The Parkland Institute

Environment

The long road to wildlife recovery in Alberta

Man-made roads continue to threaten species

Anybody who has seen the sad sight of a rattlesnake squashed on a dusty prairie road can appreciate the fact that, while roads may meet some of the immediate requirements of an animal, they are not necessarily a good thing for that species.

Without a doubt, as Alberta becomes increasingly fragmented by industrial access, roads will play an enormous part in the future of wildlife, both endangered and common. Access management is increasingly being recognized as one essential tool in the management of species at risk in Alberta. It seems entirely likely that if it can ever be applied comprehensively, it will have an important role to play in the continued survival of a variety of species. But as that rattlesnake would attest were it in a suitable state to attest anything, it is important to keep in mind the whole picture.

The relationship between roads and the endangered Ord's kangaroo rat played a lead role in the recent Joint Review Panel hearing into proposals by EnCana to drill 1,275 new gas wells in Suffield National Wildlife Area, north of Medicine Hat. Kangaroo rats have very specific habitat requirements: they need dry sandy soils with sparse vegetation cover, particularly active sand dunes. In the past, periodic fires and passing bison herds ensured that areas of suitable sand dune habitat were kept open. But as the bison were exterminated and fire suppression became a common practice, available habitat for kangaroo rats became increasingly overgrown with vegetation.

And this is where the roads come in. Surely, EnCana scientists argued at the hearing, construction of industrial roads in the dry grasslands of Suffield creates bare sandy areas alongside, and so they must be good for kangaroo rats. "It's clear that Ord's Kangaroo Rat require blown-out dunes as one aspect of their habitat," said John Kansas, a member of the EnCana panel. "They also use edges of roads and steep banks along the river ... so any form of open sand adjacent to native prairie is fair game for Kangaroo Rat." Stephen Fudge, also an EnCana witness, took it a step further, responding to questions about levels of shallow gas activity: "Perhaps from an Ord's Kangaroo Rat (sic), there's not enough," he said.

Fortunately the Suffield Coalition, led by Alberta Wilderness Association (AWA), refused to allow these comments to pass unchallenged. Biologist Cleve Wershler pointed out that "[t]he COSEWIC (2006) status report indicates the trend toward increasing use of anthropogenic habitats (specifically roads in the National Wildlife Area), appears to be a threat to this species by providing low quality ‘sink' habitats in which mortality exceeds recruitment." As with that rattlesnake, although roadside bare sand may meet some immediate habitat requirements of kangaroo rats, any benefit is outweighed by the fact that rats from surrounding areas get killed on the road.

Environment Canada biologist Olaf Jensen also pointed out that kangaroo rats' poor survival and reproduction rates in roadside habitat are in part due to soil this species is at the extreme northern edge of its North American range, making it particularly susceptible to population fluctuations. It's not unusual for kangaroo rats in Suffield to lose 90 per cent of their population during the winter. High habitat quality is therefore extremely important to their survival in this area.

This conflict between roads and habitat has also recently surfaced in the province's on/off grizzly bear recovery process. This past fall, AWA was involved in one more in a seemingly endless series of Alberta government "stakeholder processes," this one looking for suggestions into how access management can be used in grizzly bear management. (Interestingly, there are very mixed messages coming from the department of Sustainable Resource Development as to whether the government is working towards grizzly recovery or grizzly management. Although the province has a Recovery Plan and, until recently had a Recovery Team, the word recovery is notably absent from recent releases.)

The 2008 Grizzly Bear Recovery Plan states unequivocally that "human use of access (specifically, motorized vehicle routes) is one of the primary threats to grizzly bear persistence." It goes on to say, "In the Alberta Central Rockies Ecosystem, 89 per cent of human-caused mortalities were within 500 m of a road on provincial lands, and in National Parks 100 per cent of human-caused mortalities ... were within 200 m of a road or trail."

In a sign that the government may just be beginning to show a willingness to grasp the bull by the horns and actually begin to deal with the problem of access in grizzly habitat, a series of maps has been produced, showing draft boundaries for core and secondary Grizzly Bear Conservation Areas in the province (though maps themselves do nothing to benefit grizzlies, of course). As recommended by the Recovery Plan, maximum open route densities of 0.6 km per sq-km would be set for core areas, though as yet there is no mechanism to implement these targets.

But there is more to the concept of "open route densities" than meets the eye. Reminiscent of the anti-gun-control lobby statement that "guns don't kill people: people do," industrial representatives in the grizzly recovery process argue that "roads don't kill grizzly bears: human access does." The argument goes that roads, in and of themselves, do not actually harm grizzlies: in fact, they create grizzly bear habitat. What kills bears is human use of access: the more chance there is of people and grizzlies meeting, in any of a variety of ways, the greater is the likelihood of bears ending up dead.

To some extent this is true. A dense stand of forest is not particularly good habitat for a grizzly, whereas a road is effectively a long thin forest clearing, allowing the growth of grasses, sedges, and berry-bearing bushes, all of which can be good food sources for grizzlies. But roads bring people, and people mean dead bears.

From an industrial perspective, this argument has been drawn out to suggest that limitations on future industrial access into grizzly bear habitat will be unnecessary if only those roads can be closed to public access. The physical roads will be there, but the access will not. In many cases, forestry or oil and gas companies do not want the liability and the responsibility for maintaining operational roads so that they can be used by recreational users.

While changing the default on new industrial access roads so that they became closed to public use would be a step in the right direction, there is no reason to think that it would be sufficient. Experience has shown that in the absence of effective enforcement, locked access gates will continue to be pulled out, and locks cut. Outside of specifically designated areas (protected areas or Forest Land Use Zones, for example), it is not illegal to be driving a vehicle on the other side of a locked gate. If it is physically possible to drive around the gate through the bush, then it is not illegal to do so.

It is also important to bear in mind that human access, particularly motorized access, impacts bears in a number of ways, not just through direct mortality. In the fall, grizzly bears are 100 per cent focused on finding food. It takes a lot of roots and berries to keep grizzly bears going, and if they can feed effectively, they have a good chance of building up the fat reserves to survive the winter. If feeding is curtailed, their chance of survival diminishes. The same applies to females building up sufficient resources to produce cubs. The fact that grizzlies in southern Alberta produce less cubs less often than anywhere else in North America is partly due to habitat issues - they don't have the super-rich fall food sources like salmon or whitebark pine seeds that other grizzlies have. But it may also partly be a function of being continually disturbed, or "displaced," so that they go into hibernation in less than optimum condition.

While stakeholders in the access management meetings came from a diverse range of sectors, there was almost universal agreement that what is needed more than anything is a legislative framework to enforce access regulations, as well as the enforcement staff to ensure compliance. Both are currently desperately lacking. As with so many recent government stakeholder processes, participants left with cautious optimism that important issues were finally being recognized and discussed, tempered with a realization that it is only when these discussions begin to translate to real, measurable landscape changes that wildlife will begin to see any benefits.

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