Tag: nature

Silence In The Park

[originally published in 2013, this is extracted from my book Our Place [https://rmbooks.com/products/our-place ].

I’m posting it in light of a newly-published study by Jonathan Farr that documents a 33% reduction in the area of alpine meadows in Banff over less than a quarter of a century. You can read Cathy Ellis’ article about it here: https://www.rmoutlook.com/banff/i-was-blown-away-study-shows-climate-change-dramatically-shrinking-banffs-alpine-meadows-11052721 ]

Wading a cold river in the rain was not how I wanted to start day three of a nine-day wilderness trip in Banff National Park, but there was no alternative. Since my last visit, 35 years earlier, Parks Canada had demolished the bridge across the Panther River and re-christened the fire road as a trail.

When I first hiked the Cascade Trail in 1976 it was a good gravel road all the way from Bankhead, near Lake Minnewanka, to the Red Deer River. Park wardens and horse wranglers regularly drove its 80 km between the town of Banff and the Ya Ha Tinda horse ranch east of the park. They still used the Spray and Brewster fire roads too. Years earlier, in fact, the road sometimes opened for public use; my grandfather used to drive in to fish lakes that are now a two-day hike from the trailhead.

Thirty-five years after my first visit, however, the road was grown in with willows, hairy wildrye and dryas. Mine were the first human footprints this year on what had become a seldom-used single-track trail. Yesterday I had waded Cuthead and Wigmore Creeks several times, growing increasingly nostalgic for culverts, and today—June 26, 2011—I had my first major river to ford.

Icy water tugged hungrily at my knees as I picked a downstream route across a gravelly riffle. I emerged safely, feet aching, into a tangle of rain-dripping willows. Upslope from the willows the vegetation opened into a burned-off pine forest with lush tussocks of rough fescue—Alberta’s provincial grass—and clumps of healthy young aspens.

Sitting on a fallen log to trade wet runners for dry socks and boots, I reflected on how much had changed since my last visit here. That first hike was at the start of my career with Parks Canada; this one was at the end. In the late 1970s I was a Canadian Wildlife Service (CWS) biologist working on the original wildlife inventories of the mountain national parks. A third of a century later I retired as superintendent of Banff, Canada’s oldest, most revered and most controversial national park. 

On that first solo foray along this route I saw no rough fescue and no young aspens. Heavy, sustained grazing by the elk that over-populated the park through much of the twentieth century had repeatedly killed young aspen sprouts and suppressed the most palatable grass species. Never having known a Banff that wasn’t defined by grazed-down meadows, aging aspens black with scars as high as an elk could reach, and fire roads extending back into nearly every valley, however, nothing about that trip had seemed unnatural to me. It was the Banff I knew.

Some years later, I helped biologist Geoff Holroyd compile final reports on what our CWS study teams had learned through many months of measuring and counting just about anything that moved anywhere in Banff and Jasper National Parks. The ecological land classification of which our wildlife inventory was part was the most exhaustive study of ecological conditions ever undertaken in the mountain parks. By its conclusion, I had learned that lovely scenery can conceal a lot of ecological problems.

And we hadn’t even begun to think seriously about what climate change might mean to Banff.

The sad state to which the park’s aspen groves, willow thickets and fescue grasslands had deteriorated by the early 1980s was partly the result of too many elk and partly the result of too little fire. The too-many-elk part of the problem resulted from too few predators, especially wolves. They were then only beginning to re-colonize the southern Rockies after having been poisoned and shot out during the 1950s and 1960s. Bears, too, can be important predators on elk calves. Bear studies by Stephen Herrero, David Hamer and Mike Gibeau, however, showed that the park’s many roads and poorly located trails were displacing grizzly and black bears from their most productive habitats and exposing them to increased risk of conflicts with people and collisions with vehicles and trains.

The too-little-fire part of the problem had a lot to do with the determination with which Parks Canada and neighbouring agencies fought back whenever fires flared up after lightning storms or human mishaps. Fire is among the most important agents of ecosystem renewal in western Canada. Lodgepole pine, aspen, rough fescue and countless other species rely on wildfires to put potassium back into the soil, open up the vegetation canopy, knock back competing plants and produce ideal conditions for regeneration. But, by the 1980s, fire had become almost a stranger to the forests and grasslands it had helped sustain for millennia.

The Cascade Trail I was following, in fact, was originally a fire road built so crews could quickly extinguish backcountry blazes.

As I set off up Snow Creek along the former fire road on this June morning I was surrounded with the blackened spars of dead lodgepole pines. Parks Canada’s fire crews had not fought these fires—on the contrary, they had ignited them. Since the late 1980s Banff’s fire specialists have been recognized as international leaders in the science of using prescribed fire to restore ecosystem health.

As an ecologist, I was gratified to see the results—a patchwork of hillside grasslands, aspen woodland, patches of unburned pine forest and lush shrubbery where three and a half decades earlier I had hiked through a monotony of pine trees. As a hiker, however, it proved a bit disconcerting. A short way up the trail, I rounded a bend to see a grizzly bear eating sweetvetch roots 60 metres away. A quick glance around confirmed that, should events demand that I climb a tree today, I’d be out of luck. They had all been burned through. 

The bear, however, fled the moment he spotted me. I don’t know how many human beings he had seen in his life, but I was almost certainly the first one he met in 2011.

During the first eight days of this wilderness pilgrimage the only sign of humans that I saw was a single horse track. And yet, I knew the park was crowded with people. More than three million visitors flock to Banff each year. There were major special events scheduled for the area near the town of Banff during the time of my hike, and the campgrounds were full. Yet mine were the only tracks amid this mountain beauty. It seemed strange.

A long walk in the lonely wilds is a good opportunity for contemplation. Reflection has a particular edge and poignancy when it comes at the end of one’s career. What, if anything, had Parks Canada gotten right during my working years there? Several days later, when I finally arrived at Lake Louise, I had concluded that we had managed to get a lot of things right. 

Banff is in a wilder and more natural state today than back when I first discovered it. Wilder, because fire roads like the Cascade have been closed to motor vehicles and turned back into trails, while at the same time unnecessary facilities and fences were pulled out of front-country valleys to remove obstacles to wildlife movement. More natural, in part, because fire and wolves are back. The ecosystem has responded with fewer elk, more aspens and fescue and greater vegetation diversity. More natural, too, because bears no longer feed in garbage dumps, and in foraging for natural foods across the mountain landscape they are far less likely to die on the Trans-Canada Highway now that it has been fenced and fitted with crossing structures. Grizzlies die unnatural deaths today at less than half the rate they did in the early 1980s.

Clearly, the elements of Banff National Park’s ecosystems that respond to park management decisions such as whether to close or fence roads, ignite prescribed fires, protect wolf dens or open up corridors of secure habitat for sensitive species such as grizzlies, cougars and wolves had all improved. Challenges remain—like too-frequent deaths of bears from collisions with speeding CP Rail trains and the spread of invasive plants and fish—but on the whole, today’s Banff is in better shape than it was when I joined the organization that manages it.

I should have felt good, but I didn’t. 

Banff and Canada’s other national parks face bigger challenges than Parks Canada can solve by itself. Global changes, resulting from the thousands of decisions people make daily across the continent, threaten to overwhelm even the best cared-for of park ecosystems.

I was painfully aware that Banff had recently seen the loss of its last caribou—the first large species extirpated since park establishment. I also knew that Alberta glaciers have shrunken more than 25 per cent in the past 35 years – a worrisome omen of impending water challenges. But other changes I saw on my 2011 hike led me to suspect that global environmental change is causing less obvious, but more pervasive, ecological damage throughout the park.

From its earliest days, flower-strewn timberline meadows have been among Banff National Park’s defining elements. Up where forests end and the alpine emerges, generations of artists have been enthralled and hikers inspired by the beauty of timberline. Clumps of subalpine fir with gnarled old larches and whitebark pines frame almost impossibly lush openings full of glacier lilies, windflower, paintbrush and valerian. The first time I broke out into Banff’s timberline country I felt like I had arrived in Middle Earth—it was hard to conceive of so much beauty set against such peaks.

Snow Creek summit was one such place. After 35 years I couldn’t wait to see it again. To my dismay, however, its timberline meadows had almost vanished. Openings once full of greenery and wildflowers were now packed with dense young subalpine fir trees. Higher still, thousands of bushy saplings dotted what before had been open alpine meadows. The late-lingering snows, frequent summer frosts and wet soils that used to keep the forest at bay can no longer be relied upon, in a time of rapid climate change.

Those high meadows, I soon realized, are filling with trees almost everywhere. A defining element of Banff National Park’s unique mountain aesthetic—and a vital habitat for many kinds of wildlife—is shrinking as forests expand upslope. While these high-elevation meadows can be expected to migrate further uphill, they need soil, and soil develops very slowly on high mountainsides. Meantime, the meadows are increasingly squeezed between advancing forests below and rocky, soil-less ridges. A warming climate is quietly erasing Banff’s timberline flower meadows.

Snow Creek summit also awakened me to another change I might have missed if I hadn’t let so much time lapse between visits.

Many of Banff National Park’s higher valleys have a sort of male-pattern baldness. The sides of the valleys are forested, but the valley floors are open. The valley bottoms are unfriendly to trees because of their high soil moisture and frequent frosts from the cold air that pools there at night. Streams in these valleys meander through mosaics of grassland, dwarf birch tangles and willow thickets.

Columbian ground squirrels live in the grassy areas and are an important food source for predators such as golden eagles and coyotes. Brewer’s and white-crowned sparrows thrive in the patchy habitats. Moose, elk, grizzly bears and, until recently, caribou rely on the lush meadow forage.

Upper Snow Creek had those sorts of meadows a third of a century ago. Today, however, the grassy parts are hard to find. The dwarf birch and willows are taller, and have filled in most of the open spaces. Charred stems show where park fire crews have tried to burn the shrubbery back, but to no avail.

Researchers recently learned that increased carbon dioxide levels in the air give some woody shrubs a growth advantage over grasses and forbs. If that’s what is happening along Snow Creek and the other subalpine stream meadows in Banff National Park, or even if the causes are as simple as warming soils or changing snowpacks, then it would represent another loss of ecological diversity traceable back to pervasive atmospheric changes. 

These sorts of changes may have contributed to the disappearance of Banff’s woodland caribou. Never abundant after Alberta built forestry roads that fragmented their habitat outside the park and improved access for poachers, the Banff part of the herd dropped from 20 or so in the latter part of the 20th century to only five in 2009. All five died that winter in an avalanche. Biologists, however, suspect that wolf predation may have brought their numbers so critically low in the first place. 

Caribou avoid predators by staying in remote areas where the snow is deep. Frequent hard winters used to kill off deer and force elk to migrate to low-elevation winter ranges east of the caribou. Today’s gentle winters enable more deer and elk to survive, in turn supporting higher numbers of wolves than would have been normal in the past. That need not be a problem for caribou, which winter in high valleys whose deep snow used to discourage wolves. The increased frequency of mild winters, unfortunately, means that wolves can now travel much more widely thanks to a shallower, denser snow pack. Even before that final accident, climate change had probably already doomed Banff’s caribou.

On my original 1976 hike I had hoped to see a caribou. This time I knew I wouldn’t.

Perhaps most troubling, however, was the stillness. Mountain songbirds are at their most vocal in late June. But day after day I hiked through a sodden stillness broken only occasionally by the song of a kinglet, Brewer’s sparrow, hermit thrush or robin. Olive-sided flycatchers were common in the recently burned forests, but some species were completely missing. The barn swallows that once nested under the eaves of every patrol cabin were gone. The businesslike chant of MacGillivray’s warbler was nowhere to be heard.

I contacted Geoff Holroyd at the CWS when I got back. He confirmed that counts of many migratory songbird species are down across most of the continent. Even in protected places such as Banff National Park their numbers have declined, but it’s because of things happening elsewhere. Many die during their night-time migrations when they get trapped in the lights with which cities, casinos and airports fill the skies. Many thousands are killed by pet cats or collisions with windows. Others can no longer find resting or feeding spots now eliminated by urban sprawl, agricultural intensification or development. Pollutants affect their health and reproductive success. Climate changes add to the stress of migration by exposing birds to unexpected weather and altered habitats. 

For all the continuing improvements in Parks Canada’s ecosystem management, Banff National Park’s timberline meadows are shrinking, its subalpine grasslands are being overwhelmed with woody shrubs and the changing landscape is going increasingly silent. And nobody seems to be noticing.

That the causes lie almost entirely outside the park doesn’t get Parks Canada off the hook. Canada’s national parks are dedicated to the people of Canada for their benefit, enjoyment and education, subject to the requirement to keep them unimpaired for future generations. 

The enjoyment part is no problem; millions of Canadians go home happy from the parks each year. But the education part requires that they also go home with new insights or understanding about how ecosystems work and how their daily choices affect the earth’s atmosphere and ecosystems – for better or worse. Without that, it’s unclear how Canada, or Canadians, get lasting benefits from those visits. Nor, for that matter, how the parks themselves can benefit—since the global forces threatening to impair those parks are the cumulative effect of decisions made by those same visitors, and their neighbours, at home.

It’s at home, not during our brief visits to national parks, that we Canadians leave lights on in high-rise buildings, putting more carbon dioxide into the air from the wasted energy while dooming migrating songbirds to death by exhaustion in urban light traps. It’s at home where we choose whether to buy gas-guzzlers or fuel-efficient cars. It’s between park visits when we decide between rapid and reckless development of tar sands or more frugal approaches to the exploitation of our boreal forests and the petroleum beneath them. Our most important decisions as consumers, and as voting citizens, are made during day-to-day life.

National parks exist at the will of Canadians—they give expression to our collective sense that nature matters, that our heritage gives us meaning, that some places are so special that they should be passed on like family heirlooms to those who come after us. But they also exist at the mercy of Canadians. 

During my 35 years working in western Canada’s national parks, the number of visitors to those parks more than doubled. Some environmental groups argue that’s a bad thing; some tourism groups think it’s great. It could be either. It all depends on what new insights, understanding and motivations those visitors take home with them. Parks Canada’s core mandate says that visitors are to be educated. And if parks are threatened with impairment, then Parks Canada is mandated to avert it. Those two responsibilities are flip sides of the same coin, because the only hope for wise decisions about land use, energy consumption and climate policy is an educated, ecologically literate Canadian population.

.

It is Canada Day, 2011, when I finally arrive at the Trans-Canada Highway near Lake Louise. Countless people are streaming through the scenery, many on their way to or from celebrations of this place we call Canada—a place whose nature we honour and purport to protect in places called national parks. None, I suspect, are aware of the silence in the woods, the shrinking meadows, the missing caribou. Most will go home feeling good about their national park. Far too few, I fear, will go home transformed or enlightened about the nature of their Canada, its ecosystems, its climate—and their choices as citizens.

It appears that, for the most part, Parks Canada got ecosystem management right by the end of its first century. The critical next challenge is ecological literacy. Our parks won’t last their next century without it. We might not either.

Robin Song

Mornings now are full of robins, some high in the weeping birch where they glow in the sunrise, others in the shadowed backyard oak, but most of them hidden in the big spruce trees that are scattered through the neighbourhoods. Later they will drop into mountain ash trees to feed on wizened fruit, or explore snow-free patches of ground to hunt awakening insects, but at first light they huddle in their roosts and sing together.

Some sing the familiar territorial robin song but most sing variants, like a kind of avian jazz improvisation. Collectively, it’s like a frenzied chorus of excitement but if you spot one, as often as not it will seem entranced, nearly immobile. Only its beak moves.

What are they singing for?

Biologists tell us that birdsong a functional thing: an expression of territoriality. Birds, we are told, sing to warn others to stay away, and in doing so they maximize the survival prospects of their mate and offspring during each short breeding season. It has survival value.  But this is clearly not that; these birds are still en route to their summer homes. The collective cacophony that fills each half-lit morning and evening is from dozens of birds at once, temporarily massed in the riparian woods along the Highwood River as they participate in an annual robin festival which, clearly, fills them with emotion so intense that it spills over into song.  There is nothing territorial about it at all.

Those birds seem to sing simply from the excitement of migration, the thrill of waking to another day of adventuring back across their continent, en masse.  Migration is a great robin tradition, conducted en masse. It stirs hearts to song.

I’m just guessing at that; how are we to know?  We live our own strange lives. But armies have marching songs and families travel to folk festivals and I remember singing in choirs when I was a boy — those moments when a hundred voices would rise into a crescendo of harmony that filled our hundred hearts with glory.  To no useful purpose.  And certainly not to assert a right to a breeding territory. Mostly it was just to revel in the joy and beauty of song — because, like robins, we could.

On the warmer evenings I sometimes take a drink and a blanket with me down to the riverside. There I settle myself into a folding chair and watch the valley fill with shadow as the water murmurs and chatters past me: river song. For the last hour of each day, pairs of geese pass overhead.  Having spent the day on their new nesting territories along the river, they head down-valley at dusk to join up into temporary flocks again. I keep planning to go in search of them to find out what that’s all about, but have yet to do it. Probably it’s feeding time in the big fields.  Or perhaps they spend the night together on the downstream reservoir before returning in twos and fours to their riverside homes in the morning.  But there they go, each evening, enacting a daily ritual that is part of being a goose — looking forward, clearly, to gathering with friends and neighbours for a while, because that is how geese socialize.

When I was younger, I went out most evenings too, in search of other people.  Sometimes to a party, occasionally to a bar, other times simply to wander around downtown.  It was part of being a young adult human in a big city. I did it because I wanted to be around others; it gave me pleasure.

When I started paying attention to those goose couples and their evening flights, I found myself wondering why they did it — what survival value those flights have for them. On further reflection I found myself wondering why I automatically assumed it must have a functional value.  Why do we think that way?  We seem to have conditioned ourselves to look at other animals and explain their appearance, their behaviours and their life patterns in terms of survival value.  In doing that, we reduce them to living mechanisms and elevate ourselves to the only beings whose lives have meaning beyond simple survival.  Well, that’s certainly handy for us; it absolves a lot of sins. Think of all the birds that live and die in cages — not by their choices but by ours.

We say birds with brilliant plumages are colourful because it helps them attract mates or distract predators from their drab-coloured mates.  We say birds with drab plumages are drab because it helps them hide. Birds sing to mark nesting territories. Birds migrate to escape bad weather or to find seasonal food sources.  Everything, in an understanding of nature shaped by Descartian objectivism and Darwinian theory, has adaptive value.  There is no room for spontaneous joy or simple pleasure in that objective, mechanistic view of nature;  things do what they do simply to survive. It’s all DNA and design — for other creatures. Grim.

After a lifetime of observation and reflection, however, I have to believe we have schooled ourselves wrong. Animals are not simply assemblages of genes that sort themselves out into pre-configured behaviours that help them perpetuate the species.  Animals are beings like ourselves, with complex social lives, ceremonies, relationships and simple pleasures. They don’t just survive; they live. They have fun. They feel sorrow.  They adventure.

Late one summer afternoon I sat on a log beside the Panther River in the high backcountry of Banff National Park. There was an eagle nest near the top of a nearby cliff.  An eagle appeared to the north, so high it was just a speck in the sky.  As it drew near, something separated from it and began to plummet toward the earth.  It was too small at that distance to make out what it was — probably a dead marmot or ground squirrel.  The eagle twisted into a breathless dive, carving a crazy horizontal arc out of the blue, spiralling down from the sky, intersecting at last with its plummeting prey.  With perfect timing, it scooped its victim out of the air and carved a sharp curve up along the mountain face before lighting gracefully at the edge of its eyrie where it posed for a long moment with both wings extended, before finally bending to feed its hungry youngsters.

I knew what I was seeing. That eagle was proud; he held that pose to bask in joy and glory. His dive had been a celebration of skill and freedom.  It wasn’t necessary, but it was fun.  He was taking delight in being who and what he was. He had given himself a moment of sheer, glorious pleasure, because he could.

Part of being who and what we are, at least in the objectivist, rational Western culture in which most of us were trained to understand the world, is to assume that any non-human other is also non-sentient.  Animals are considered to operate primarily by instinct.  Birds don’t think; they react.  Behaviour is simply a response to external stimuli that helps the individual, and through it the species, survive.  Only humans have intellect or creativity or complex emotions.

That eagle would beg to differ. The geese that gather to enjoy one another’s company each evening would beg to differ.  A hundred robins paying joyous homage to the rising sun as they adventure north across the living face of their mosaic world would disagree too.  At least they would if they cared — if they weren’t so absorbed in the glorious adventure of living in a world that was put here for them to make their own kinds of meaning, and to feel their own range of emotions, while living their own unique experiences.

We have no way of asking or knowing, but it would be interesting to learn how they interpret us. Perhaps their imaginations are more generous than ours.

I recall, one summer afternoon, hearing a robin singing nearby as I walked quietly along an early morning woodland trail. Unlike the usual robin song, this one was barely audible. I wouldn’t even have heard it it, had it not been so near.  Curious, I picked my way forward slowly until, by lucky accident, I spotted it on a branch in the aspen canopy. It was a male robin, motionless amid the leaves, singing so softly it was almost like a whisper — in fact, in my notebook I recorded it as a “whisper song”. 

There was a nest in the next tree, lower down, the tail and wingtip of the robin’s mate protruding over the edge where she sat motionless, patient, the smooth roundness of her four eggs warm against her brood patch; a mother-to-be.

He was singing to her.

I had stumbled into another couple’s love.

Iiníí

“Early in November, 1887, John Nolan and other half breeds were near the forks of the Red Deer and South Saskatchewan when they came across a bunch of eleven buffalo, one of the bunch being a very large bull. They killed the big bull, two cows and a calf and brought them into Swift Current.  J. Grant got the head of the bull and Curry Bros.,  got the two cows heads and hide of the calf. No doubt afterword the half breeds cleaned out the rest of the bunch for they were never heard of again.

“Hine of Winnipeg mounted the bull’s head and in 1893 it was loaned to the government and was sent to the World Fair at Chicago, where it was much admired…

“The country lying between the South Saskatchewan and the Cypress Hills and Old Wives Creek and the lakes and the Vermillion Hills was famous for Buffalo and even now the old Buffalo trails and wallows are to be seen from Moose Jaw to Medicine Hat.“

from a letter by “Wyoming Bill” to the Fort Macleod Gazette, 1902

Treaty Seven was signed in 1877. Barely ten years later, Canada’s last wild plains bison expired its last breath into the prairie sky. 

Canada’s first prime minister, John A. Macdonald, thought the eradication of North America’s largest land mammal was a very good thing.  “I am not at all sorry,” he said to Canada’s House of Commons in faraway Ottawa. “So long as there was a hope that bison would come into the country, there was no means of inducing the Indians to settle down on their reserves.”

The treaties at least assured the Indigenous tribes of the western plains that they would not starve. In exchange for that and other assurances, they settled on the reserves they had chosen and tried to come to terms with a world turned upside down. How could there be no buffalo? 

The Ghost Dance movement that originated with tribes who lived in the Great Basin region of the US spread through many of the plains nations. It was a spiritual practice whose adherents hoped would bring back the world they had always known, including the vanished bison. They were desperate in their loss; a world they had never imagined could end, had.

But the bison were gone for good. Settlers were coming to populate the empty plains. The newcomer people replaced the native bison with a newcomer animal: the domestic cow.

MacDonald’s government wanted to build a new nation from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean, and to secure its control over that nation before the Americans, who had a head start on settling the west, could appropriate the place for themselves. That was the basis of MacDonald’s National Policy.  His government’s problem, however, was that the land was vast and there were people living there already. The decision to negotiate treaties with those native peoples was, from the Dominion of Canada’s point of view, more a pragmatic than a principled one. They needed peace and order, so they had to negotiate.

As soon as the treaties were in place, the Canadian government started cutting other deals to secure its control over the land. First they arranged to build a railroad across the southern edge of the country. Until that was done there was no practical way to fill the place with farmers. So, as an interim measure, the government issued grazing leases of up to 100,000  acres to well-financed eastern Canadian and British investors.

That was another pragmatic decision. For one thing, it pre-empted any move by Americans to settle the lease lands. The new railway could ship beef as a source of revenue to start paying down its debt. And, perhaps most importantly: the government had promises to keep. It needed a supply of meat for thousands of Indigenous people now faced with the prospect of starvation.

The first huge grazing lease went to a well-connected Ontario conservative, Matthew Cochrane. He sold shares in his Cochrane Cattle Company to a few wealthy friends from Montreal and the Eastern Townships, imported some breeding stock from Europe, and arranged for two big shipments of mixed-breed cattle to be trailed north from Montana.  The new lease was centred on what is now the town of Cochrane; the home ranch was at the mouth of Bighill Creek.

Cochrane and his investor friends hired a well-respected mountie, James Walker, to run the ranch. Walker was a rigid, letter-of-the-law kind of guy, which had served him well as a policeman. When his bosses told him to do something, he did it. Unfortunately, that obsequiousness didn’t serve him well in his new job.

The investors had put a lot of their money into this new ranching enterprise, and they wanted to see profit sooner rather than later. They told Walker to get those American cattle onto that Canadian grass as quickly as possible. He followed their orders diligently, pushing a herd of 6800 tired cattle hard in order to get them to the Bow River grasslands before winter.  They arrived in bad shape just in time for one of the hardest winters on record.

Cattle aren’t bison.  When the north wind blows, bison turn their big, hairy heads into the wind and paw away the snow, grazing their way into the storm.  Cattle turn their backs to the wind and drift ahead of it. When snow covers the grass, from a domestic cow’s point of view the grass has gone. They don’t crater down to it like bison, elk or horses do.

Bison would have weathered the hard winter of 1881-1882 easily, but they were gone. The newly-imported cattle piled up against fences or in the deep drifted snow of coulees and river breaks. Most died.

The following year, again following orders from eastern bosses who had no idea of the West’s environmental realities, Walker drove another 4300 head of cows north from Montana during a dry, thirsty summer. The same disaster happened all over again that winter. 

Of the more than 11,000 domestic cows Walker brought north, by the spring of 1883 only 4,000 survived. Coyotes and eagles had a great spring; there was food galore. It was not a great spring for wealthy white men with high hopes for extracting big profits from the far frontier. They blamed Walker, even though he had simply followed their orders.

Only two decades earlier, there had been hundreds of thousands of bison here. They knew how to live there. So did the people who lived among them. But the future had arrived. Nothing about it was going to be easy, now that the place was full of strangers.

A century and a half later, the human population of Alberta has increased from less than 50,000 at the time of Treaty Seven to almost 5 million today. A gridwork of roads crisscrosses the plains and continues to metastasize into the boreal north. Towns have grown into cities and cities have grown into metropolises. It might seem like the buffalo days have been left forever in the past.

That would be a misconception. The buffalo have returned. Their reappearance in a land that had almost forgotten them might seem as impossible as their original disappearance was to the Niitsitapi who had lived with them so long. Even so, it is well underway.  Who knows what might happen next?

I met Wes Olsen in the early 1980s when I was assigned to a bird inventory project at Elk Island National Park, east of Edmonton.  I was still with the Canadian Wildlife Service, and Wes was a park warden responsible for the care of the park’s herds of pure-strain wood and plains bison. Tall, moustached and soft-spoken, Wes comes across more like a cowboy than an ecologist, but appearances can be deceiving: he is North America’s leading authority on the ecology and reintroduction of bison.

Wes was responsible for keeping Elk Island’s herds free of disease and for helping keep the population in balance with the available supply of forage. That meant that the herds had to be culled periodically. Rather than kill the surplus animals, though, Wes and his colleagues arranged for them to be transferred to new homes: bison ranches, small display herds in other prairie parks, First Nations reserves and even an ambitious project to restore some of the original Pleistocene megafauna to northern Russia. The Elk Island animals are considered the gold standard for bison recovery because they contain no domestic cattle genes and are kept free of the diseases that domestic cattle brought to North America.  Anthrax, brucellosis and tuberculosis have infected other conservation herds, including those in Wood Buffalo and Yellowstone National Park.

When Pierre Trudeau’s federal government established Grasslands National Park in the Frenchman’s River area of southern Saskatchewan in 1981, the park had no bison. Parks Canada imported plains bison from Elk Island in 2005 and, soon after, imported Wes Olsen too.  As the herd grew, Wes and his wife Johane Janelle studied the ways in which the big animals changed the prairie and its wildlife fauna. They soon realized that, just as the absence of bison had changed everything, their return also changed everything — for the better.

Bison wallows create small hollows that fill with meltwater each spring and create breeding habitat for frogs and insects. Bison shed their wooly underfur each spring; songbirds use the wool to line their nests. Bison wool not only provides superior insulation for eggs, it also disguises the odour of the nestlings, increasing both hatching rates and nestling survival. Literally hundreds of species of insect and other arthropods are attracted to bison droppings. Some of those insects burrow into the ground, increasing the soil’s porosity and enabling rain to soak in more thoroughly. Others are vital food sources for horned lizards, loggerhead shrikes, sage grouse and other species that were once abundant but are now endangered. In winter, pronghorns, deer and grouse feed in the snow craters that grazing bison carve out of the snowpack.

Wes describes the plains bison as a keystone species — a species whose presence or absence has much more far-reaching effects on their ecosystem than other animals. Beavers are another keystone species. So are we.

In 2022 Wes and Johane released The Ecological Buffalo, unquestionably one of the best books of applied ecology ever published in Canada.  It details the many threads of connection linking plains bison and the rest of the prairie ecosystem. The sheer complexity of the relationships Wes and Johane describe is a sobering revelation of what was lost when that last prairie bison fell to a hunter’s bullet a century and a half earlier. But it is also an awe-inspiring revelation of what prairie Canada might again be, if the bison were to return.

And it’s not a question of if, any more. It’s happening. 

In 2005, bison returned to Grasslands National Park. From an initial release of 71 young animals from Elk Island, the herd has grown to more than 500. Their trails, wallows, dung and grazing patches again shape that relict prairie ecosystem. They graze among prairie dogs and long-billed curlews. Their odour mingles with that of sage and wild rose. The place is real again.

Thirteen years later, another 16 plains bison went from Elk Island to a new home in the wilderness of northern Banff National Park. That herd, which regularly encounters grizzly bears and wolves, has since grown to more than 100. They range widely from alpine meadows through burned-off mountain slopes to the fen meadows along the headwaters of the Panther, Dormer and Red Deer Rivers. The herd may soon outgrow the available range. The need to trim the herd has led to another restoration — that of the age-old hunting traditions of the Iyarhe Nakoda and Siksikaitsitapi.  The return of bison to Canada’s first national park — a park whose origin story includes the ejection of those Indigenous people whose homeland it had always been — may help heal more than just the land.

“What would happen if you took the cross away from Christianity?” Kainai elder and teacher Dr. Leroy Little Bear said when I interviewed him in 2017. “The buffalo was one of those things.  The belief system, the songs, the stories, the ceremonies are still there, but that buffalo is not seen on a daily basis…The younger generation do not see that buffalo out there, so it’s out of sight, out of mind.”

Little Bear played a pivotal role in drafting the Northern Plains Buffalo Treaty, the first Treaty among Indigenous nations in over 150 years. Initial signatories in the fall of 2014 included the Siksika, Piikanii, Kainai and Tsuu T’ina First Nations as well as Assiniboine, Gros Ventre, Sioux, Salish and Kootenai tribes from south of the 49th parallel.  The Stoney Nakoda First Nations signed on a few months later. Other First Nation groups continue to join the treaty each year.

“The Buffalo Treaty is very historic,” says Little Bear. “A treaty among just Indigenous cultures to work together on common issues: conservation, culture, education, environment issues, economics and health research. In the centre of that is the buffalo.”

“Our elders said, we want to restore the buffalo. But it’s a big job. We can’t do it on our own. We need partners.”

Marie-Eve Marchand, a passionate conservationist of Quebec settler stock, is one of those partners.  She was a founding member of Bison Belong, an advocacy network formed in 2008 to pressure Parks Canada to follow through on its commitment to bring bison back to Banff National Park and to build social license for the initiative.  That work successfully completed, Marchand moved on to provide administrative support and media coordination for the Buffalo Treaty. She worked with both Niitsitapi and their allies from among the newcomer peoples on the Iiníí Initiative, which was meant to rematriate bison in Niitsítpiis-stahkoii — Blackfoot territory. 

“We eliminated the beaver and the bison, both keystone species,” she says. “Now we are turning that around.”

“With the return of the buffalo,” Dr. Little Bear adds, “those things that were part of those regularly occurring patterns in nature, the buffalo was part of it. So we’re bringing back those regularities and those regularities are part of what anchor our societies.”

“But there’s a whole lot more. There’s also their larger role in the ecosystem.  As a human species, we play a very small role in that ecosystem. And it’s a big job to bring about an eco-balance. So we need help and the buffalo will do that.”

Two years after the initial signing of the Buffalo Treaty, the homecoming of Iiníí became more tangible, with the arrival of 88 plains bison in northern Montana from Elk Island National Park. Their new home was a tribal ranch on the Blackfeet Reservation. They were home, but still behind fences. Then, in 2023, the Blackfeet released 25 bison into their ancestral range on the foothills slopes below Ninaistako. Wild bison were back in the Crown of the Continent.

Tristan Scott of the Flathead Beacon was present to report on the homecoming. Tribal elder Ervin Carlson told him, “To see them out here, it just choked me up. It’s a real good feeling. It finally feels right, after feeling wrong for a long time.”

It finally felt right. But for most of the twentieth century, it was unimaginable. Our only bison story was one of loss. What else might we imagine? We live in a landscape our choices shape, and in a landscape of possibilities our stories create. We have a new story now, a better one. Those landscapes are changing for the better.

If the bison can come home, perhaps we can too. All of us, together, as the Treaty People we are meant to be.

Good Relations

One rainy morning in the Front Ranges of Banff National Park, having just waded the icy-cold Panther River, I rounded a bend in the trail, and there was a grizzly bear.  The slope had been burned a few years previously, and the bear was rooting in the lush greenery among the black snags.

I had no intention of turning back, but neither did I feel it would be respectful or wise to try to pass so close to the oblivious bear. After a bit of thought, I pulled out the black plastic garbage bag that was protecting the top of my backpack and tied it to the end of one of my hiking poles.  Then I waited until the grizzly finally turned in my direction and spotted me. I waved the garbage bag over my head; the bear flipped ends and took off at a trot up the trail.

Fifty metres on, it half-turned and raised up on its hind legs, then leaned forward in a rabbit-like pose, and projectile-pooped a gusher of green into the woods. Having jettisoned its ballast, the bear dropped to all fours and bolted away up the mountainside.  I didn’t bother examining the deposit as I walked past, but the odour was a fecund mix of decomposed greenery and grizzly bear digestive system.

A normal odour for that country.  Bears eat a lot of vegetation — young grass and horsetail shoots, dandelion flowers, sweet vetch roots, glacier lily and spring beauty bulbs, and the berries of saskatoon, huckleberry and strawberries.  Their digestive systems aren’t suited for breaking down cellulose and other stringy bits, so a lot of what goes down the hatch comes out the other end relatively unchanged.  The good bits — sugars, proteins, easily-digested chemicals — remain behind. One reason bears are so food-obsessed is because they eat a lot to get relatively little.  Deer, elk, bighorn sheep and bison digest a lot more of what they eat because of their ruminant stomachs — fermentation vats where bacteria and other simple organisms help to turn the unpalatable bits into digestible material.

In order to let their rumen stomachs get that job done, ungulates have to spend a lot of time just lying around, chewing their cuds.  Bears, on the other hand, need to keep travelling around to get the nutrition they need.  They eat, they excrete, they eat some more.

Hiking the Wishbone Trail in Waterton Lakes National Park one day, Gail pointed out a tiny forest in the middle of trail.  The blob of newly-sprouted seedlings, like a flattened chia-pet, was bear poop.  The autumn previously, having filled itself up with chokecherry and saskatoon fruit, a bear had paused in the middle of the trail to deposit the remains and make room for more. The resulting pile, after spending the winter under the snowpack, had sprouted dozens of baby shrubs from seeds the bear had failed to digest.

A BC researcher, Aza Fynley Kuijt, tracked 74 grizzly bears and conducted germination experiments on wild huckleberries.1 She found that berries need bears as much as bears need berries.  “Bears don’t just eat huckleberries—they help them grow in new places,” she said. “Our findings show that this mutual relationship is crucial for both species, especially as climate change shifts suitable habitats for huckleberries.”

Left to themselves, huckleberries usually fail to reproduce. Less than 1 in every 500 seeds in a huckleberry fruit can actually sprout without help, because the seed coats have chemicals that inhibit growth. In the gut of a grizzly, however, digestive juices remove those chemicals. Kuijt’s research team found that at least a third of the huckleberry seeds excreted by bears subsequently sprout.  And since bears travel a lot, those berries often sprout in new places — half the seeds excreted by bears were more than a kilometre from the bushes that produced them, and some got deposited as much as 7 km away. 

Bears and berries live in dynamic landscapes. Trees invade meadows and gradually shade out berry patches, enabling other more shade-tolerant plant species to take over. On the other hand, fires and avalanches sometimes kill forest stands, creating new openings of the sort in which berry bushes thrive.  Bears, in exploring their home ranges, help bushes like huckleberry, saskatoon and chokecherry find and colonize those places.  In turn, the vigorous new berry stands help bears build up their fat reserves each summer and fall, helping them survive through the winter hibernation period. Berries and bears would both be less abundant if they didn’t have one another.

As a student of ecology in the late 1970s, I was taught about symbiosis, a process by which two species come to rely on one another. Symbiosis was considered a bit of an anomaly in a world of inter-species competition. The belief that nature is usually red in tooth and claw — with relationships among plants and animals defined by competition, not cooperation — flowed naturally from the dominant paradigm of the culture in which I was raised, one based on competitive capitalism and a cutthroat market economy that yields winners and losers. 

Cooperation between species was so….socialist. And surely that couldn’t be natural.

A half century later, the competitive paradigm has been turned on its head.  Symbiosis is no longer seen as an unusual phenomenon — it is the very nature of life and place. Nothing exists in isolation. We are all in this together.  Competition among organisms may help drive change and evolution, but the mutually-sustaining relationships among organisms are what keeps everything working.  Things don’t exist in opposition to one another; they exist in communion with one another.

The relationship between grizzly bears and berry bushes wasn’t considered to be an example of symbiosis back in my student days, because it was assumed that the benefits only flowed one way: from berry to bear.  In reality, as Fynley Kuijt wrote, “Considering the ecosystem services bears provide to the germination and dispersal of shrubs such as huckleberry, the mutualistic relationship between bears and huckleberry should be recognized as an important ecosystem function.”

It should be considered more than that. It should be considered a defining element of what it means to be a real bear, and of what it means to be a real huckleberry.  An individual does not exist in isolation from its relationships; it exists as a consequence of them. Without the huckleberry, grizzly bears would still be bears, but they would be less complete ones.  Without bears, huckleberries would still be bushes, but incomplete.  And neither would live where they do today, and in the ways they do today. They help make each other who they are.

One summer Gail and I took our children on a road trip down the Rocky Mountain chain to the southern edge of Colorado, a journey that took us through the San Juan Mountains. This was where Colorado’s last known grizzly bear died in 1979. The old female bear attacked a hunting guide in self-defence after having been surprised at close range. Against all odds, he managed to kill her by pushing a hunting arrow into her throat as she mauled him.

That incident happened in the southern edge of the San Juans, but as we drove through those mountains it seemed to me it could have happened anywhere there. The San Juans are some of the finest-looking grizzly bear habitat I’ve ever seen: long, steep green avalanche meadows, rich riparian mosaics along tumbling trout streams, aspen forests and dark timber. Grizzly bears simply belong there. But for almost half a century, they have been gone. There are still plenty of black bears to gorge on saskatoons, huckleberries and other wild fruit crops there, and to deposit the undigested seeds in new settings, but the once-abundant grizzly bears are gone. A relationship that once defined both the grizzly and the San Juans has been ended.

Those mountains had a forlorn beauty about them. Like faded paintings, they were less than they should have been. There was a smallness that hadn’t always been there; like an empty chair at the family table, when someone won’t be coming home again.

Grizzly bears have many relationships that make them who they are, and that help make other things who they are too.  A few months after that Colorado visit, I rode up Yarrow Creek with other park wardens, heading for a trail that follows the Waterton Lakes National Park boundary west from the head of the valley.  For well more than a kilometre, the floodplain meadows looked as if they had been rototilled by some wilderness gardener.

Indeed they had; the churned up meadows were the work of grizzly bears. Constantly rearranged by spring floods, mountain streams tend to meander along their valley bottoms, every so often changing course and leaving their former channels to fill gradually with vegetation.  Some of the colonizing plants are valuable bear foods.  Sweet vetch is a particular favourite in early spring and late fall, when the stringy roots are full of stored starches and proteins.  Glacier lilies and their bright little companions, spring beauty, similarly store nutrients in underground structures – bulbs and corms.  Grizzly bears follow their noses through the meadows and use their powerful forelegs and long claws to tear up sods and eat the hidden treasures.

But just as is the case with berry bushes, those bears are not exploiting that food source; they are sustaining a relationship.  Sweet vetch and other floodplain plants are pioneers.  They thrive best on recently disturbed ground where there is little competition from other plants.  As the meadows mature, those other plants take over and the pioneers gradually become scarce.  When a grizzly bear digs its way through a meadow, however, it sets the successional clock back by creating anew the raw, fresh soil in which those plants thrive.  At the same time, it leaves fragments of roots and bulb in the newly cultivated soil.  When human gardeners do that, it’s called dividing perennials. When bears do it, it’s the same thing. Bears are gardeners too.

Sweet vetch would still exist if there were no grizzly bears. It still grows in the San Juans, after all. But its distribution and abundance are different there than when its relationship with the grizzly bear was still intact.  Along Alberta’s Rocky Mountain front ranges, whole slopes of yellow and purple sweet vetch offer mute evidence that the great bear still lives here; they would be limited only to soils renewed by other kinds of disturbance if it didn’t.  Like in Colorado.

Popular hiking trails like Chester Lake, in Alberta’s Kananaskis Country, are closed annually to allow grizzlies to forage in peace in glacier lily meadows that would have become grass and willow long ago if it weren’t for the annual renewal of a relationship that benefits both the flowers and the bears — and hikers, who thrill to the sight of the bear diggings, watch the forest edges warily, and take pleasure in the delicate, golden beauty of the lilies.

Those relationships do more than benefit the plants, the bears and the hikers. They define them. Each is, in part, the other because each helps make the others whole.  Flowers, bears… hikers too.

Hikers in the San Juans don’t see roto-tilled meadows any more. They don’t worry about surprising a grizzly bear. “It must be poor life that achieves freedom from fear,” wrote legendary conservationist Aldo Leopold back in the 1940s. Grizzlies still occupied the San Juans then, but Colorado was well on the way to achieving the poor life of which Leopold warned. Colorado’s mountains today remain no less beautiful, but there is a hollowness there that makes them less than they were, and that makes those who sojourn there a little less whole too.

The bear makes the huckleberry more of what it was meant to be.  The huckleberry makes the bear more of what it was meant to be.  And both, I would argue, make us more of what we were meant to be.  Our relationships, after all, are who we are.

One August morning Gail and I hiked in to a sunny mountainside in southwestern Alberta to pick our winter supply of huckleberries.  It was a bumper year; the bushes were heavy with fruit. We were soon lost in the task, hunkered down a few metres apart, surrounded by the peace and beauty of the place. Birds rustled in the bushes around us, filling up with fruit that would help to power their fall migration flights. Huckleberries have many relations; some have feathers.

A particularly loud rustle made us look up. Maybe ten metres away, a grizzly bear had just stepped around a spruce tree and discovered that this berry patch was already taken. We were all taken aback, especially Gail who was closer to the bear than me and had also left her bear spray by her pack.  But the grizzly evidently had the same understanding of berry-picking etiquette as we did, and it turned and retreated into cover, leaving the patch to us.  Not entirely fair, as there is a good chance that one of its ancestors had relieved itself there and helped get those berries growing, but the whole mountainside was covered with fruit, so there was plenty to go around. The bear huffed its way past us a few minutes later and was soon comfortably ensconced in his own patch, farther up the slope.

The mountains paid no attention to the encounter. They have their own relationships with the world and they live in far deeper time than the rest of us. To the mountains, we were probably all one thing; part of its coat, as it were. The berries, the bear, the humans — I suspect those mountains saw us all as one.  In ways that matter to the workings of this world, we are.  And we’re all the better for it.

  1. Kuijt AF, Burton C, Lamb CT (2024).  Effects of bear endozoochory on germination and dispersal of huckleberry in the Canadian Rocky Mountains. PLoS ONE 19(11): e0311809. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0311809 ↩︎

Disaster

[an invisible friend, one of many on Facebook, edits an online magazine called Hubris. An American, she sent out a plea for essays that might help her, and many others who think and feel in the same way, come to terms with the outcome of their recent election. So I tried (apologies for the Imperial measurements; I wrote it for an American publication):]

There is a pinch point in the Rocky Mountains chain that geologists call the Lewis Overthrust.  It extends across the US-Canada border and includes two of our oldest mountain national parks: Waterton Lakes, in Canada, and Glacier, in the USA. The subterranean paroxysms that gave rise to those western mountains were so powerful here that they pushed slabs of mountain rock over top of each other, like overlapping dominos, until that shifting rock had buried whole ranges of mountains and foothills.  Drive up to the Lewis Overthrust from the east and the effect can be startling: the prairie ends and the mountains are there.  No transition.

That orthographic pinch point lies east of a flattening in the landscape: the Columbia plateau. Those two geologies combine to create the perfect storms.  Storm after storm; westerly winds sweep inland from the Pacific Ocean and, finding little resistance through the Columbia plateau, pile up against that skinny bit of mountains before spilling over the top and sweeping down to the prairies.  It’s a continental-scale Bernoulli effects that yields relentless winds on the eastern side of the mountains, with gusts that regularly exceed 80 mph.  Anywhere else, that would be called hurricane-force.  In the lee of the Lewis Overthrust it’s called the chinook wind.  When we lived in Waterton, it sometimes blew our children down the street.  Fortunately, it blew them to school. Getting home could be a bit of a problem.  They wore ski goggles in winter, and sometimes crawled.

On August 29, 2017, during an intense summer thunderstorm, lightning struck a tree in southwestern British Columbia, about five miles west of the Continental Divide, on Kenow Mountain.  The tree burst into flame, and the fire spread. The forest had been primed by drought and heat… and after the storm blew through, a chinook wind developed.  By September 11 when gusts of over 90 mph drove the fire across the Continental Divide, fire crews didn’t stand a chance.  They had set irrigation sprinklers up to protect the park townsite, but when that roaring inferno arrived all they could do was to get out of the way and watch the fire storm burn through.  The town was saved, but almost half of the 195 sq.mile park burned.  And it wasn’t just the trees and grassland that burned; the fire was so intense that it burned the very soil, right down to the rocks and gravel.   It was an utter disaster.  It could have been worse, but the turbulent wind created back eddies that stalled the advance of the fire until a change in the weather settled it down and enabled the fire crews to get back in and start mopping it up.  Everywhere there were dead and wounded animals. The place ached with loss; all its life and stories and meaning seemed gone with the smoke.  News stories reported that the park was destroyed

I visited the national park three weeks later.  It was burned to the very mountain tops, a bleak place of blackened tree trunks, grey ash and silence.  And in the charred prairie along the park road: brilliant green spikes of emerging grass. They didn’t look defiant, but they looked determined.  They knew the place was meant to be alive. Theirs was a wisdom deeper than ours.

In the ensuing decade, it has indeed come alive.  Many of the burned trees have fallen but as many more still stand, their boles now riddled with holes drilled by woodpeckers that have been attracted by all the wood-boring insects thriving in their new homes, homes created by flame. Absent the stifling shade of closed coniferous forest canopies, the understory has erupted in greenery.  When I worked in Waterton in the 1990s, I knew of three small patches of wild hollyhock; now those green pillars of floral beauty seem to be everywhere.  In summer, the flower mosaic has to be seen to be believed. Bighorn sheep feed on green slopes where encroaching forest had previously been shrinking their ranges.  Eagles still wheel above the summits; the bull trout still return to spawn. It isn’t the glorious place it was.  But it’s becoming the glorious place it’s now meant to be.  It wasn’t a disaster; it was a turn of the circle.

Immediately after the fire, teams of archaeologists descended on the park. The archaeologists, including two young Siksikaitsitapi (Blackfoot) researchers, saw the fire’s aftermath as a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to find evidence of previous human occupation. With the vegetation and duff burned away, old campsites, structures and artifacts lay exposed in the ashes. Crews hastened to inventory the park’s archaeology before it could be obscured again by vegetation. They found camps and remains everywhere — a startling record of more than 12,000 years of continuous occupation by Niitsitapi. The archaeologists had to revise their story; this was not a place the Blackfeet visited occasionally or travelled through to trade or hunt; it was a centre of their existence. The Siksikaitsitapi are not just a prairie people — they are mountain people. But that had almost been forgotten.

The researchers decided to examine the mountaintops. They found seventeen different vision quest sites.

Dr. Mike Bruised Head, a Kainai researcher, described in his Ph.D. dissertation* how deeply troubled he felt. These Itaksiistsimoo’pi were meant to be places of fasting and visions. But almost nobody visited them anymore. There was little point. The mountains no longer had their original Indigenous names. A vision quest begins with an invocation of the mountain’s spirits, and that requires that the seeker pray to the mountain by its name. The names seemed to have vanished, to be replaced with names that had no relevance — like Mount Vimy, named after a battlefield in faraway France. In consultation with elders and other knowledge-keepers, Mike Bruised Head determined that its true name is Sakiimaapi.  One by one, he has been working to find the original names of those sacred mountains and restore Niitsitapi relationships with the place.  The park’s new interpretation centre uses those original names, and the interpretive signs sprouting up across the recovering landscape tell the deeper story of meaning that has emerged from those ashes.

This year, Parks Canada and the Blackfoot Confederacy announced a new Indigenous Guardians program that employs Siksikaitsitapi people to monitor and protect these sacred lands.  In doing so, the guardians will rediscover themselves, while offering new relationships and learnings to park visitors many of whom are, themselves, in search of deeper meaning and connection.

Barely a decade after disaster, the park is experiencing both an ecological rebirth and a renewal of its names, meanings and cultural relevance. It isn’t the place it was. It’s becoming something better.

When disaster strikes, it’s all we see. The despair and horror come from seeing the end of what we knew and loved, and the certain knowledge that there can be no going back. What is unknowable, in that awful moment, is what might come next; what possibilities await beneath the ashes.  But they are there, and after the flames burn down and the last wisps of smoke dissipate into the winds, the world will still be with us and it will have lost none of its magic. None. Some of its magic, in fact, will have been set free.

One of the most common trees in that wind-whipped landscape along the Lewis Overthrust is the lodgepole pine.  It forms dense stands that, as they mature, grow a dense, connected canopy that shades the ground below.  By the time a lodgepole pine forest has grown old, its thirsty roots and crowded canopy have suppressed or killed many of the other plants that were there when the trees were young and small.  And that’s okay; snowshoe hares, squirrels and crossbills like those dense old forests.  But there is a sense of suppressed sameness to a landscape dominated by those pines.

Fortunately, they burn.  The older and denser they are, the better they burn.  That’s one reason the Kenow fire was so intense; not only was it wind-driven but it was fueled by aging pine forests full of tree resin and crowded fuels.  Those trees are dead now, and the other kinds of plants whose growth they once suppressed will have their time in the sun again for a few decades.

But lodgepole pine is a paradox: it exists to be killed by fire, yet it relies on fire for its very existence.  Its cones are like rocks, sealed tight by resin, their seeds securely stored inside.  Fire burns off the resin coating and twists the cone scales open, releasing the seeds.  The dead lodgepole pine forests of Waterton Lakes National Parks, today, are full of live lodgepole pines: young ones, reaching their baby fingers joyfully into the sun beneath mountains that are rediscovering their ancient names, amid a coming together of Treaty People — both the Niitsitapi who were always here and the more recently arrived who hike the trails as tourists. The aftermath of disaster offers new hope of deep, real sorts of reconciliation.  Not just between peoples, but between people and place.

And this is what was unimaginable in the moment when the flames came.

There are other kinds of disasters. Sometimes an election’s outcome can feel like a disaster.

When those disasters beset us, it can be worth reflecting on the Kenow fire and the certain truth that magic sometimes is just waiting for its moment, even if we can’t see to the other side of the flame and smoke. Things that happen are never just events; they are teachings that are given to us by the living world that gives us all our life and all our meaning. Fires burn out; new things emerge. Sometimes better things. This is a truth given to us.

I’m trying to learn to think like a forest — to listen to the teachings of the world.  It is always the end of things; it is always the beginning of things.  The names of our mountains outlive the battlefields after which some might try to name them.

It will be okay.  It might, eventually, even be better.

* reference: Ninna Piiksii, Mike Bruised Head. 2022. The Colonial Impact of the Erasure of Blackfoot Miistakistsi place names in Paahtomahksikimi, Waterton Lakes National Park. Ph.D Thesis, Dept. of History, University of Lethbridge.

A Wild Sign of Hope

Lorne Fitch, P. Biol.

It’s an increasingly busy world, with more development, acres of pavement and noisier. Looking at our human footprint and the crush of people, all wanting more space, more resources, more of everything except wild country, wildlife and peace and quiet, it’s easy to fall into despair.

The northeast quarter of section 36 is our refuge, but it’s tiny in comparison to the developed world and what is required to maintain biodiversity and the other essential ecological services. It is a pretty quiet place though and so the rattling bugle call of a sandhill crane was unmistakable. One floated into the wetland on set wings, with a clear destination in mind.

We don’t know how old the wetland is. It probably began as a beaver dam and spread into a basin that collected and held water. Around the edges willows sprouted and in the interior cattails proliferated. All of this took time, maybe time beyond our imagining. 

Every spring though, the chorus frogs wake up the wetland, and us. There probably was a time when the wetland was also awakened with the rattle of crane music. But in the previous three decades of our ownership no cranes graced the wetland, except maybe for a temporary look.

The historical breeding range of cranes was the Prairie Pothole Region, but up to 40 per cent of the wetlands there have been drained. Worse yet, wetland loss exceeds 90 per cent in parts of the region. 

Early hunting and later habitat loss caused large declines in the population but crane numbers in Alberta seem to be steadily increasing with “excellent survival rates for adult and young birds,” according to biologists with the province. In the southwestern foothills this seems evident and might reflect some population migration north from similar habitats in the western US.

Nonetheless the birds are still considered Sensitive in Alberta, a reflection of habitat vulnerability that still defines population persistence. In spite of the designation Alberta opened up a hunt for sandhill cranes in 2020. My late colleague and friend Hugh Wollis raged against the hunt and asked penetrating, impertinent questions of federal and provincial bureaucrats over the dubious biological rationale and lack of supporting evidence.

Unkind thoughts of a mercenary government minister lobbying for a hunt with suspect motives were pushed to the side as I picked out not one but two birds through my binoculars. The standing bird was tall, towering over the wetland grasses, a gray body with brownish tones and a deep red “cap.” From the stance of the bird I could see why Aldo Leopold would write of cranes, “nobility, won in the march of aeons.”

Almost hidden by grass and cattails was the other bird, clearly sitting on a nest. To suggest this was a thrilling sight is the mildest of understatement! Seeing nesting cranes on the wetland created a feeling beyond the reach of words.

These cranes make the wetland and the NE of 36 more complex, more compelling and more complete. There is hope that eggs will hatch and the colts survive. In doing so, adult cranes might sense a place to return to, time and time again. In their annual return (fingers crossed) will be the endless ticking of an ecological clock. 

A spring return will confer a particular distinction on the wetland, of a secure and safe place to nest. A crane wetland holds a patent of nobility, rising above the commonplace, providing a sense of timelessness. Wetlands provide wildness and as Leopold pointed out, “the crane is wildness incarnate.”

Maybe we might yet see the elaborate mating dance, the stretching of wings, pumping of heads, bowing and leaping into the air in a graceful and energetic pageant. And, to hear that iconic call, a signal of the wild and all the wild implies.

Leopold’s prophetic words on cranes registered: “When we hear his call we hear no mere bird. He is the symbol of our untameable past, of that incredible sweep of millennia which underlies and conditions the daily affairs of birds and men.”

The landscape of the NE of 36 seems timeless but of course it isn’t. It lies in and is influenced by a changing world, one of more cultivation, more land clearing, more wetland drainage as well as drought exacerbated by climate change. But for the moment we will cheer on the ray (and call) of hope brought by a pair of nesting sandhill cranes.

June 2024

Lorne Fitch is a Professional Biologist, a retired Fish and Wildlife Biologist and a past Adjunct Professor with the University of Calgary.