Three dead, two hospitalized, following collision in Fredericton: police
Three people have died and two have been hospitalized after a speeding car struck a tree and landed on another vehicle in Fredericton Sunday morning.
New research suggests wolves can be steered away from the endangered caribou herds they prey on by making the man-made trails they use to hunt harder to move along.
The recently published study adds to the debate over whether governments should depend on shooting and poisoning wolves to protect caribou, said lead author Jonah Keim.
"It's probably one of the most challenging conservation issues in the Northern Hemisphere," said Keim, an independent researcher based in New York state.
Woodland caribou herds in Alberta and British Columbia have been declining for decades. Scientists blame habitat loss -- since 2000, B.C. and Alberta have lost at least 33,000 square kilometres of old-growth forest -- and increasing predation as wolves and bears follow roads and seismic lines into landscapes that once offered caribou refuge.
Governments, with scientific support, have turned to maternity pens, captive breeding and killing hundreds of wolves in an effort to keep caribou around.
Maybe there's another way, Keim thought. Maybe the problem isn't the wolves -- it's the artificial trails they're taking advantage of.
"How do we get at movement?" he asked.
Keim and his colleagues set up motion detector cameras on logging roads, seismic lines and game trails throughout the Parker caribou range in northeast B.C. The team recorded movements of animals past those cameras for a year.
They measured which of those features were easiest to travel by timing themselves as they walked them. They considered which ones lead into the marshy wetlands that caribou like and which went to higher ground favoured by moose and deer.
Then, they made the easy trails into the best caribou habitat harder to move through.
"We hinged trees from the sides of the features into the seismic line," Keim said. "(We) did soil mounding to create hummocks. We tried to make the feature as difficult to move down as was the adjacent habitat beside it."
They sat for another year and let the cameras roll. Then they compared the incidence of wolves or bears and caribou using the same trail on the same day to what it was before the treatment as well as to an untreated control area.
"We were able to reduce the encounter rate between wolves and caribou by 85 per cent," said Keim.
Dave Hervieux, an Alberta Environment caribou specialist, said Keim's results are consistent with other studies but only address half the problem.
"Unnaturally high and unsustainable levels of wolf predation on caribou are due to both increases in wolf travel and increases in wolf numbers," he wrote in an email.
"Linear feature restoration is a key action. However, our conclusion is that it is unlikely that linear feature restoration, as a sole action, will provide sufficient protection in the near-term for endangered woodland caribou populations."
Hervieux said the government is working with industry to restore forest cover to seismic lines, pipelines and roads.
Still, Keim said focusing "encounter management" could go a long way to reducing Alberta's and B.C.'s dependence on the annual killing of wolves.
"We know that predator removal is socially and ethically controversial and it may not be solving the true problem."
This report by The Canadian Press was first published June 19, 2021.
Three people have died and two have been hospitalized after a speeding car struck a tree and landed on another vehicle in Fredericton Sunday morning.
Amid scientists' warnings that nations need to transition away from fossil fuels to limit climate change, Canadians are still lukewarm on electric vehicles, according to a study conducted by Nanos Research for CTV News.
A Montreal man is warning Tesla drivers about using the Smart Summon feature after his vehicle hit another in a parking lot.
Madonna put on a free concert on Copacabana beach Saturday night, turning Rio de Janeiro's vast stretch of sand into an enormous dance floor teeming with a multitude of her fans.
One person was killed and 23 others were injured when a bus crashed early Sunday on Interstate 95 in northern Maryland, police said.
William Nylander stood in a solemn visitors locker room at TD Garden just before midnight. The Maple Leafs had battled back from a 3-1 series deficit against the Boston Bruins with consecutive 2-1 victories - including one that required extra time - in their first-round playoff series to push the club's Original Six rival to the limit before suffering a devastating Game 7 overtime loss. Nylander's message was emphatic.
As Canadians brace themselves for summer temperatures, forecasters say a weakening El Nino cycle doesn’t mean relief from the heat.
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A mother goose and her goslings caused a bit of a traffic jam on a busy stretch of the Trans-Canada Highway near Vancouver Saturday.
Alberta Ballet's double-bill production of 'Der Wolf' and 'The Rite of Spring' marks not only its final show of the season, but the last production for twin sisters Alexandra and Jennifer Gibson.
A British Columbia mayor has been censured by city council – stripping him of his travel and lobbying budgets and removing him from city committees – for allegedly distributing a book that questions the history of Indigenous residential schools in Canada.
Three men in Quebec from the same family have fathered more than 600 children.
A group of SaskPower workers recently received special recognition at the legislature – for their efforts in repairing one of Saskatchewan's largest power plants after it was knocked offline for months following a serious flood last summer.
A police officer on Montreal's South Shore anonymously donated a kidney that wound up drastically changing the life of a schoolteacher living on dialysis.
Since 1932, Montreal's Henri Henri has been filled to the brim with every possible kind of hat, from newsboy caps to feathered fedoras.
Police in Oak Bay, B.C., had to close a stretch of road Sunday to help an elephant seal named Emerson get safely back into the water.
Out of more than 9,000 entries from over 2,000 breweries in 50 countries, a handful of B.C. brews landed on the podium at the World Beer Cup this week.
Raneem, 10, lives with a neurological condition and liver disease and needs Cholbam, a medication, for a longer and healthier life.