Selkirk Caribou close to Extinct

[GEF]

I remember an article in the 80's in a bc outdours or something about the mountain caribou .Talked about limiting snow mobile and road access and heli skiing in the percells .The packed trails helped the predator access .It was well documented in the article .There was a big uproar from the user groups and it got ignored .I guess this is the out come.They were stating that the wolfs normally did not access the alpine in that area and that the access and the disturbance from the helicopters pushing the herds down were huge factors.I wish I had kept the piece .It was a good read.

[panhead]

Check out this bou ...
http://www.richmond-news.com/news/pr...tat-1.23266638
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An old man was walking the beach early one morning, bending down to pick up starfish and throwing them out into the ocean. A teenager came by and asked, “Old man, what are you doing?”

“These starfish will die of dehydration once the sun comes up high,” he said. “I’m throwing them back into the ocean so they will live.”

“Ha!” the young man spat sarcastically. “The beach goes on for miles, and there are millions of starfish. What does it matter what you do?”

The old man looked at the starfish in his hand and then flipped it to safety in the waves. “It matters to this one,” he said.

[Ourea]

Roads with machine packed snow are a lot easier for the wolves to intercept caribou and other ungulates from. If machine packed snow is present up into the alpine, where it wasn't before, wolves are going to have a predatory advantage that they formerly never had.

^^^^^^
This is well documented and has been observed during aerial wildlife counts.
Wolves are seen trotting down roads vs pushing deep snow.

[Pemby_mess]

I remember an article in the 80's in a bc outdours or something about the mountain caribou .Talked about limiting snow mobile and road access and heli skiing in the percells .The packed trails helped the predator access .It was well documented in the article .There was a big uproar from the user groups and it got ignored .I guess this is the out come.They were stating that the wolfs normally did not access the alpine in that area and that the access and the disturbance from the helicopters pushing the herds down were huge factors.I wish I had kept the piece .It was a good read.

exactly.

Unmonitored, and unhindered by regulation, snowmobile use has exploded in the last 2 decades. Formerly deserted alpine areas are now veritable zoos of motor heads -and powder junkies throughout the late winter. 20-30 machines running up an alpine access rd packs the snow firm. Sometimes for the rest of the season in a low snow year. That makes wolf mobility infinitely easier, especially when this is repeated all over the province's mountainous regions.

Heli-skiing by itself probably doesn't have a huge impact on an operation to operation basis. But like other things it's cummalative, and is an additional exacerbating factor to other conditions. Combine large numbers of unrestricted recreational and commercial snowmobile machines in the near country alpine, competing heli skiing operations pushing further into the wilderness avoiding sled activity and competing cat ski operations in the treeline, and throw in some wide open cut blocks everywhere for good measure, and the caribou are going to be lost eventually.

[horshur]

You guys keep wanting to go back to the garden..but the son of man ate the fruit...cats out of the bag. Genie is out of the lantern..dug to deep in the mines. If Adam had just not ate that Apple.

[Pemby_mess]

You guys keep wanting to go back to the garden..but the son of man ate the fruit...cats out of the bag. Genie is out of the lantern..dug to deep in the mines. If Adam had just not ate that Apple.

Just because we're well beyond the garden, it doesn't require us to go back in and cut it all down. We can use our knowledge to preserve it, and visit it regularly without trashing the place. It's important to value it for what it is, even if we now know it's not all that there is.

[labguy]

Well, they should have gotten rid of the moose so the wolves would move on thereby saving the Caribou. Tongue firmly in cheek regards.

[dana]

Well, they should have gotten rid of the moose so the wolves would move on thereby saving the Caribou. Tongue firmly in cheek regards.

And the whitetails and muleys too. Oh, wait....they did just that. Kill off the moose, the muleys and the whitetails in Region 3 and guess what happened??? The caribou didn't come back!!! Hmmm, wouldn't it have just made it a hell of a lot easier to get rid of the number 1 problem???? Nope, too many dog lovers that just want to study them. It will be 'fascinating'!!!! And before they are completely finished, we might as well kill the economies of every town anywhere near the caribou habitat. Lets ban logging, sledding and skiing because they are the ones that caused this right???

[Ride Red]

Interesting read; https://www.gao.gov/archive/1999/rc99102.pdf

[Pemby_mess]

And the whitetails and muleys too. Oh, wait....they did just that. Kill off the moose, the muleys and the whitetails in Region 3 and guess what happened??? The caribou didn't come back!!! Hmmm, wouldn't it have just made it a hell of a lot easier to get rid of the number 1 problem???? Nope, too many dog lovers that just want to study them. It will be 'fascinating'!!!! And before they are completely finished, we might as well kill the economies of every town anywhere near the caribou habitat. Lets ban logging, sledding and skiing because they are the ones that caused this right???

None of this stuff needs to be banned. It just needs to be done in a more thoughtful, cohesive way. Acknowledging that something has an impact isn't akin to being totally against that something. Nor does it mean that people advocating for better ways of doing things are somehow prepared to sacrifice all the benefits previously attained through such activities.

For starters, we can put more narrow restrictions on commercial land use agreements. And just as importantly, enforce those restrictions. Quite often a tenure proponent will start their application with a very specific prescribed use, and then subsequently creep out the scope. Since there is rarely any kind of accountability microscope on things happening out in the backcountry, a lot of impacts can accumulate before anyone seems to notice that unintended consequences are happening. The backcountry users will then beg forgiveness and demand post hoc permission claiming their previously unsanctioned land use gives them precedent.

Motorized recreational use is a perfectly legitimate activity. However public encouragement of a defacto free for all in the mountains is a death writ for the integral wild spaces BCers pride themselves on. Increasingly sophisticated machines, operated by an increasingly wealthier and freer society untethered to any kind of natural or legal limitations, is going to have dire consequences for wildlife sooner or later. Some might consider the loss of caribou one of those consequences, but others say "hey, who cares if nobody has ever hunted them anyway".

So the question for hunters and everyone else; is what are the values that are important? And important to who? Once we decide what our collective values are, how do we prosper while staying consistent with what it is we have previously determined?