An extensive two-year remote camera study detected only a couple of grizzly bears travelling on the north side of the Bow Valley in Canmore – an area used extensively by hikers and mountain bikers.
John Paczkowski, a wildlife biologist with Alberta Environment and Parks, said preliminary results found only “a couple of grizzlies” using the wildlife corridor area by Cougar Creek, but black bear use was more extensive.
“We haven’t seen a lot of grizzly bear use on the north side of the valley, and it’s been pretty slim on the south side as well,” he said.
“We’re still going to monitor into the grizzly bear season this year, so hopefully we’ll find some usage there.”
The camera data was collected as part of an Alberta Parks and Town of Canmore human use management review partnership, aimed at improving wildlife corridors. Most of the area is either protected wildland or provincial park.
Data has been collected from 100 cameras. There are currently 77 cameras out there until the fieldwork wraps up in June, with one camera placed for every one square kilometre on both sides of the valley.
Based on interim results of the camera work, one message is clear from wildlife biologists.
“If the people of Canmore want functional wildlife corridors, it’s going to take some effort and maybe some sacrifice, and it’s going to take some education,” said Paczkowski.
Although results are preliminary, what Paczkowski can say is that of 1.5 million images taken, 178,000 were classified as unique events. Of those events, 163,835 (or 96 per cent) were people using the habitat patches and wildlife corridors.
“That means humans were recorded at a rate of almost 20:1 in wildlife corridors and habitat patches around Canmore,” said Paczkowski.
“This is something that has potential for negative impacts on wildlife and increased potential conflict.”
Images of people were immediately deleted after data was classified.
“These cameras are for research purposes and are not used for enforcement,” said Paczkowski.
Of the total of classified human events, 97,829 were people with dogs, and 61 per cent of the dogs were off leash.
“It basically means that people are using the wildlife corridors as off-leash dog areas,” said Paczkowski.
For example, Paczkowski said 2,340 dogs were recorded over an 18-month period at just one camera site within a designated wildlife corridor, not the whole corridor – and 1,885 of those were off-leash dogs.
“Other sites, adjacent to the designated wildlife corridor, had equally high numbers,” he said, noting cameras are not set up in the off-leash dog park.
Paczkowski said one of the challenges for Alberta Parks and the Town of Canmore is to improve education and improve signage.
“Part of the program is to educate, do some better signage,” he said. “If that doesn’t work we may have to go to more enforcement, but we’ll start with the carrot.”
In addition, the cameras picked up a resident bobcat population, regular wolf activity and an increase in skunk use. The cameras show cougars are also regular visitors to the Bow Valley.
Foxes are fairly common, said Paczkowski, noting they’ve done some analysis on the first year’s worth of data.
“We looked at the relationship between human use and wildlife use and one of the things we saw was with increased human use, foxes tend to show up more,” he said. “That’s because we break the trail for them.”
Paczkowski will discuss the interim results of the study at a Friends of Kananaskis event at artsPlace in Canmore on Wednesday, April 19, at 7 p.m.
