This year marked the death of a well-known bighorn sheep – a large ram that gave Parks Canada valuable knowledge to help protect his herd in Kootenay National Park.
The large male ram, known by park researchers as M645, was found dead this past spring in the Redstreak area of Kootenay National Park. The member of the Radium bighorn sheep herd was thought to have been almost 12 years old.
Parks Canada officials say the ram lived a fairly long life for a wild sheep and changed how Parks Canada understands sheep ecology and ecosystem restoration in the park.
“The carcass had been there for a while when it was found by a member of the public, but it wasn’t a vehicle kill,” said Alan Dibb, a Parks Canada wildlife biologist for Lake Louise, Yoho and Kootenay.
“It looked like it could quite possibly have been a cougar predation, but we’re not quite sure. “
Ram M645 was first radio-collared on Jan. 30, 2008 and wore the collar until Nov. 17 that same year as part of a 2002-09 Radium bighorn sheep study.
The ram gave park biologists almost 10 months of valuable data on his travels – 2,167 location points, and up to eight points per day, during that time period.
Parks Canada learned where sheep go to find critical habitat features, such as mineral licks and how sheep have responded to ongoing efforts to restore ecosystems in the area.
They also got information on which migration routes and habitat types sheep use.
In early summer of 2008, ram M645 and a few other males revealed what is likely an historical migration route used by generations of sheep to reach the ram summer range running from Redstreak campground, over Redstreak Mountain to Kimpton Creek.
This wasn’t the only summer range used by M645, though.
It was discovered that he and a few other rams used two summer ranges – one south of Highway 93 South and one north of the highway – and moved between them by crossing the busy highway near Olive Lake in midsummer.
Dibb said this previously unknown information is important to future planning on Highway 93 South to reduce the number of animal-vehicle collisions in this area.
“This fellow in the middle of summer went from the southern range to the northern range and crossed the highway just south of Olive Lake – and he was one of only a few that did that,” said Dibb.
“We know sheep using the range to the north came down to lick minerals from the road, but if not for this fellow and one or two others, we wouldn’t have known whether sheep need to cross the highway or not.”
The Radium Hot Springs bighorn sheep population is made up of about 200 animals.
In the last few decades, deteriorating range conditions and traditional winter habitats have led the sheep to partially abandon their traditional winter homes.
Instead, the herd tends to prefer artificial grasslands like golf courses, residential lawns and highway rights-of-way in and around the area of Radium Hot Springs.
This has increased habituation of bighorns, exposed them to harassment by dogs and run-ins with people, and increased the number of sheep deaths along highways.
Dibb said research shows ram M645 and others spent most of the fall and summer inside Kootenay National Park, usually leaving the park around Nov. 1 each year to spend the winter on provincial lands.
“It’s really an inter-jurisdictional herd because most of the summer range is inside the national park and most of the winter range is outside the park,” he said.
In an attempt to improve natural winter habitat for bighorn sheep and get them out of the artificial habitat, Parks Canada has embarked on a big multi-year restoration project.
They thinned a 200-hectare site in 2003 in the area in and around Redstreak campground, including tree removal, while keeping clumps of veteran trees, brushing, piling and burning, and noxious weed control.
In addition, there have been two smaller prescribed fires in that same area since then, in 2005 and 2009.
Dibb said ram M645 made quite a bit of use of the area after the restoration program, noting 182 of his 2,167 location points were inside the restoration area.
Dibb said less than one per cent of sheep locations were inside the area before the habitat restoration work, whereas since then, the amount of use has varied from two per cent to more than 10 per cent.
“Prior to those treatments, it would have been difficult for an animal the size of a sheep to walk through that. It was very thick with very little forage and really nothing of appeal for a sheep,” he said.
“After we restored it, there was open habitat, which sheep like. The overall trend is for increasing use of that area by sheep.”
Dibb said Parks Canada has presented the result to scientific conferences of wildlife biologists.
“There’s been a lot of interest in it across western North America because there’s not many cases where people have had pre-treatment habitat use data and then significant habitat modification to monitor the response,” he said.
Parks Canada has more restoration work ahead.
A prescribed burn is on the books for Redstreak Mountain and it could go ahead as early as Sept. 30. Approximately three kilometres east of Radium, the prescribed burn unit is 235 hectares in size.
While part of the goal is to protect the village of Radium from a potential future wildfire, a big part of the plan is to restore grasslands and associated habitat traditionally used by bighorn sheep and other animals.
Rick Kubian, resource conservation manager for Lake Louise, Yoho and Kootenay, said they’ve been attempting to burn that area in late fall for about six years, but conditions have not been favourable for large-scale ignition.
“We’ve worked intensively with Alan to understand sheep habitat,” he said.
“We hope to create an open forest condition upslope and create some habitat in that transitional range between summer and winter.”
Dibb said most of the travel corridors connecting winter and summer range are made up of fairly thick, closed forests, which are not liked by sheep for many reasons, including a lack of escape terrain from predators.
“The concern we have is, if corridors remain closed forest, at some point some of the sheep may make stop making part of the journey and become sedentary on winter migration,” he said.
“We want to maintain natural migratory behaviour and one of the steps to try to improve habitat along a natural migration corridor is to open up the forest. The sheep are more likely to feel secure and more likely to use them.”
To address some of those concerns, Kubian said Parks Canada is in the final stages of planning a 40-hectare restoration project above the former Radium Hot Springs Lodge – which was demolished in 2011.
“That has very much been shaped by the telemetry work that shows a very significant travel corridor used by sheep transitioning from winter range on the valley floor up to their summer range,” said Kubian.
“The initial phase will be thinning, hopefully early this winter, and then it will be two or three years before we consider burning that. It’s a small, but important piece of bighorn sheep habitat.”
