LOCAL RESTORATION ‘ENCOURAGING’
Parks Canada reports on reforestation efforts including moose cull
Parks Canada reports on Cape Breton Highlands reforestation efforts, including moose cull.
Parks Canada is delivering promising results from an effort to reforest the Cape Breton Highlands National Park.
Experimental methods by the federal agency include an annual moose cull inside the park beginning in 2015, as part of the Bring Back the Boreal pilot project.
The park’s resource conservation manager Rob Howey said for the past five years, staff has monitored tree plots by measuring height, diameter, the number of branches with new shoots and branches browsed.
“We’ve got three years of data now and this spring we’ll have more information,” said Howey. “The preliminary results are very encouraging.”
Other efforts to bring back mature growth include planting trees and creating a large moose enclosure on the Skyline Trail.
Howey said the percentage of twigs available for browsing on North Mountain, where the cull occurs, increased from 46 per cent in 2015 to 95 per cent by spring 2018.
At the start of the pilot project, Parks Canada identified 100 plots on North Mountain near Cape North and 100 plots on French Mountain near Cheticamp.
French Mountain was chosen as
a control site because it has similar ecological terrain.
“We measured two balsam fir and two white birch trees in each
plot with the aforementioned measures,” said Howey. “These measurements were taken on the same trees every year and we compared changes year-to-year. Each year since June 2016, both areas have shown a statistically significant decrease in browsed twigs.”
The 2018 moose harvest opened on Nov. 7 and closed three weeks later due to an early blast of winter weather. The hunt was originally scheduled to run until Dec. 2.
Howey said although they didn’t all hunt at once, a team of 12 volunteers took part in last year’s harvest, including a few Mi’kmaq chiefs.
All the hunters were Mi’kmaq and had been selected by the Unama’ki Institute of Natural Resources and the Kwilmu’kw Mawklusuaqn Negotiation Office.
Howey said within five days, 16 moose (10 bulls and six cows) were killed, bringing the total of animals harvested to 138 over the course of four years.
One of the more contentious issues of the harvest has been Parks Canada’s decision to use helicopters to aid in the hunt, along with ballooning costs of the project.
In November, the Canadian Press reported that the total cost was slightly over $7,900 per animal.
The biggest ticket items were travel and overtime costs for park wardens, helicopter flights into the remote area and the cost of airborne moose surveys.
Parks Canada said last year that its Bring Back the Boreal project budget had doubled from $1 million to $2.1 million.
“We don’t use a helicopter for herding animals or anything like that,” said Howey. “It’s simply used to transport harvesters and locate animals, and also sling harvested animals out of the back country where there is really tough terrain.”
Howey said helicopter use falls within the park’s own established animal care guidelines set out in the project.
Prior to the start of the harvest, Parks Canada estimated there were 1,800 moose in Cape Breton Highlands and thousands more outside the park.
Crystal Dorey, spokesperson for Kwilmu’kw Maw-klusuaqn Negotiation Office, said this year’s harvested meat was distributed throughout Mi’kmaq communities of Nova Scotia.
Howey said as much of the moose is used as possible, including the hides that will be used for Indigenous drum making.
He said Parks Canada will spend the year analyzing the results of its pilot project, stating the department remains committed to restoring boreal forest in the Cape Breton Highlands.