Plans to reintroduce plains bison into a remote area of Banff National Park continue to stir controversy, with fears the iconic animals will head to better habitat on neighbouring provincial lands where they can be legally shot and killed.
With the public comment period on a detailed environmental impact assessment having ended Nov. 30, the $6.6 million pilot project to bring a small herd of bison back into a corner of their former range in the Panther and Dormer river valleys looks set to get final approval.
Karsten Heuer, Parks Canada’s project manager for the bison reintroduction project, said the intent of the five-year pilot project is to see if longer-term bison restoration is feasible in Banff.
“They’ve been absent for over 140 years,” said Heuer at last month’s Bow Valley Naturalists meeting. “We have a major element to the ecosystem missing, and obviously we’re interested in trying to bring that element back.”
In February, Parks Canada plans to move 16 bison – 12 pregnant two-year-old females and four two-year-old bulls – from a disease-free herd in Elk Island National Park to an 18-hectare fenced soft-release pasture in the middle of a 12,000-square-kilometre reintroduction zone.
The animals will be held within this fenced pasture for 16 months, where they will be given water and supplementary food, such as hay. By the time they are released in June 2018, it’s hoped there will be about 30 animals.
Heuer said the idea behind a soft-release pasture, which will have a fence similar to the wildlife exclusion fence along the Trans-Canada Highway, is to help the herd develop a strong bond with their new home.
He said bison will be held there until they have calved twice.
“We’ve been told holding them in that pasture for a longer period, especially for the young and the mothers, is the thing that’s going to bond them to that place the most,” Heuer said. “We’re trying to do everything possible to make sure they consider this place to be a new home.”
Once bison are released from the fenced pasture in June 2018, they will be kept in the larger reintroduction zone with approximately eight kilometres of adjustable wildlife fencing in 15 locations, such as rivers and ridges.
At that point, bison will be closely monitored with GPS and radio collars so their whereabouts are known.
It’s expected bison may try to wander beyond the reintroduction zone, but Parks plans to have staff on horseback to herd or haze the bison, possibly even use baiting techniques, to help steer their movements to encourage the bison to develop an affinity for their new home range.
“That initial cohort will be managed a little more intensively than we plan over the longer-term, but it’s to help set patterns,” Heuer said.
“All of this is being done to help the bison adopt this new area as their home. Then those patterns are set in place for subsequent generations.”
While there is widespread support across Canada for the return of bison to Banff, there remain concerns and doubts.
Some say Parks Canada is being dishonest by calling it a free-roaming herd when there is strategic fencing to keep bison within the 12,000-square-kilometre reintroduction zone, while others fear animals will simply leave the national park for better grazing on provincial lands.
The effects of bison returning after an absence of 140 years on livestock outside the park and potential for property damage continue to be a worry for many.
Graeme Pole, a well-known author and conservationist, said historically bison were only coming into the mountains seasonally, not year-round, adding quality bison habitat is limited to small island pockets, mostly within protected areas.
He said bison would have used the meadows of the Panther and Dormer valleys in historical times – and the meadows would have been larger a few hundred years ago – as part of a much larger network of habitats, not constrained by human developments.
“If bison were to take hold in the proposed release and expansion areas, they would exhaust the habitat and its carrying capacity for them,” said Pole, who has travelled this remote region of the park extensively over the past two decades.
“In the big picture, the park is in trouble ecologically without bison; the park will still be in trouble ecologically with bison.”
While bison were lost from Banff in historical times around the mid-1800s, Pole said caribou disappeared from Banff in 2009 when a remnant herd was wiped out in an avalanche. Jasper’s herds are dwindling.
He worries aspects of the bison reintroduction plan will have negative effects on any plans for caribou reintroduction.
“Bison may increase wolf populations over the long-term. The use of prescribed burns will improve potential bison habitat, but is antithetical to maintaining critical caribou habitat,” Pole said.
“As the area of Banff that is suitable bison habitat is relatively small, there may be pressure to use prescribed fire in areas that impinge on critical caribou habitat – more easily justified if caribou are not present.”
Fencing, including strategic fencing in the larger 1,200-km reintroduction zone, is also cause for concern for those who argue Parks Canada is simply creating a backcountry version of the bison paddock that was removed from near the Banff townsite in the late 1990s.
“If the bison flourish, what might remain is a bison park, not much dissimilar to the paddock deemed incompatible with park objectives in the recent past, and thus removed from Banff,” Pole said.
Conservationist Reno Sommerhalder doesn’t have a problem with the bison reintroduction program in itself, but he does have concerns that better bison habitat is outside the national park.
“I’m just doubtful because the better habitat is outside the park. Sooner or later, bison are going to be able to find that,” he said.
“From a species perspective, you think logically animals are going to go where life is easiest and I think bison will probably try to do that at some point.”
Sommerhalder said he knows Parks Canada has done its homework in terms of the fence design to retain bison, but also to allow other wildlife species to hopefully move through without harm.
“I don’t have a problem with them being retained inside a fence for a little while,” he said.
“We don’t want another buffalo paddock, but the goal is to have them free roaming, being prey to wolves and grizzly bears.”
The fences in the larger reintroduction zone are designed to hold back bison while allowing other wildlife to safely pass through.
Heuer said a review of thousands of images from remote cameras shows the permeable fences are working for all species, allowing bighorn sheep to go under, elk, deer and moose to go over, and carnivores ducking under as well.
“These fences will be in wildlife permeable mode until the bison mode is needed,” Heuer said, noting the target is to have the fences on bison mode less than five per cent of the time.
Heuer said he initially struggled with the concept of fencing, given that he has been a passionate advocate for wildlife connectivity. He also had initial concerns about the level of human management and intervention of the bison.
“This initial cohort of animals are not going to be quite wild to begin with, so that’s a bit of a cost to them, and from an ethical standpoint for me it was something I had to wrap my head around,” he said.
“But it’s a short-term sacrifice, if you will, towards a longer term objective of making sure that we can set patterns with these initial animals that can then be generational patterns that are passed down.”
The 1,200-kilometre reintroduction zone area will be divided into three zones – a hazing area, recapture area and no-go zone, each prompting different responses when the bison herd starts to head towards the periphery of the area.
“As animals approach the periphery of the reintroduction zone, they would actually be hazed similar to how elk are hazed when they come inside the townsite; this will be the flipped version of that,” he said.
Over the course of the pilot project, Heuer said Parks Canada doesn’t want the animals leaving the reintroduction zone. The Bow Valley is about 40 kilometres away from this remote area.
“For the first five years, at least as we’re learning here, we actually have areas in the national park where we don’t want these animals, one of which is the Bow Valley here,” Heuer said.
“If they do go into them we would be working to recapture them. We’ve even committed, if we need to, that we might even have to euthanize them if we can’t get those animals back to this part.”
Similar zones have not been created for provincial lands, where bison have no legal protection. They have no status as wildlife, so they can be legally shot and killed as long as there are required firearm permits.
In addition to fencing, there are also plans to enhance the habitat in the reintroduction zone through prescribed fire, as a way of encouraging bison to stay. There’s a goal to burn a total of 1,500 hectares before 2019.
Heuer said the hope is to burn immediate areas around the smaller fenced pasture next year, so that bison have a reason to stay once the gates to the fenced pasture are opened in 2018.
“They really like areas that have recently been burned for the fresh succulent growth that comes up in the wake of these fires,” he said. “We will actually use this as a tool to gradually expand and draw them into different areas.”
One of the biggest concerns surrounding the bison project comes from the province’s agriculture industry, which is worried about diseases like tuberculosis and brucellosis that can be passed to domestic cattle.
Heuer said the Elk Island bison herd is probably the most genetically pure of original plains bison that once roamed plains, foothills and mountains. These animals have been used for about 25 different translocation projects – and they’re disease free.
Although an assessment indicated risk of the disease was low to negligible for this herd, Heuer said Parks Canada has committed to testing animals.
“Any sick, dead, or animals that are chemically mobilized, or even if they’re dead from a wolf kill, we’ll go in and collect samples and have them tested for the first five years, just to make sure that nothing else is going on,” he said. “In the unlikely event that tuberculosis or brucellosis is detected, we have committed to culling the animals and ending the project.”
In addition, the nearest beef and bison farms are about 50 kilometres away and the nearest seasonal leasing allotment for ranchers to graze cows is about 20 km from the park’s eastern boundary.
“I’ve researched where other bison live, and this is a real gift for us to have this kind of buffer,”Heuer said.
Research out of Montana shows that Banff’s reintroduction zone could potentially support hundreds of bison, but Heuer said there are no plans to set up population target until the pilot is concluded.
“In five years, the best case scenario, depending on how much predation these animals might receive and how successful we are in calving these initial 16, I think the maximum number of animals we might have would be 60,” he said.
According to early explorer accounts and archaeological evidence, bison were the second-most prevalent ungulate after bighorn sheep in the national park area prior to being extirpated by overhunting in the 1850s.
Bison bone fragments, teeth, skulls and wallows have been found throughout the reintroduction zone.
“There’s good reasons to consider bringing back the bison, largely because they were killed off by us,” Heuer said. “The bison in Banff National Park were part of the larger extirpation of bison in North America.”
After the five-year pilot project, Parks Canada will consider whether long-term bison reintroduction is feasible or not.
“If the answer is no, we’re committed that the animals and the fences will be removed,” Heuer said. “If the answer is yes, then we would development a bison management plan, in cooperation with the Province.”
The deadline for public input on the detailed environmental impact assessment is Nov. 30.
Parks Canada asks all comments by submitted by email to [email protected] or by mail to Kendra VanDyk, Integrated Land Use, Policy and Planning, Parks Canada, 101 Mountain Avenue, P.O. Box 900, Banff, Alberta, T1L 1K2.
