For many people the terms wildlife corridor and habitat patch are synonymous with Three Sisters Mountain Village and what has been an at times contentious development in the community of Canmore.
With designated corridors and buffer zones built into the development and protected through some conservation easements so far, ensuring animal movement through the east end of the valley has been paramount for the community over the years.
TSMV has monitored wildlife movement in these areas for over a decade, until recently when last December the decision was made to stop the practice.
Chris Ollenberger, principle planner with QuantumPlace, which is acting on behalf of TSMV owners, said monitoring with 20 cameras showed three times as many people in the corridors than wildlife.
“We stopped sending biologists out to the field to see what was going on because the number of pictures we had of town of Canmore permanent residents – and there are 13,000 of you with unleashed dogs running around wildlife corridors and on your mountain bikes on pirate trails – outnumbered every species and every animal we had out there by a factor of three,” Ollenberger said.
He said human use management is the key to addressing wildlife corridor challenges as a result and where efforts should be focused in the future.
“We have a different problem; it is no longer about how you get the animals to move through the valley, it is how do we stop the humans from getting in the way and I think that is a challenge the entire town is already working on,” Ollenberger said.
Jon Jorgensen with Alberta Parks said the developer has not been required to monitor wildlife for a number of years and until completion of the subdivision towards the east end – it isn’t clear what should be monitored.
“In a lot of areas right now, especially on the east end, there is no development, so basically there isn’t a defined corridor,” he said. “The wildlife can go anywhere they want because there is nothing constraining them.”
Jorgensen is part of the municipality’s human use management review process trying to look at the issue of people being in these areas.
Part of the problem is some areas are off limits by ministerial order (on Alberta Parks land) and other areas are not restricted because it is outside the park.
“You can do it on park land, but on public land it is much more difficult because we don’t have a clear piece of legislation to close stuff like that,” Jorgensen said. “That is part of the problem, people don’t know where the corridors are and a lot of them don’t understand this relationship between human use of corridors and their functioning for wildlife and this workshop is designed to pull out all of those issues and to come up with some recommendations on how we might address some of them.”
Wildsmart spokesperson Tyler McClure, who is also on the committee, said education, and specifically signage, is key to managing human use in these areas.
“There may be a need for signage to let people know about the sensitivity of the area they are entering,” he said. “If people don’t know where the lines are, they are just as invisible to us as they are to animals.”
Kim Titchener with Bear Safety & More said while residents and visitors are fortunate to have so many local trails, they need to be aware of the effect they have on wildlife movement by going into these areas.
“Human use on non-designated trails is an issue in the Bow Valley, especially in the wildlife corridors where wildlife need space from people to move freely between habitat patches and protected park lands,” she said, adding more than a committee is needed to address the issue.
“The Town has created a stakeholder group to look at addressing this, but an on-the-ground education program is what is really needed.”
