Fact checking

Someone I know shared an blog post, with some personal commentary of course, about wolf culls in Alberta.  Specifically, this blog post.

Wolves to be Poisoned Over Tar Sands in Canada

Headline aside, it's not actually about wolves being poisoned because of the "tar" sands.  Aside from the usual anti-oilsands rhetoric, what the post is actually saying is that wolves are going to be culled because caribou numbers are decreasing, and it claims caribou numbers are decreasing because of oilsands activities.  Since wolves kill and eat caribou, the Canadian government is going to kill wolves to protect caribou.

Uh huh.

So I decided to do a bit of research.  First, I looked up caribou ranges.  The species of caribou in question is the woodland (Boreal) caribou.

Source: Parks Canada

Then I looked up where the oilsands activities are happening.

Source: geoLOGIC

As you can see, there's very little contact between the oil sands surface mineable and currently disturbed areas, and the range of woodland caribou.  For more detailed maps of the areas involved, visit here (pdf) and here.

What about the caribou?

The woodland caribou is indeed listed as a "species at risk (pdf)," and not just in Alberta. 

What are the reasons for decline?  Visit here for more detail, but this is the short form.

1. Altered predator-prey dynamics
2. Predator Access
3. Human Disturbance
4. Habitat Loss
5. Small Population Effects

Note that for Human Disturbance, that is mostly due to vehicle collisions, while Habitat Loss includes forest fires.

Another source tells us:

Timber harvesting is one of the primary agents of habitat change within the study area. Large-scale harvesting increases the area of early successional forests, and because this younger habitat favors moose and other non-caribou ungulates, historical predator-prey dynamics have changed(Fuller and Keith 1981, Rempel et al. 1997, Johnson et al 2004a,Wittmer et al. 2007, Nitschke 2008).

With more information here (pdf).

For more information about the wolves and their affects on ungulate populations, visit here (pdf).

I highly recommend spending some time going through all the links.  Until then, this is a brief overview.

The woodland caribou is a species that lives in small populations with a low birthrate and with a habitat preference for older forests.  This makes them susceptible to a number of things that can affect their population.  Timber extraction results in younger forests that are preferred by other ungulates, like moose and elk, which displace the woodland caribou.  The increase in population in these other ungulate species leads to an increase in wolf populations.  Wolves replace themselves quickly, are highly adaptable, and very efficient.  More wolves means more loss of woodland caribou to predation, which can devastate a species that is so slow to replace itself.

So what does this have to do with the oilsands?

Not much, it turns out.  Although human industrial activity does disturb and fracture their habitats, they have been at risk since before the oilsands grew to the point they are now (which still has little overlap with local woodland caribou populations), and some of the populations in Alberta that are declining aren't anywhere near the oilsands, but are in Banff and Jasper parks.  Throughout Alberta, there are little pockets of caribou that are increasing, decreasing and are stable, with still others listed as "unknown," and considering the geographical spread of these populations, no connections to the oilsands can be made, other than the usual ways all other human activities affect them.

Are the wolves being poisoned because of the "tar" sands?

Nope.  They are going to be poisoned in a culling process that will span years because of overpopulation, and that overpopulation is putting the woodland caribou at increased risk due to predation.

Now, one can argue over whether or not humans should be culling wolves at all.  One can argue about the use of poison for culling (shooting them from helicopters has been done in the past, which lead to a huge uproar from the general public).  That's not what the blog post is saying.  The writer there is blaming the cull and the decline in (some) woodland caribou on the oilsands.  However, it turns out that the association between the culling of wolves, the population of woodland caribou and oilsands activities is spurious at best.