In the first of a series of articles from Cortes Islands recent Wildlife Coexistence Gathering, Cortes Currents looked at Vancouver Island’s first wildlife coexistence program in the Pacific Rim National Park Reserve. The problem at that time was human/bear conflicts. By the time Sabina Leader Mense reached out from Cortes Island, in 2009, Bear Aware (later renamed WildSafeBC) had been dealing with wolves and cougars for more than a decade. 

Bob Hansen, Pacific Rim Coordinator for WildSafeBC, described the wolves’ sudden appearance. 

“Up until this point in time, it was bears and nothing but bears.  In 1998/99, the wolves showed up after being missing from our area for  decades.  Their presence was very dramatically felt.  I remember getting a phone call from the local paper in January of 1999,  ‘have you been getting wolf reports?’ I checked our database, and we’d had  six wolf reports since 1972.  I said, ‘nope.’ Within two weeks it started, the wolves were back.” 

Hansen suspects that modern forestry methods may be at least partially responsible for the influx of wolves and cougars into his area. 

Bob Hansen: “Behind the West Coast Trail, and definitely behind Long Beach, there’s very extensive areas of large scale clear cuts. Major portions of watersheds were completely cut during the heyday of clear cut logging.” 

“What we learned  through the research project was that the newly cut areas are exceptional deer habitat and support predators for 10 to 15 years, but when that second growth plantation grows up  to a certain age, the canopy closes in. So it goes from being an exceptional deer habitat to the opposite end of the scale.  It’s been referred to in the literature as ‘ungulate barrens.'”

“We looked at satellite imagery of Vancouver Island with GIS. We colour coded the second growth plantations that were in that state. We had the cut dates and could see really large areas of Vancouver Island are now locked up in that ‘ungulate barrens’ condition. That condition persists till the stand is about 80 to a hundred years old.”

Cortes Currents: Aren’t some of the forest plantations now being cut after 40 to 50 years?  

Bob Hansen: “They have a calculation about where the best cost benefit point is on a plantation. It used to be 80 to a hundred years, but the math has changed. Right now those plantation lands are being cut around 60 years or even as early as 45 years. So there’s just no potential for them to become ‘old growth’ again.”

“The predators had to adapt to that reality and were coming into the national park, coming out to the shoreline.  There’s old growth there. It supports a low, but consistent, density of deer. It has all of these other prey animals at that interface between the ocean and the forest: deer, raccoon, river otter and seal pups.” 

“It’s food that they find at that interface between the ocean and the forest.  That was the big missing piece. Something had happened on the larger landscape, and it’s still happening.” 

“If you apply a different forestry technique to those plantations,  you don’t have to let it close off. Wait until they get 80 to 100 years old. You can actually keep sunlight filtering through the canopy as that plantation is growing, by doing commercial thinning and other things.  Also,  there’s other silviculture prescriptions that you can use  to help  promote medicinal plants and other values that are important for First Nations.”

“There’s a lot that could be done with those second growth areas, but it will take investment and a different vision. It’s not  just cubic meters of wood,  you have to manage it from a different perspective.”

Cortes Currents: With the arrival of the wolves, Hansen and his colleagues were suddenly faced with a whole new set of problems.

Bob Hansen: “It seemed almost as if the wolves didn’t know how to live amongst all the human activity and the people definitely didn’t know how to live amongst the wolf activity.” 

“The word spread quickly that you could come to Tofino, you could go to Vargas Island, you can find these wolves, they’ll trot right up to you.”

“I remembered a quote from a  Canadian Geographic article. Paul Paquette, a renowned researcher who’d been studying wolves for decades wrote, ‘when you see a wolf you’ll know that you’re in pristine remote wilderness.'”

“I’m going, ‘what!’ This is not remote. This is an area that at that time receives around 800,000 people a year for visitors. They’re quickly showing signs of just being almost socialized by people. There were many interactions and we recorded everything and we tried to learn from those reports. Then we learned that in a larger pack, their younger animals had actually been fed by hand. They were getting into garbage and food left out  in backcountry campsites. They were getting more aggressive in getting that food reward.”

“It really rang true when, at the ceremony last night, Grace SoftDeer said,  “˜if you feed an animal from your pack, and  another person comes along with a pack, that animal expects to be fed.” 

“What we were seeing was that as campers and kayakers started to push back against one pair of wolves, the wolves were standing their ground, growling and baring their teeth.” 

“In the next two years, we had 16 attacks on dogs. We had people that habituated and  fed wolves. We had a kayaker that sustained serious injuries in a wolf incident.  It was the very first  incident of its kind in BC.” 

Bob Hansen: “This picture was taken just a few weeks before the kayaker was injured on that island. Two photographers went out to Vargas and they spent two days camped on the beach and interacted with this pair of wolves during that time and got amazing photos. It seemed at times like the wolves were trying to play with them. It’s a blurry picture, but you can see the wolve’s body language. That wolf came up and grabbed  her pant leg, and the other one started to circle around behind them. The humans packed up and left because it wasn’t playtime anymore.” 

“The whole time, I thought ‘I  really know nothing or very little about wolf ecology, or wolf behaviour. I certainly didn’t think that wolves could become habituated. I Didn’t think that wolves could become food conditioned.  At that time, the common perception was wolves never ever harm people.”

“From that starting point, it was obvious we’re right back down at the ‘bottom of the mountain.’ We just feel like we’re getting someplace with bears and people, and now we’re back starting a new climb. What do we do? And it was back to that first lesson, ask for help.” 

“So, just to keep life really interesting,  we experienced increased interactions between hikers and cougar on the West Coast Trail.  So now we have bears, wolves, and many very close encounters involving cougars on the West Coast Trail.” 

“I hit the phone again and put together all of the detailed reports we gathered, and sent it to a researcher named Lee Fitzhugh, who was considered ‘the expert’ on cougar human encounters.”  

“He got back to us, ‘well, it looks like you have an animal that’s assessing people as prey and you won’t know when that animal makes up its mind until an attack occurs.” 

“We very nearly didn’t open the West Coast trail that year.” 

“A hiker had gone through before the trail opened. It turned out every year he hiked the trail before the trail opened. And he’d had an incredibly intense experience with what was likely the same cougar.  It was crouched and  coming like this straight towards him with his tail twitching.  So he broke his hiking stick that he’d had for 20 some years, to no effect. The cougar was just staring at it.  He got one of those little flare bangers out of his pack and he set that off.  It walked into the edge of the forest, just two or three meters away. Then it stood there, stared at him and screamed.” 

“In response to that, we went, ‘wow.’ The first month of hikers on the West Coast trail is almost all school groups. Children are represented in a lot of attack reports involving cougars. So, we assembled a whole team with guns and spent  almost 10 days trying to find the cougar. Eventually, we weren’t seeing any tracks. We didn’t ever find it.”

“It was during that response that another warden and myself, we were standing at Carmanah Beach, and we just looked at each other and said,  ‘this is so f…ed-up. What is going on?  We’ve got wolves interacting with people,  we’ve got cougars interacting with people. Something’s gone wrong on the landscape. Something has changed.  We’re years into this now where we’re reacting, reacting, reacting, and we keep trying to get ahead. And  we asked, ‘is something going on in the landscape, in the habitat?’ We have so many questions we need answers to, if we’re ever going to get ahead of this.”

“Out of that moment,  the idea for the Wild Coast Project was born.  We got to work and we reached out far and wide to many universities: 

Vancouver Island University; Simon Fraser; UBC; University of Calgary; Royal Roads; and the University of Victoria. We reached out to all three levels of government; First Nations; ecotourism operators; provincial parks; the CO service; interested individuals and outdoor guides.”

“We got together for three days at the University of Victoria and we came up with an integrated multidisciplinary research plan.  We worked backward from the questions we had and we realized, okay, we need to understand deer habitat and the prey base. We need to understand wolf ecology. We need to understand cougar ecology. We need to seek teaching from the First Nations. We need to involve people with local ecological knowledge, up and down the coast.  Really importantly, we need to understand ourselves.  It’s the human element that we need to understand. So, that was a big realization, and we ended up involving the head of the Department of Natural Resources Psychology.  I never even knew such a thing existed. Social Science and Human Dimensions Research became a big part of what ended up being a 10 year program with 18 technical projects. We took our blank  blackboard, and we started putting up little pieces of information from all of this work over 10 years.” 

“One of the biggest hurdles we had in getting this whole thing going, turned out to be a huge bonus. Everyone in our region was fully on board, willing to participate and bring whatever they could in terms of resources, but Ottawa was just giving us the minimum they could so we could hold some meetings. The research proposal was for a million dollars and in the end we received $35,000 one year and $70,000 the next.  It was enough to get us going. On the last page of the summary of the results from all of the wild coast work, there are 65 partners listed. Everyone brought a little bit of funding and in kind resources and they applied for their own grants, research grants. One of the biggest legacies from the Wild Coast Project is all of those working relationships are still in place.  We had to go out, we had to partner, we had to collaborate. We learned so much and that network of community effort grew exponentially again.” 

“That’s when I was approached by another champion, Sabina Leader Mense from Cortes Island, because she’d heard about the Wild Coast  project. So we were taking a step away from the West Coast.”

Cortes Currents: You have been reading a series of clips from one of Bob Hansen’s presentations at the Linnaea Education Centre on April 6. The gathering concluded with a walk through the wildlife travel corridor in Hank’s Beach Forest Conservation Park, the following day. That was when Bob Hansen described two scenarios: 

“Old growth forest  supports a low density of deer, but if you had a large landscape of continuous old growth, what you would have is a low density of deer spread across that landscape. Wolves could hunt across that landscape and find deer.”

Cortes Currents: We appear to have been seeing the second scenario as a result of modern logging practises.

Bob Hansen: “Wolves could expend a huge amount of energy hunting in ungulate barrens (see example from Cortes Island at top of page) and have very little success, or they could go to some place like rural subdivisions. Even within communities where there’s an abundance of good deer habitat.  It makes sense that the wolves would go where their food is, which brings them into  areas of high human activity, but the deer are there.” 

Cortes Currents: One thing that puzzled Hansen and the other presenters is the size of Cortes Island’s wolf pack. They concluded it was because of the abundance of food. 

Bob Hansen: “After our session last night, we saw seven deer on the way home. It was a deer, every 500 metres or so, all through that rural residential area. So the deer are there. It’s a good chance the wolves will be there.”

Cortes Currents: However unlike the wolves that entered the Pacific Rim almost a quarter of century ago, Cortes Island’s pack has been studying our behaviour for years. 

Bob Hansen: “Successive generations of animals are learning how to live amongst human activity.  I don’t think that trend is going to change.  Then it comes back to how we learn and change our behaviors, so that we can live with them.”

Links of Interest:

• Origins of the Cortes Community Wolf Project – Cortes Currents
• WildSafeBC website
• Learning To Live With Large Carnivores – The WildCoast Project Primer
• The First Wildlife Coexistence program on Vancouver Island – Cortes Currents
• Articles about or mentioning Bob Hansen on Cortes Currents

Top image credit: While there has been little industrial scale logging on COrtes Island since the 1990s, there are still numerous ‘ungulate barrens’ – Roy L Hales photo

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