Bow Valley elk live in a fragmented and dangerous world.
With two highways, railway tracks, grids of municipal roads, fences, homes, businesses, industrial plants and large-scale tourism developments, the Bow Valley is anything but pristine, ensuring elk face many challenges as these large ungulates attempt to eke out a living, according to Benn Edwards.
“You can’t just paint all of the elk in north America over a 4,000 kilometre range with the same brush. Everything is specific to landscape, specific to terrain, specific to what kind of pressures are going to be around,” said Edwards, who is studying the effects humans have on elk behaviour and ecology, during his recent Bow Valley WildSmart presentation – Bow Valley Elk: Living in a Fragmented Landscape – held at the Canmore Collegiate High School theatre Jan. 21.
“How many natural populations do we still have? I’d say almost none have been untouched by some sort of habitat fragmentation, human caused. The animals living in Canmore and the Bow Valley are all surviving to a certain extent, but what we are trying to find out with a study is are there strategies viable in the long term?”
“The Valley is quickly changing with a lot of development, a lot of tourism and a lot of recreation activities. Are these strategies that (elk) are using, are they going to help them to persist?” Edwards asked.
Working as part of a research project initiated by Alberta Parks in 2008 and supported by Lafarge Canada, Edwards undertook a series of studies, including projects looking at habitat fragmentation and parasites, helping to create a baseline of elk-related information.
“When we are looking at fragmentation, one of the big factors in Canmore and the Bow Valley is elk don’t like to move or forage up high because it’s all rock, there’s nothing to eat up there. So they’re really limited to the valley bottoms and unfortunately, that is where we are putting roads, railways and town sites.”
As a result, these animals tend to rely on the same high-quality habitats over and over again, Edwards said.
“A lot of their habitat choices are dictated by the availability of good cover and excellent forage so along forest edges and in clearing,” he said.
For the Canmore herd, this means elk can regularly be found at the Canmore Golf and Curling Club, baseball diamonds and soccer fields, an area Edwards referred to as Elk Island, located near Millennium Park that sees a lot of rutting behaviour come fall. Another island refuge northeast of the Three Sisters area also offers elk good cover and forage and limited use by people as does the unfinished golf course in Three Sisters Mountain Village.
Edwards said he tends to find the Canmore herd on the unfinished golf course quite often, up to 90 per cent of the time.
In total, the Canmore herd uses a home range of roughly 30 square kilometres.
“As the frequency of use increases, you see the elk using smaller and smaller portions of the core home range so they’re not uniformly distributed across that 30 sq. km. They’re using 4.5 sq. km 50 per cent of the time. It’s pretty incredible how small these core home ranges are for these animals,” he said.
At Dead Man’s Flats, meanwhile, the elk have a home range of about 10 sq. km, but, like the Canmore herd, use an even smaller core home range, which Edwards described as “absolutely tiny.”
“This is one of the most constrained areas in the Bow Valley: It has both highways, the river, the railway, the cement plant. These animals are focusing their efforts and really using one area of the habitat, which is the patch between the Bow River and Lac des Arcs,” he said.
In Bow Valley Provincial Park, meanwhile, a herd of roughly 70 to 80 elk tend to use a home range of 23 sq. km where they face fewer overall constraints compared to the Canmore and Dead Man’s Flats herds.
“They’re not so constrained by the valley walls and they’re able to spread out into the plains. Some of these animals move south towards Barrier Lake and Highway 40 and they’ve started to use terrain in what you might call a natural way. They’re not focusing on such a small number of high-quality habitats but they are rotating as they are foraging. They’re not foraging in the same place every day. They’re moving around quite a bit.”
The result of elk moving greater distances around their home range is that the BVPP elk are less susceptible to parasites than their Canmore and Dead Man’s Flats counterparts. Highway mortality rates, however, appear to be higher as the BVPP elk often follow the TCH as an east-west corridor. That behaviour, Edwards said, makes them more prone to be killed by cars and tractor-trailers.
“I had a friend call and tell me that he just saw a semi-truck take out six elk at one time. This happens really, really regularly. One of the biggest things you can do to help elk is to just slow down.”
Of 11 cow elk collared in the Dead Man’s Flats and Bow Valley Provincial Park area, five have been killed on the TCH. Edwards pointed out, however, that those highway mortality numbers could be biased as the elk that were captured and collared for this study could have been individuals inclined to travel along the highway corridor.
“We might have selected animals more prone to go to open areas, more prone to go near the highway. Hopefully that is not indicative of all the elk,” he said.
While much of Edwards’ research may point to challenges, he did find elk – the Canmore herd specifically – do get some benefits from hanging out near town and other developed areas.
“First off is predator evasion,” Edwards said. “Regardless of those rare events where people see cougars wander through town, there’s not a lot of chance for these elk to be preyed upon by wolves, cougars or bears going after the calves. So they are relatively safe from predators in the town site.”
Along with avoiding predators, town elk also benefit from a plentiful and rich food source.
“The forage here is awesome: golf course, soccer fields, baseball diamonds, all sorts of lawns and gardens. There’s lots of good forage in the town site and they recognize that,” Edwards said.
While it is not all bad news for elk living in the Bow Valley, given the high-quality forage and a greater level of protection from predators, Edwards said elk appear to be facing a difficult future.
“From what I’ve seen in the last few years I suspect the Bow Valley population is in a slow decline unless they have an extremely high reproductive rate or recruitment rate or birth rate to account for all of the highway mortalities,” Edwards said.
The series of studies within this larger study and masters project will hopefully help provide land managers and municipalities with the information they need to make good decisions that will help elk, one of the iconic species of the Rocky Mountains, survive in this very busy valley.
“In order to determine how this population is going to persist, you have to know a bit more in terms of what they are using, you have to know their recruitment and survival rates, their adaptive strategies and their habitat selection. To be effective, cows have to survive to reproductive age,” Edwards said. “It’ll be interesting to see over the next few decades how these animals will respond…
“How we are using the parks, how we are using the land really has to be made through informed decisions and really effective remedies when it comes to habitat management.”
