'A beautiful soul': Funeral held for baby boy killed in wrong-way crash on Highway 401
A funeral was held on Wednesday for a three-month-old boy who died after being involved in a wrong-way crash on Highway 401 in Whitby last week.
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.
A funeral was held on Wednesday for a three-month-old boy who died after being involved in a wrong-way crash on Highway 401 in Whitby last week.
There has been a "sophisticated" cybersecurity breach detected on B.C. government networks, Premier David Eby confirmed Wednesday evening.
Toronto police say a man was taken into custody outside Drake's Bridle Path mansion Wednesday afternoon after he tried to gain access to the residence.
U.S. President Joe Biden said for the first time Wednesday he would halt shipments of American weapons to Israel, which he acknowledged have been used to kill civilians in Gaza, if Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu orders a major invasion of the city of Rafah.
Rookie goalie Arturs Silovs will start in net for the Canucks as Vancouver kicks off a second-round series against the Edmonton Oilers Wednesday night.
One of the Indian nationals accused of murdering British Columbia Sikh activist Hardeep Singh Nijjar says in a social media video that he received a Canadian study permit with the help of an Indian immigration consultancy.
Pfizer has agreed to settle more than 10,000 lawsuits about cancer risks related to the now discontinued heartburn drug Zantac, Bloomberg News reported on Wednesday, citing people familiar with the deal.
Quebec Premier Francois Legault is defending his comments about a new history museum after he was accused by a prominent First Nations group of trying to erase their history.
Independent U.S. presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. had a parasite in his brain more than a decade ago, but has fully recovered, his campaign said, after the New York Times reported about the ailment.
The stakes have been set for a bet between Vancouver and Edmonton's mayors on who will win Round 2 of the Stanley Cup playoffs.
A grieving mother is hosting a helmet drive in the hopes of protecting children on Manitoba First Nations from a similar tragedy that killed her daughter.
A chicken farmer near Mattawa made an 'eggstraordinary' find Friday morning when she discovered one of her hens laid an egg close to three times the size of an average large chicken egg.
A P.E.I. lighthouse and a New Brunswick river are being honoured in a Canada Post series.
An Ontario man says he paid more than $7,700 for a luxury villa he found on a popular travel website -- but the listing was fake.
Whether passionate about Poirot or hungry for Holmes, Winnipeg mystery obsessives have had a local haunt for over 30 years in which to search out their latest page-turners.
Eighty-two-year-old Susan Neufeldt and 90-year-old Ulrich Richter are no spring chickens, but their love blossomed over the weekend with their wedding at Pine View Manor just outside of Rosthern.
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 mother goose and her goslings caused a bit of a traffic jam on a busy stretch of the Trans-Canada Highway near Vancouver Saturday.