Recovery, A Long Time Coming

May 13th 2009

Chalk one up for mountain caribou

From the Spring 2009 edition of the Conservation Northwest Quarterly by Joe Scott

The mountain caribou recovery plan, legislated earlier this year, protects more than 2.2 million hectares (5.4 million acres) from logging and associated road building. That’s an area eight times the size of the entire North Cascades National Park. The plan also prohibits motorized recreation across 1.5 million hectares (3.7 million acres) of caribou habitat.

The practical effect of the recovery effort is that more than 90% of mountain caribou high suitability winter habitat will be protected from the most pernicious forms of habitat destruction.

Despite some serious holes, the recovery plan is a huge win for these amazing animals and their globally unique inland rainforest habitat. Mountain caribou are a rare type of woodland caribou that live only in the Columbia Mountains in a huge swath of habitat on the western flank of the Rockies that extends from near Prince George BC across the US border into Idaho, Washington, and Montana. Mountain caribou depend on the old-growth forests and mountainous terrain for food and security from predators.

Caribou biologists are generally positive about the plan. Says Trevor Kinley, Mountain Caribou Science Team biologist, “The announced plan does not aim for full recovery across the complete range of mountain caribou. However, it does represent conscious, transparent choices based on the best available information. If fully implemented, I believe we will see significant recovery across most of the range of mountain caribou over the next few decades.”

The recovery plan has an initial goal of restoring mountain caribou numbers to pre-1995 levels of approximately 2,600 animals and identifies a suite of actions to achieve those numbers. Caribou scientists say that some herds will not be self-sustaining in the foreseeable future because their habitat has been so fragmented by industrial activities and development that it has deeply altered predator/prey relationships and made predator control necessary. Snowmachine tracks in caribou habitatConservationists say that the plan comes with a major “IOU” for caribou: Protections against mineral exploration development, snowmobiling, and heli-skiing in critical habitat are still outstanding—unfinished business that presents an unnecessary risk to the recovery of the animals.

The Mountain Caribou Project, a coalition of ten Canadian and US conservation organizations including Conservation Northwest, has been working with and pressuring government to protect critically endangered mountain caribou for the past six years, primarily by protecting their old-growth forest habitat.

Human activities, predominantly logging and associated road building, have eaten big moth holes in the caribou old forest security blanket. As a result the animals have declined precipitously in the last decade as industrial scale logging has pushed further into BC’s inland rainforest mountains.

It’s significant that a pro-business government in a province without an endangered species law has legislated a far-reaching single species recovery plan with such a large amount of protected habitat. And in so doing has given wide latitude to the science experts who know the animals and their needs. But it’s clear that industry interests from logging to heli-skiing to mining had their collective feet on the recovery plan brakes.

As it is not backstopped by a strong legal mandate, the plan stops short of what caribou will likely need to overcome the most serious threat to their existence—human activity. Biologists will need to kill predators to protect some herds for an indefinite time.

Caribou survived the Pleistocene Ice Age extinctions that erased mammoths, mastodons, short-faced bears, ice-age camels, and many others after making their way to North America over the Bering land bridge thousands of years ago.

Globally, caribou are now under assault from a variety of human-caused threats, with climate change being the latest. As the southernmost herds of caribou on earth, the mountain variety may be particularly vulnerable where their habitat is most impacted. But these animals have adapted to a harsh environment in ways that no other animal can. They are resilient but not invulnerable.

As habitat specialists in a changing world, mountain caribou have little margin for error. And hopefully the BC government understands the implications of their loss and the further steps needed to prevent it. That would be something of a sea change in BC politics and policy.

Caribou deserve nothing less. But ultimately it’s the public who will benefit from diverse resident wildlife and rich protected habitat.