Conference may help ‘charismatic megafauna’
Up to 95 participants either made presentations or heard about research
Gerry Redmond, a retired biologist with the Maritime College of Forest Technology in New Brunswick, was in Ingonish last week, where he hopes a conference will ultimately provide help for what he calls charismatic megafauna and others simply refer to as swamp donkeys.
Researchers and managers were gathered at the Keltic Lodge to talk about all things moose, potentially offering solutions to the hyper-abundant ungulate population in Cape Breton Highlands National Park. The conference wrapped up on Friday.
“Up to 95 participants are either presenting or hearing about research on what I call the charismatic megafauna — because everyone sort of likes moose — and some people call them swamp donkeys and things like that,” said Redmond, who organized the conference.
“But they’ve got character and I guess that’s the reason I’ve been involved with the moose for most of my professional career.”
The 51st North American Moose Conference theme was hyperabundance, and while at least eight presentations over the week had direct relevance for the moose population in Cape Breton, other talks involved various aspects of moose health, conservation and biology, including their habitat.
The Maritime College co-hosted the conference with the University of New Brunswick and Parks Canada, said Redmond, and the theme was chosen because of the Bring Back the Boreal program in the national park in northern Cape Breton, where the growing moose population is threatening to reduce the forest to grassland.
“When you pull people together, often solutions can be found, or at least we can talk about some of the issues and maybe get some advice or direction on how we can improve things,” Redmond said.
“And it’s to improve things not only for the habitat, because not only the moose but other critters that depend on a certain type of habitat. If it is eliminated then a whole host of interactions occur and it’s not just moose that lose out in the long term. It might be all kinds of other smaller mammals and insects and birds that might be affected as well.”
Under Parks Canada’s Bring Back the Boreal program, several experiments are underway to try to limit and reverse the damage being done by a burgeoning moose population in the park that has been estimated at around 1,800.
Several “exclosures” have been built to keep large animals out of certain areas of the park, and trees are being planted to measure their growth in the absence of hungry moose.
Parks Canada also has allowed hunting within the Cape Breton park for the first time, with two controversial moose harvests conducted by Mi’kmaq and two more scheduled in a small area on North Mountain to see if culling the herd will aid in forest regrowth.
Redmond said those and other methods have been used in other jurisdictions with hyper-abundant moose populations with varying degrees of success, depending on local climate, predators and habitat conditions.
“The only way you’re going to learn is to experiment with different approaches that make some sense, or at least have some biological logic to them,” he said.
“The exclosures, the planting and the harvesting are really in small portions of the park. If you were to make a wholesale change in management strategy and apply it everywhere, I would say that would be unwise.
“I think they’ve been responsible, in the sense that the harvesting is in a relatively small area. They are experimenting with the removal of moose over a number of years and then they’re going to evaluate what those impacts have been.
“And the same thing with plantings. I have a Christmas tree farm and I know that if I plant a seedling here and another one 100 metres away, they grow at different rates for a whole host of other reasons.”
Talking with habitat and wildlife researchers and managers is important to get a broader perspective on all of the factors that go into managing an animal population, Redmond said.
“Just knowing the intricacies and relationships takes many, many decades and maybe we never find out everything, but wherever you tweak, something else twitches,” he said.
Derek Quann, Parks Canada’s project manager for Bring Back the Boreal, said Thursday the conference is providing a significant exchange of information on hyper-abundant moose management.
“We’re benefiting from the brainpower, the wisdom, that’s in various rooms, and fresh perspectives,” he said.
Quann said nothing he has heard suggested changes in Parks Canada’s efforts so far in small parts of the national park, but the information would be useful when it comes time to scale up on a wider area when the project ends in March 2019.
“It’s early to say on some of that,” he said. “For sure, Parks Canada has been monitoring moose and the forests now for well over a decade, 15 years, and we’ve had this issue ... for quite a while, so we go into the project already with an evidence-based and science-informed set of data and literature that we can draw upon.
“No surprise, but there’s nothing that’s come out of this that said what we’re doing is wrong or faulty or anything like that. It’s really just a question of how it can be applied and how we can learn from it as we move forward with longer-term boreal forest restoration.”