Canada’s National Parks should be safe for wildlife, but they aren’t. One of the most deadly is Point Pelee National Park, in extreme southern Ontario, where a once vibrant colony of cormorants and herons has been shattered by years of shooting thousands of cormorants on their nests on Middle Island, a small island that is part of the park where park visitors are not allowed to set foot on, while the birds are there. On the mainland, the park’s victims of park “management” have included a great many native white-tailed deer, killed, like cormorants, to protect vegetation.
“You don’t know what you’ve got ’till it’s gone; They paved paradise and they put up a parking lot…”
-Joni Mitchel, Canadian songwriter, singer, visual artist.
And then we have the story from this week of a hunter who, while hiking near Banff National Park, in the Rocky Mountains of Alberta, found two dead foxes and a dead wolf, followed by a huge live wolf trapped in a snare, and then six other dead wolves. It was called a “scene of carnage” by John Marriott, a wildlife photographer and conservationist who investigated. Two wolves had been radio-collared as part of research in the park, where they are protected. Once they step outside the park and that protection ends.
It is believed that two out of three packs of Banff’s wolves may have been lost due to trapping outside the park.
To me, these issues relate to stories coming out of the U.S. about killing wolves, bears, bison, and other “game” animals as soon as they leave the park’s protection.
The plant species Parks Canada is ruining the bird-nesting colony on Middle Island to “protect” are not rare, except by virtue of being at the northern ends of their respective ranges. The uninhabited island is the southernmost land belonging to Canada. It should be, could be, safe for birds. A few meters to the south and suddenly a “rare” plant species is legally defined as common. And even so, those species would be more common in Canada had their mainland populations been protected. Commercially-fueled pressures of encroachment, including resource-extraction industries such as fossil fuel, timber, mining, and commercial fishing, augmented by agriculture, urban sprawl, and various recreational activities all take their toll.
Here in Ontario, there are those of us wanting to protect the endangered eastern “Algonquin” wolf, whose core range is within Algonquin Provincial Park by providing a “buffer zone” around the park where the wolves and the visually near-identical gray wolves and coyotes, hence the endangered Eastern wolves, from the very thing that happened recently to the “protected” Banff wolves. But, we are strongly opposed by hunters, trappers, and farmers. The need for protected “buffer zones” and protected wildlife corridors is well recognized by science and conservationists, but they come at a price too few are willing to pay.
Keep Wildlife in the Wild,
Barry
