In this episode, I look at a recent report documenting the expansion of coyote range over the past century. I also talk about some of the recent challenges facing the Banff’s new bison herd, and finally, I join my voice in the plea for the end of rock piles being built at popular tourist sites.
Mapping the Expansion of Coyote Range across the Continent
In the mountain west, we simply accept the presence of coyotes on the landscape. They’re simply a part of the mountain environment that we call home. For many places though, that isn’t the case. Coyotes are one of the continent’s most successful predators and have always been one of the first carnivores to explore potential new habitats.
But just how native are they too much of their current range? If we were to look back…waaaaay back, would we find them in the same places we encounter them today? What can we learn from their range expansions that can help us predict where they might move in the future?
In a report published in the Journal Zookeys in May of 2018, biologists James Hody and Roland Kayes looked to scientifically quantify both the historic range of the coyote over the past 10,000 years, but also to look at how the influence of civilization has aided them in dramatically increasing their range.
They discounted anecdotal records and hearsay and instead looked to the fossil record, archaeological specimens, museum collections, peer-reviewed reports, and official records from wildlife management agencies.
One of the things they wanted to determine was the coyote’s range prior to European contact? To accomplish this, they examined archaeological records. By looking at the locations where fossil bones were discovered, they could determine the coyote’s range between 10,000 years ago and the late 1800s. This was when European expansion first began to alter the landscape, the predator-prey relationships, and perhaps other factors that influenced the expansion of coyotes.
As a second aspect of the study, they sought to look at the expansion of coyotes after European contact as urbanization of the continent opened up new habitats for these crafty carnivores.
A quick look at the range of coyotes today will reveal a mid-sized carnivore that covers most of the continent. You can encounter coyotes from Alaska to Panama and from Newfoundland to Vancouver.
The one area they are not found is in the true north where harsh climates have, until now, trumped their adaptive nature and formed a no-go zone.
Ironically, coyotes have received the same unwelcome treatment as have all of our other carnivores. They were shot, trapped, had bounties placed upon them, poisoned, and suffered through all manner of attempts to rid the landscape of predators.
While these measures resulted in the disappearance of wolves and cougars from much of their original ranges for decades, these plucky puppies actually expanded their range during these times of persecution.
Every change humans made to the landscape worked to the advantage of coyote colonizers. In the days before European contact, they were largely restricted to the arid west. They are an animal of the plains and thrive in areas with endless grasslands and sparse forests.
Much of the existing literature is contradictory with some reports offering completely alternative details as to when coyotes expanded into certain territories. This is particularly true when we look at when they expanded west to California, north into Canada, and even south towards Costa Rica and the Yucatán Peninsula.
All of this contradictory data meant that the authors of this study needed to essentially start from scratch. According to the report:
“We compiled museum records from recent biological surveys, fossil and zooarchaeological collections, peer-reviewed literature, and management agency reports to characterize the historical distribution of coyotes prior to European settlement and catalogue their expansion decade-by-decade from 1900 to 2016.”
The authors used two principle data collections to collect accurate records for this report. The first is a repository known as FAUNMAP, or the Faunal Mapping Project and another called VertNet.
For the pre-contact records, FAUNMAP details archaeological remains and allows scientists to peer back into much deeper time. In order to find the ancient range of coyotes, the authors looked to their bones. Thankfully, coyotes are pretty common in the fossil record and by looking at the locations where specimens were discovered, a much more detailed map of their historic range could be constructed.
VertNet offers details on wildlife samples captured during studies of live animals. It includes items like skins, skeletons, stuffed specimens, etc. Since the collections include details of where and when an animal was captured, it gives us a good look at coyote ranges from the mid-1800s all the way to today.
In addition, for more recent records, they utilized peer-reviewed literature, in particular, reports where physical specimens or photographs were present to assure an accurate identification.
Their goal was to create two maps. The first was to quantify just where coyotes could be found between 10,000 years ago and 1900 when the landscape began to be carved up by settlers expanding westward into the coyote’s traditional range.
The second map would show the expansion of coyotes in 10-year intervals beginning in the year 1900 and continuing all the way to 2016.
The goal is to provide the first truly in-depth look at the expansion of coyotes since European contact.
Coincidentally, the historic range of coyotes compared quite closely with maps of historic forest cover. Coyotes were an animal of open plains and their preference for similar habit historically is to be expected.
When they looked at the results from their FAUNMAP query, they found 347 records from Canada and the U.S. with details on the age of the fossils. These specimens were located between the Pacific and the Mississippi, along with a few unexpected fossils from New Brunswick and Florida.
The authors grant that these two outliers may infer a wider eastern range of coyotes, but they believe it more likely that they were misidentified remains of related dogs like red fox.
These results give the coyote a distinctly western distribution prior to European contact. Samples showed coyotes to be found north into Alberta and Saskatchewan, and south to the Yucatán Peninsula.
When they looked to their VertNet results, they had 12,319 records of coyotes and coyote hybrids from across North and Central America. Of these, a total of 8,472 had enough geographical information to be mapped to at least the local county. 3,747 records only had enough location data to bring them to the state or province level. While many of these latter records were ignored due to their lack of good locality information, they did retain the records for Mexico simply because there were much more limited records there prior to 1900.
With all this data in hand, the first order of business was to look at the pre-contact range of coyotes to see if it showed evidence of a natural expansion in the absence of European settlement. The results indicated that the range remained pretty stable over time. The distribution of skeletal remains older than 300 years seemed to match those remains discovered in the late 1800s.
The skeletons don’t lie, but they do contradict some earlier studies that claimed that coyotes only expanded west towards California and the American Rockies during the 1800s and 1900s.
Instead, the pre-contact distribution of coyotes seemed to match the areas where forest cover was lacking. Coyotes definitely showed a preference for open landscapes of prairie, grasslands, and deserts.
From this data, it seems clear that western expansionism may have provided the impetus for coyotes to expand their ranges. Not only were they able to provide a map showing the range in 10-year intervals, they were able to follow the expansion as coyotes began to explore new territories far different from their prehistoric preferences.
As they state in the report:
“We compiled coyote occurrences from past biological surveys, fossils, zooarchaeological records, and existing literature to document the historical distribution of coyotes throughout the Holocene and reconstruct decade-by-decade range expansion during 1900–2016. Our findings indicate that coyotes historically occupied a larger area of North America than generally suggested in recent literature…”
They could clearly see the expansion of coyote range in western Canada and Alaska spread north and westward with the advent of land clearing for agriculture, along with forest clearing and garbage left behind by gold rushes in British Columbia and the Yukon.
Every change that western expansion has made to the landscape has benefited these versatile predators and allowed them to expand their range by taking advantage of these human-made changes.
Also of note here was that fossil records show coyotes had already expanded southward as far as the Yucatán Peninsula as far back as 4,000 years ago. This means they were already present on the landscape before the great civilizations of the Aztecs, Mayans, and other lost cultures began their great Pre-Columbian empires.
The report speculates that, based on fossil records, the population of coyotes may have followed the landscape, selecting open habitats through Mexico, the Yucatán, and even central America as far south as northern Costa Rica – at least until the middle of the 20th Century.
More recently they’ve expanded south into Panama as forests were cleared. At this point, the dense forests of Darien National Park in Panama seem to be the last barrier keeping them from bursting forth into South America.
The report continues:
“However, this barrier may be more permeable than previously thought, especially along the coastlines, raising concerns that coyotes might reach South America in the near future. If coyotes reach South America, it is likely that the grassland and agricultural habitats in Colombia and Venezuela could support viable populations, unless competition with native carnivores restricts them. Observations in eastern Panama suggests that road construction and agricultural development might facilitate coyote range expansion in previously forested tropical landscapes, but we find it improbable that coyotes would expand into intact parts of the Amazon rainforest. Conversely, we speculate that the open habitats of the Andes might offer suitable coyote habitat in such a scenario, and allow further expansion around the Amazon. Regardless of its extent, coyote colonization of South America would be an event of profound ecological significance; barring direct introductions by humans, expansion of a North American predator into South American ecosystems has not been observed since the Great American Biotic Interchange 3 million years ago and its potential effects on native wildlife is entirely unknown.”
This could have an immense impact on the savannahs of South America. Coyotes are one of the most versatile predators on the continent. It will be very interesting to see what happens when they breach this final barrier and take their first tentative steps onto an entirely new continent. Let’s hope there are biologists tasked with paying close attention to this historic invasion.
Reintroduced Banff Bison Decide to Move Towards the Prairies
Last episode I crowed triumphantly at the release of Banff’s new bison herd from its paddock into its 1,200 sq km release zone. This was a very exciting time that was also filled with some trepidation. Bison have not roamed free on this landscape for some 130 years, and now, here they were, able to make their own choices of how to explore their new home.
It was always a possibility that some may decide to push the boundaries once they were released from the paddock. I also talked about how the bison headed off in the wrong direction that parks staff had hoped and were literally headed off at the pass and encouraged to move further into their release zone where officials hope they will stay.
The goal is to use a variety of techniques to guide them until they truly settle into their new landscape. This involves a combination of baiting them to get them to move into areas with rich food rewards while also using aversive conditioning to discourage them from heading towards the open prairies where support for the release is still quite low.
These massive animals have been penned up for their entire lives, either in their Banff Park pen or in Elk Island National Park in the case of the original 16 reintroduced to the park. Once the gates opened up, one direction would seem as good as any other…”I wonder what’s over there…or there…or there?”
In the August 9 edition of the Rocky Mountain Outlook, we learned that one of the big bulls had decided to go on a walkabout and had bolted eastward towards the prairies. It was always a risk that some of the bulls might assert their dominance and begin to head in unwanted directions. This was complicated by the fact that they had no legal protected status once they left the protection of Banff National Park and stepped onto provincial lands.
This first bull was followed by a second, and unfortunately, on Aug 16 Parks were forced to Euthanize one of the two bulls when it moved into much more high-risk landscapes within provincial lands. According to a release, they stated that they:
“made the difficult decision to euthanize one of the bison bulls who had continued to move eastward toward private grazing lands and was posing a risk to public safety and to the safety of livestock.”
The statement continued:
“Parks Canada staff made tremendous efforts to encourage the bison bull to return to the national park and closer to the reintroduction zone. The decision to euthanize the bull was taken only after every other possible solution was tried or examined by highly trained, professional, and dedicated Parks Canada staff who are committed to conservation and the protection of species like bison”
Social media erupted with outrage that the bull was shot, but within a few days, more details on the situation added some clarity to the story. In an interview with CBC News, Bill Hunt, the Resource Conservation Manager for Banff National Park stated:
“Our options for recapturing the bull … were compromised by various factors including the speed at which the bison was moving eastward and the availability of key resources such as staff and helicopters”
Wildfires made the availability of helicopters a problem and the heavy smoke made it hard to track him with telemetry. This all combined to create a dangerous situation for park staff and the decision was made to Euthanize him.
This would have been a heart-wrenching decision for park staff. This is a 6 million dollar project, but there was always the chance that some of the animals might wander. In fact, that’s what young bulls do, they move off on their own, usually only returning to the herd during the rut.
A second bull that also left the park was later captured and has been transferred to a paddock in Waterton Lakes National Park in southern Alberta.
Of more pressing concern was that the rest of the herd also wandered in the same direction, towards the Red Deer River. In the end, though, park staff were able to encourage them to remain in the release zone although a third bull is still hanging out near the margins of the zone.
Finally, there was a bit of good news from the province of Alberta when an August 21 announcement heralded provincial protections for the Banff bison herd on some provincial lands.
The province has produced a 239-sq km area called the Upper Red Deer River Special Bison Area within which the bison are protected. This is great news ensuring that they can’t be legally shot for simply leaving the larger protections of the national park.
Parks Canada is “all in” on this one. They’ve put a tonne of resources towards trying to allow the bison the very best opportunity to thrive in the mountain landscape. In the end, it will be up to the herd to decide whether they can live with the restrictions placed upon them by the realities of their release. Will they continue to explore their new home with its plentiful grasslands or will they insist on heading east towards the plains where their future is far more uncertain? Only time will tell. I certainly can’t fault Parks Canada on this though. They are doing everything in their power to ensure success.
Park officials ask visitors to stop making rock sculptures or Inukshuks
Ever since the Vancouver Winter Olympics adopted the Inukshuk as its logo, it seems that every time visitors see a bunch of rocks, they can’t help themselves. They need to pile them up into either poor renditions of Inuit rock sculpture, or they simply make a tall pile trying to balance as many stones as possible in one spot.
The problem has gotten out of control in the past few years as Instagrammers began to invade the mountain wilderness. Suddenly no wild place is immune. Take a long day-hike or multi-day backpack trip and these stone piles are there to greet you and remove any feeling of wilderness you might have been enjoying up until that point.
Recently Kevin Gedling, the Partnering and Engagement Officer in Jasper National Park, has asked people to stop building these geological eyesores.
In the far north, where you are above treeline, Inukshuks have a very important role in helping people find their way. These statues name literally means: “that which acts in the capacity of a human”. They are designed to, in many, but not all cases, look like a human form.
They are a marker, helping Inuit to navigate their way on a landscape devoid of natural landmarks. It also forms the centre symbol on the flag of the Northwest Territories. There were numerous styles, each with a specific purpose. One might show directions, another might point to the next Inukshuk along a route, another to a place of spiritual importance. The bottom line is that they had a purpose. They weren’t senseless piles of rocks placed there to say: “I was here”.
With its adoption as the Olympic symbol, the government of Canada gave gifts of Inukshuk to Brisbane, Australia; Monterrey, Mexico; Oslo, Norway; Washington, D.C.; and Guatamala City, Guatamala.
In the mountains, rock piles known as cairns, have their own purpose, to show people where a trail goes when there are no other physical features onto which to attach trail signs. You’ll see them high in the alpine where they can be a welcome sight on a confusing trail. They can be a critical safety point on a walk and it’s critical their role is not diminished by rocky vandalism.
These random rockpiles built by tourists become increasingly problematic when people take rocks from legitimate cairns and use them for their own ego boosting rock pile.
If you think this is a local problem, unfortunately, it’s become a global one. Travel around the world and you can see similar rocky eyesores. As columnist Patrick Barkham wrote in England’s The Guardian Newspaper:
“But what Hourston’s critics don’t seem to grasp is the almost industrial scale of this new age of stone-stacking. Adventure tourism and social media have created a perfect storm of stones. Cruise ships decant hundreds of visitors on to once remote islands such as Orkney, the Faroes or Iceland, each passenger burning with a creative desire to memorialise their sightseeing on Instagram. “Where do you draw the line?” wonders Hourston. “Orkney, Shetland, Iceland, Svalbard, or the Antarctic peninsula? We should start drawing the line now.”
Patrick’s article was in response to another story written by John Hourston, the founder of marine campaigners the Blue Planet Society. When he tweeted his dismay at the endless rock piles he encountered in the Orkney Isles, he triggered a huge online debate.
To many people, it was just a harmless activity, but as an article in Mother Nature Network states:
“Each rock in a stream is blooming with life. Everything from aquatic plants to micro-organisms are attached to those rocks. They also create habitat for crustaceans and nymphs. Crevices in the rocks hold eggs in salmon redds to be fertilized, supporting those eggs until they grow into fry and begin feeding off the very critters that were hatching off of and crawling around those same rocks.”
Rocks are more than just inanimate objects resting in the water or on the ground…they’re habitats. Shallow water cobbles provide quiet eddies in the river beneath them allowing insect larvae and amphibians to find a quiet place amidst what may be a turbulent stream. Many aquatic animals rely on rocks as if it were the roof of their house. They burrow beneath them to provide safe shelter from predators and currents.
Young caddisfly larvae may even build their home out of rocks, albeit very tiny ones. They create a tubular case made of available materials that can include rocks, shells, or even aquatic plants.
Trout and salmon use rocks for shelter, especially when young. Simply said, aquatic cobbles are not lifeless skipping stones or construction materials, they are habitat.
The same goes for rocks on land. Have you ever flipped over a rock and seen a flurry of activity as a multitude of insects scurried for cover? Well, rocks for insects are like buildings for people. If someone could just rip the roof off of your house, you’d look pretty surprised. In the case of rocks, they provide shelter.
Let’s look at the numbers. Planet-wide, more than 50 percent of all living things are insects. Insects, like all living creatures, need a placed to call home, and beneath lovely, moist, dark rocks exists one of the most awesome places for insects looking for shelter.
In particular, hundreds of species of beetles, ants, and crickets take shelter under rocks. Simply tossing them about to make pretentious sculptures discounts the importance of that habitat.
I spend a lot of time educating people about black and grizzly bears and the foods that are important to them throughout their lives. If you’re a regular listener to this podcast, you’ve heard me drone on about the importance of buffaloberry habitat during the mid-summer months. This is based on the fact that these berries are the most important caloric benefit to bears here during our short summer.
While each berry alone represents just a 5th of a calorie, if they eat enough, say 200,000 a day, they can injest some 40,000 calories in order to build their fat layers for winter.
What if the buffaloberry wasn’t an option? Not all bear habitats offer the same menu. In places like Yellowstone National Park, bears don’t fatten up on buffaloberry. Instead, they have found a way to slurp down the same amount of calories by slurping down furry Army Cutworm Moths.
At night, the moths emerge and feed on pollen and nectar from plants like the red paintbrush, daisy, and lupine. Like all moths, they are nocturnal insects taking advantage of the quiet that evening brings to the mountains. When dawn breaks, they look for shelter in the alpine beneath the rocks that form the loose rock, or talus slopes, that characterize the mountainous landscape.
For many years, it was a mystery as to how bears fattened up at this time of year until helicopter pilots witnessed grizzlies in landscapes that seemed to be completely contrary to common sense. Why would a bear climb up into desolate rock slopes with little in the way of known foods to sustain them?
It was at this time that biologists realized the bear wasn’t just passing through, they were mowing down vast numbers of these nectar engorged moths simply by flipping rock after rock after rock and revealing their hiding spots.
It’s coincidental that numbers bandied about are strikingly similar to numbers revealed locally for grizzlies feeding on buffaloberries. While in this area, grizzlies slurping down berries accounts for around 40,000 calories a day, bears in Yellowstone manage to munch down some 40,000 moths with each representing around a calorie of fuzzy, nectar-filled goodness.
Flipping rocks means disturbing habitats. It’s not just about piling a few rocks and saying I was here! It’s a disturbance of habitat while at the same time, creating an eyesore for future visitors.
A basic tenet of wilderness travel for decades has been to leave only footprints and take only photographs. Every wilderness traveller parks their car so they can feel the tingle of wildness that comes with leaving civilization behind and perhaps, just perhaps, finding a place where time has been delayed in order to offer the impression of discovery.
It doesn’t matter how far you travel. You might be a city slicker doing a half-mile walk up to Johnston Canyon in Banff, or a veteran doing Lake Agnes, the Big Beehive and the Highline Route at Lake Louise, you still have that inner explorer driving you. When you get to a new vista, you want to feel that you’ve crested your own little Everest.
The purpose of wilderness travel is to experience…well, wilderness. Arriving at a destination only to find it scattered with piles of rocks which could simply not occur by any natural process only destroys that experience.
I often finish my tours with one of my favourite quotes: a quote by J. Monroe Thorrington who did a lot of mountain climbing in the Rockies around the end of the 1800s. He once wrote:
“We were not pioneers ourselves, but we travelled over old trails that were new to us, and with heart’s open, who shall distinguish?”
That to me is the essence of wilderness travel, but also the crux of this rock piling obsession that is taking place. People visit wild places for wild experiences. We want to wander the wilderness to emerge to some new place where we can have (even if it’s just an illusion), the feeling that we are the first to experience the magic of that place.
As more and more people feel the need to Instagram their conquest with a pile of rocks, it reduces the wilderness feel for future visitors, while at the same time diminishing the ecology of the landscape simply by exposing unique ecological niches beneath the rocks before they are unceremoniously stacked for simple vanity.
I’ve been a guide since the early 1980s. Over those years I’ve worked with a multitude of other guides. Currently, I work a great deal with Dave Honeyman of Canadian Rockies Alpine. His brother is Jay Honeyman of Alberta Environment and Parks who plays an important role in helping us live safely within bear country.
Dave was the first guide that helped me to see the damage that these rock piles were creating. We made a pact to knock down every pile we see. They’re everywhere. Stop at Lake Minnewanka and walk to the public restrooms and they’re piles that need removing.
In some locations, there are dozens or even hundreds. Our job is simple…destruction. When you come across these wanton rock piles please disassemble them. Don’t just swing your foot to knock them down because they have more heft than you may have considered beforehand. Don’t hurt yourself while trying to restore a spoiled vista.
As a naturalist, my goals are simple. I just want to help people experience a little bit of wilderness, educate them on the unique natural and human history that made the experience possible, and then make sure that the next client is able to have the same experience.
Let’s all remember the basic rule: take only photographs and leave only footprints…and knock all the other crap down.