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>> Quebec’s forest
fires are adding to the by PATRICK LEJTENYI
“The caribou prefer to live in forests that are at least 50 years old,” says Michel Huot, a biologist with the provincial Services des faunes et des parcs du Québec. And because the caribou require certain vegetative species to survive, like lichen, the fires may prove a real hazard to the population’s future. “The population is already at risk, and it’s a population in decline,” Huot says. “The caribou are not a dynamic species. It is very difficult for them to colonize other territories.” The woodland caribou, whose population extends from Newfoundland to B.C., is already on the Canadian endangered species list. And while other caribou thrive in northern Quebec and Nunavut, where herds with hundreds of thousands roam the taiga and the tundra, the woodland population living between the 50th and 54th parallels—where the fires are raging—is much smaller. And it is declining. While precise data is not available, it is known that larger herds, like the one ranging around the George River near Labrador, no longer migrate as far as they once did. The James Bay hydroelectric dams have also made life more difficult for them. The worst of the fires may be behind us, but the extent of the damage done to the environment in the area remains to be assessed. While many are saying it’s not nearly as bad as expected, the delicate ecosystem the caribou need to survive is always precarious. “The lichen [the caribou need] is quite rare,” says Huot. “If it is burned, it may have very severe adverse effects on the population.”
A lot of other things have happened, however, that have been very bad for caribou. Laura Telford, the manager of the endangered species program at the Ottawa-based Canadian Nature Federation, says logging practices have proven disastrous for the caribou population. “Forest fires generally are related to logging practices,” she says. And this is terrible for the caribou population, because they live in old boreal forests in the northern parts of the country. “In the boreal, it takes forever for trees to grow. And the logging industry is biting into it.” Logging, then, is acting like a double whammy on the boreal caribou population. First, it contributes to the ignition of forest fires, which can destroy the caribou’s natural habitat; second, because caribou are extremely sensitive to human activity, it scares them away from their traditional feeding and breeding grounds. “The issue concerning us,” says Kevin Kavanagh, the Toronto-based director of the national conservation program for the Canadian branch of the World Wildlife Fund, “is that across Canada, the caribou is a threatened species. And in most areas of operations, logging operations are moving north into the boreal.” This translates into a drop-off in population. “We’re seeing whole units disappear, separate herds that wink out on us,” he says. And so it goes: human presence leads then to a calamitous drop-off in the population of caribou. Laura Telford estimates the entire national population of the woodland caribou being between 40,000 and 47,000, down from almost 200,000 in the 1980s. When asked what she thinks the effects of the fires will be on the remaining caribou, she says, “I don’t know. I hope they will prove resilient and be able to move. I imagine the long-term effects won’t be good, they are already facing a dwindling habitat. People are really worried. We wonder if we’ll still have caribou in 50 years.” Meanwhile, forestry officials have already opened up some of the area within the fire perimeter to traffic, and Abitibi-Consolidated, a forestry giant, has stated that the financial impact of the fires on the company has been “minimal.” : |
Forest
fires are good, right? Natural regenerative process and all that. But
not if you’re the woodland caribou. The gigantic fires in northern
Quebec which flared up earlier this month have not only torched hundreds
of thousands of hectares of forest, displaced hundreds of mostly Cree
inhabitants and cost the province about $1.5-million a day, they have
also affected a fair share of the wildlife. And while most large mammals,
like deer, moose and bears, can smell the fire as it approaches and
flee accordingly, some animals, like the woodland caribou, are in danger
of moving closer to extinction.