and effective delivery” of logging and road-building permits.

Which is a road to ruin for caribou.

Two once-robust herds

Decades ago, caribou in the Itcha and Ilgachuz mountains didn’t seem to be headed for trouble. There was plenty of roadless forest in proximity to the ancient volcanic peaks that comprised both mountain ranges. This meant that resident caribou were relatively free to roam and spread out with little risk of high predation as they fed on their favoured food, terrestrial lichen.

Following seasonal cycles, the caribou stayed high in the mountains in the late spring, summer and autumn months, moving down into the surrounding lower-elevation forests when snowpacks grew too deep up high and they were no longer able to dig or crater for lichens.

As recently as the mid-1980s, the Itcha-Ilgachuz caribou population was considered so robust that biologists captured, tranquilized and transported dozens of individual caribou from the herd to help prop up populations that were in trouble elsewhere, such as the Charlotte Alplands herd in the nearby Coast Mountains.

As that relocation effort occurred, road-building and logging had begun to accelerate as B.C. responded to the first of a number of large mountain pine beetle infestations.

In the face of that explosion in logging, environmental activism grew and the NDP government responded by creating numerous new protected areas, including Itcha Ilgachuz Provincial Park in 1995.

The 112,000-hectare park was then and still is billed as a refuge for “the largest herd of woodland caribou in southern B.C.”

A dire situation for caribou in BC

Outside the park, a “special management zone” was also established where industrial activities including logging were permitted but where such activities were to be conducted in ways that posed less risk to vulnerable wildlife species like caribou.

But the park and surrounding zone failed to protect the iconic wildlife species. In 2003, there were an estimated 2,800 caribou in the park and its environs. That number, according to a recent and partial provincial government survey, is now just 551, which means the herd’s numbers have plummeted 80 per cent in just over 20 years.

The most recently published provincewide inventory of caribou, conducted in 2021, revealed a dire situation across much of B.C.

Out of a total of 55 populations, seven have disappeared altogether, with herds gone from their once-safe refugia in portions of the Rocky, Monashee, Purcell and Selkirk mountains, as well as in the immediate environs of Prince George, among other places.

Another 19 populations were listed as decreasing in number.

This included the Itcha-Ilgachuz herd, the nearby Rainbows herd (so named for the Rainbow mountains, a third volcanic range) and the Tweedsmuir herd. The proposed Anahim Connector would bring further logging activity and the roads required to facilitate that logging closer to all three of those populations.

On the positive side of the ledger, seven herds were listed as increasing in number and another eight were considered stable.

This did not mean, however, that the populations were healthy.

The Telkwa herd, for example, consisted of just 33 animals, a number that, while up, was still so low that provincial government scientists considered it to be “at continued risk of extirpation.”

Killing wolves and other extreme measures

In some cases, herds attained an “increasing” or “stable” status thanks only to wolf culls and, to a lesser extent, cougar kills.

The government took even more extraordinary measures to protect numbers in the Moberly and Columbia North herds — caribou cows and their calves were placed in pens to shield them from wolves.

Near Mackenzie, the Kennedy Siding herd is actively fed by humans in the hope that this will “lead to greater health and population growth.”

A video camera has been placed at the feeding station. Nine in the morning is often a good time to tune in.

In 2022, Chris Johnson was the lead author of a peer-reviewed article in the journal Conservation Science and Practice that explored both the efficacy and ethics of “intensive” predator management — in other words, killing large numbers of wolves to save threatened caribou.

The article noted that woodland caribou were formally recognized as a species at risk when Canada’s Species at Risk Act came into force 20 years earlier in 2003.

This formal recognition did nothing, however, to stem the tide of forest losses as provincial governments in B.C. and elsewhere continued to sanction logging, oil and gas and other extractive enterprises.

“We are now at a point where intensive or manipulative conservation actions are the only options to stave off extirpation of small and rapidly declining populations,” Johnson and the study’s two other authors — Justina Ray, a senior scientist with the Wildlife Conservation Society Canada, and Martin-Hugues St-Laurent, an animal ecologist at the Centre for Northern Studies — wrote.

“Even within protected areas, which in parts of caribou range are isolated and surrounded by roads and other human activities, conservation professionals must resort to predator control and other forms of potentially controversial management.”

To work, wolf-kill programs must be aggressive and prolonged, the trio reported, citing field studies that concluded shooting between 65 per cent and 85 per cent of all wolves over large areas of land for four or more years may be needed to stave off extirpation of caribou populations. Even those measures “might be insufficient for high density or fecund populations of wolves that are supported by abundant prey.”

Over winter 2019-20 and winter 2020-21, provincial government scientists guiding B.C.’s Caribou Recovery Program applied that thinking in the vicinity of the Itcha and Ilgachuz mountains, where 113 wolves were “removed,” a euphemistic word for shot and killed.

In the winter of 2023-24, a further 59 wolves were killed in the vicinity of the mountains, leaving approximately 21 wolves alive in an area covering 25,540 square kilometres.

At approximately the same time, a wolf kill was carried out to stave off further sharp declines in the number of caribou in the Tweedsmuir herd with 33 wolves removed from the landscape, leaving behind a population of 12 wolves in a 15,785-square-kilometre area.

In both cases, wolf densities fell for the time being to roughly one wolf for every 1,000 square kilometres.

Roads kill

In the short term, the wolf kills met the immediate objective of stemming the tide of localized caribou losses. The Itcha-Ilgachuz herd is now considered stable, while the current trend line is toward increasing numbers in the neighbouring Tweedsmuir herd.

But the central challenge remains: What is to be done about habitat loss, the root cause of caribou declines and that of many other forest-dependent wildlife species as well?

As Rick Page, a wildlife biologist who once worked for B.C.’s Ministry of Forests, has said, “In North America, every herd of caribou has declined once the forest has been logged — no exceptions — over the course of the last two centuries. And in eastern North America most of those herds are now extinct.”

Is it possible that the hyped promise of “ecosystem-based management” of B.C.’s forests might hold a key to caribou survival?

This question was recently explored in another peer-reviewed study led last year by Suzanne Stevenson, a wildlife biologist in the UNBC natural resources and environmental studies graduate program, and co-authored by Johnson and two other scientists.

The team began by noting what the objective of ecosystem-based management is: to log in ways that mimic natural disturbances like wildfires.

The thinking is that if this is done in a disciplined way, a diversity of plant and animal life should persist over time. In the case of caribou, that would mean enough mature forest and lichens over time to maintain their numbers.

But the scientists noted that even with this approach, caribou numbers can fall.

That’s because, when forests burn in wildfires, patches of trees, shrubs and other plant life are typically left behind in burned areas and survive the fires, providing important wildlife habitat.

The “complex mosaic” left behind in forests following wildfires is not replicated in logging, which typically removes all of the trees over areas of land varying from a few hectares to 150 hectares in size and, in some notable cases, far larger clearings than that.

Moreover, logging blocks tend to be clustered, with the most “productive” stands of trees targeted for logging and most if not all of the trees, and the understorey plants and animal life they support, removed as well. Wildfires are not so discriminating.

“In comparison to wildfires, harvesting [logging] usually results in more homogeneity with large areas of regeneration interspersed with fragments of forest,” Stevenson and her colleagues found.

These critical differences explain why caribou respond one way to wildfires and another to logging.

Following fires, caribou tend not to move about in the burned areas themselves but continue to inhabit the adjacent or nearby forests.

Following logging, on the other hand, caribou tend to shift or abandon their home ranges entirely and may be absent from such settings for up to 40 years.

While a shift to ecosystem-based logging might leave more patches of forest behind to “mimic” what wildfires do, the big problem remains: roads.

Roads are unnatural features that have no corollary in nature. And the evidence on roads is “abundant,” Stevenson and her colleagues reported. Build them and caribou numbers fall.

While roads can be deactivated following logging, the practice is expensive and is not typically done quickly enough following logging, thus enabling predators to more easily track and kill their prey.

But the biggest challenge with implementing a more widespread program of ecosystem-based logging may be the political pressure to maintain and even to increase logging rates.

If economic concerns continue to guide provincial government resource development, ecosystem-based management will fail because it will perpetuate the building of more roads and “unnatural” logging rates that exceed the disturbances associated with wildfires, Johnson and others warn.

Which inevitably leads back to killing wolves, penning vulnerable caribou cows and their calves, caribou-feeding and other measures.

Collectively, Johnson and his colleagues noted in their report on the efficacy and ethics of wolf kills, such actions amount to “a bridge to nowhere” if they are not accompanied by meaningful efforts to deal with the core problem behind caribou losses and those of other wildlife species as well — habitat loss.

‘We can’t do everything on the same piece of land’

As previously reported in The Tyee, avoiding a collapse in biological diversity while maintaining a reasonably large area of land for logging companies to operate in might be accomplished by embarking on a comprehensive zoning exercise of B.C.’s forests.

One possible zoning scenario would see one zone of primary or natural forests never before subject to industrial logging and road-building fully protected and ruled off limits to industrial logging and other extractive enterprises.

In a second zone, where logging and road-building have already occurred, lands would be restored to try to bring wildlife back. This would involve a range of costly actions, including decommissioning logging roads and thinning trees extensively in densely stocked, biologically depauperate tree plantations. After all that expensive work was done, the lands would need to be left alone to fully heal and remain off limits to future logging.

Lastly, there would be a third zone where growing trees for wood to be used in making forest products would be the primary use.

In the absence of such a comprehensive effort, Jeff Werner, a wildlife ecologist and adjunct professor at the University of Northern British Columbia, believes that continued wildlife losses are certain.

“We can’t do everything on the same piece of land. You can’t maximize two-by-four production and have owls. You can’t maximize fibre and expect to have functional food webs,” Werner said in a 2023 talk at the university, steps from where caribou once did and no longer roam.

In B.C. today, the network of resource roads used by the logging, mining and oil and gas industries is so vast that if you took all those roads and stitched them together, you could drive for 700,000 kilometres, a distance equal to circling the planet 17 times.

The Anahim Connector would extend that network a tiny bit more while enabling more clearcut logging, which Mike Morris, recently retired MLA for the riding of Prince George-Mackenzie, says is ultimately responsible for the collapse of the iconic wildlife species and much more.

Quitting clear cutting, Morris told The Tyee, “is the simplest thing we could do to save endangered habitat, and also it would reinvent the forest sector.”

“Clear cutting is the fast track to eliminating jobs and the fast track to eliminating biodiversity,” Morris added. “It’s the fast track to exacerbating climate change. And it’s the fast track to increasing the severity and magnitude of flooding and wildfires.”

In response to questions filed by The Tyee, the Ministry of Forests said it has yet to make a decision about whether it will go ahead with the Anahim Connector.

But it did acknowledge that the issue of threats to caribou in the region is on the radar.

“The planning phase is now complete, and the proposed project is in the consultation phase with impacted First Nations,” the ministry said in an email. “This includes designing a caribou and wildlife impact mitigation strategy.”

The ministry did not elaborate on what such a mitigation strategy would be. But if the past is a guide to the future, mitigation could mean more wolves killed, more roads and more logging.

As for specific details on what the government has heard from various parties about the Anahim Connector, the ministry directed that all inquiries be made through a formal freedom of information request.