Show and tell

Please join us at the Green Living Show, April 27 to 29, 2007, in the Automotive Building, Exhibition Place, Toronto. Visit the Ontario Nature booth to meet our staff, find out more about the organization and look through our publications. Enjoy the Art of Nature Show and Sale – a portion of the proceeds will go to Ontario Nature.

Highlights include two original Robert Bateman paintings. For more information, visit www.greenlivingshow.ca.

Swan rescue

Last November, a trumpeter swan was nearly struck by a powerboat being driven at high speed on Lake Simcoe. While the swan was not hit, it was injured by the boat’s wake as the driver circled the bird.

Two local field naturalists, who happened to be in the area at the time, took pictures of the boat and driver, who later surrendered himself to police and has been charged under the federal Migratory Birds Convention Act and the Small Vessel Regulations.

The swan, its wing badly broken, was taken to the Ontario Veterinary College at the University of Guelph. Because the swan may not fly again, the Wye Marsh Wildlife Centre has agreed to keep the bird in the hopes that it will mate and breed. Rehabilitation may cost more than $2,000. Members of the Brereton Nature Club and the Six Mile Lake Conservationists Club are organizing fundraising events to cover the costs of rehabilitation. Donations can be sent to the Brereton Field Naturalists Club, c/o Brian Gibbon, 24 George St., Barrie, on l4n 5n3. Make your cheque out to the club and write “Swan fund” at the bottom of it. A tax receipt will be issued for any amount over $10.

For more information, write to Anne Lewis, president, Six Mile Lake Conservationists Club, PO Box 49, MacTier, on p0c 1h0 or phone her at 705-756-8425 (sixmiler@yahoo.com).

Fence removal

Last September, 10 employees from Lo-Tek Wireless and three Ontario Nature staff spent the day at the Cawthra Mulock Nature Reserve near Newmarket, removing sections of livestock fencing that crossed the old fields on the reserve. Originally erected to contain cattle, the fencing had long ago ceased to serve any useful function and had, over time, become a barrier that prevented wildlife such as red fox and white-tailed deer from moving freely across the reserve.

Approximately 500 metres of fencing was removed, along with some fence posts. Some of the wooden posts were left standing to serve as perching spots for the grassland birds that inhabit the old fields. The old fencing and metal fence posts were hauled to a nearby transfer station, where they will be recycled.

Ontario Nature thanks Lo-Tek Wireless and the Community Fisheries and Wildlife Involvement Program of the Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources for their support of this project.

A public event is planned for September 9, 2007, to remove the remaining fencing on the reserve. Please contact Lisa Richardson, Volunteer for Nature coordinator, at lisar@ontarionature.org or 416-444-8419, ext. 222, to find out how you can help.

New bird book

The Hamilton Naturalists’ Club has published a splendid new book written by Robert Curry – Birds of Hamilton and Surrounding Areas. Its 676 pages document the status of more than 385 species of birds within the Hamilton Study Area, which extends 40 kilometres from Hamilton and includes Halton, Brant, Haldimand,

Norfolk, Peel, Waterloo, Wellington and Niagara counties. In addition to detailed accounts of bird species, the book features 32 pages of colour photographs, original art by Robert Bateman, David Beadle and Peter Burke,

a provocative foreword by Fred Bodsworth, contributions from leading local field naturalists, detailed colour maps of regional hot spots and seasonal bar graphs for each species. Birds of Hamilton and Surrounding Areas costs $60 and is available through the Hamilton Naturalists’ Club (www.hamiltonnature.org, 905-381-0329) and local book retailers.

Best in show

My condolences to the staff on the premature passing of Dianne Slyford. She was very helpful anytime I called the office and will be hard to replace.

In the Winter 2006/07 issue, I thought the subjects, although often in the press, were presented in a professional manner and reflected some good research. Bruce Gillespie’s article [“The numb3rs guy,” page 15] about Allan Elgar gave me ammunition to take to the Ottawa City staff who insist that we must buy any property adversely affected by rezoning. Douglas Hunter [“The ghost cat,” page 18] covered the cougar question better than any article I have read. Megan Ogilvie’s article [“Troubled waters,” page 32] on scaup was also better than average. Tim Tiner [“The fight for the forest,” page 24] presented the well-covered boreal forest problem in a brief and attractive manner. Lloyd Alter [“Small is beautiful,” page 50] winds up with a reality check on green building.

All in all, an excellent issue.

Frank Pope, Nepean

Bad weather

Was it a rare fluke or another sad indicator of climate change in our midst?

I was returning home from a family get-together on a warm and sunny Sunday, December 17, via the “scenic route.” My drive took me over the crest of the escarpment on the Sixth Line next to the Hilton Falls Conservation Area, just north of Highway 401 near Campbellville.

To my amazement, there, freshly dead on the road, I spotted what looked like a snake. On December 17!

I stopped and picked up the poor creature just to confirm that I wasn’t dreaming. It was an eastern milk snake about 60 centimetres in length. Its skin was slightly damaged and bloody, but still glossy and full of colour, indicating good health. The snake had probably just crawled out of its nearby rocky den on an escarpment outcrop, looking for a bit of warmth on the pavement.

In Ontario, most snakes would be advised to find a warm and safe underground home in October, and stay put there until May. The temperature that December day was about 10C at best. But it was preceded by almost a week of unusually warm weather, which closed most ski hills and had many people asking, what’s not to like about global warming?

One obvious answer is the dire consequences it has on our fellow species. With such erratic temperature clues, I presume we can expect more such cases of climate confusion and subsequent challenges to the plants and animals whose shrinking world is already threatening their existence. Right across the road from Hilton Falls and steps away from my interesting find, were the berms that surround and hide from scrutiny the quarry operations of Dufferin Aggregates, just recently awarded the green light for expansion of their pit – an activity destined to take yet more escarpment habitat and turn it into road dust.

Richard Procter, Mansfield

Balancing acts

I read Bob Garthson’s letter “Fine dining” [Winter 2006/07, page 7] with great interest. I feel, however, that only half of the story of organic food is being told.

In our enthusiasm to promote organic foods, we are ignoring at least one ecologically significant issue – to say nothing of human ones. Norman Borlaug, the father of the “green revolution” and a Nobel prizewinning scientist, points out that thanks to synthetic fertilizers, much higher yields can be obtained using much less land, thus leaving more land (such as rainforests) in a natural condition.

He states, according to The Economist, that global cereal production tripled between 1950 and 2000 due to synthetic fertilizers, but land usage only increased by 10 percent. Using traditional techniques would have required three times the amount of land under cultivation.

His most telling point, however, and I quote him directly, is that “some of the environmental lobbyists of the Western nations are the salt of the earth, but many of them are elitists. They have never experienced the physical sensation of hunger … if they lived for just one month in the physical misery of the developing world … they’d be crying out for tractors and fertilizers and irrigation canals and be outraged that the fashionable elitists at home were trying to deny them these things.”

It is a little ironic that your cover story for the Winter edition proclaims “The fight for the forest.” We can’t rewrite history, but think how much of the original forest and wetlands that once covered southern Ontario would not have been destroyed if the early settlers had access to modern farming methods.

Finally, while I have nothing against organic foods and certainly enjoy them from time to time, I have yet to see any convincing evidence that conventional food is harmful or that organic food is nutritionally superior.

To each his own – but let’s keep a balanced view of our environmental causes.

Bill Caulfeild Browne, Tobermory

Teaching nature

I think the magazine is really great these days.

I was glad to see the article about Eco-Schools [“Fertile grounds,” Summer 2006, page 30], but I feel it gave the misleading and positive impression that most Toronto students are receiving a great environmental education. While the EcoSchools program is a step in the right direction, it is not necessarily going to make the majority of students as environmentally literate as they should be. Partly because it is voluntary, but also because its effectiveness depends on the level of environmental literacy of the staff involved and the amount of time that can be dedicated to it – given an already crowded curriculum.

Susan Sheard, Willow Beach

Wee shorebird vs. the Feds

by Helena Rusak

Conservation groups across Canada, including Ontario Nature, have rallied behind the plight of a small, endangered shorebird. Late last year, a coalition of leading environmental organizations filed a lawsuit against then environment minister Rona Ambrose for her ministry’s refusal to identify critical habitat in the recovery strategy of the rare piping plover, which is listed as endangered in Ontario and nationally. The identification of critical habitat in the species recovery strategies under the federal Species At Risk Act (SARA) is critical to effective protection for any endangered species, because it defines the geographical area and ecological requirements for a species to nest and produce young successfully. Read the full article…

Park named for Len Gertler

by Linda Pim

The Ontario government has established the Len Gertler Memorial Loree Forest in honour of Len Gertler, the father of Niagara Escarpment protection, who died in late 2005. This 339-hectare park in the Blue Mountains is one of the larger properties in the system of 131 escarpment parks from Queenston to Tobermory. Read the full article…

Rare species may get a break

by  Wendy Francis

The wait is nearly over. An improved Endangered Species Act that will strengthen protection for Ontario’s at-risk species is inching closer to becoming a reality. In November, Minister of Natural Resources David Ramsay released the Report of the Endangered Species Act Review Advisory Panel. The panel was charged with reviewing and updating the act, which has long been in need of an overhaul. Read the full article…

Last Call

By Victoria Foote

Globally, it is very likely that the 1990s was the warmest decade and 1998 the warmest year in the instrumental record (1861-2000). The increase in the surface temperature in the Northern Hemisphere is likely to have been greater than that for any other century in the last thousand years.” This is according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

In January a small green sheet of paper was slipped under the door of our house. People in the community had organized a group called Green Neighbours and were asking residents in the ward we live in to meet and discuss how we can protect the environment individually and collectively. It seemed to me an interesting continuation of the citizen science movement, but this time the challenge appears especially overwhelming.

Because of global warming, sea ice cover in the North Pole is melting fast. A near total loss of sea ice in the summer is expected by the end of the century, and the populations of animals that depend on ice coverage, such as polar bears, seals and walruses, will decline. Polar bears hunt seals on ice, but because it is breaking up earlier now than in the past, the bears have less time to gain the weight they need to survive the winter. A hunting season shortened by only one week can mean that a bear is 10 kilograms lighter than it should be. Climate change can affect animals in subtle ways. Some turtle eggs, for instance, become female if they incubate at temperatures higher than 30 C but become male if the eggs incubate at lower temperatures.

In this issue of ON Nature, Douglas Hunter investigates the impact of climate change on our home province. Some of the latest research in this area indicates that Ontario’s forest ecosystems – which define our landscape so indelibly – will be hard hit. While some sun-loving tree species will flourish in warmer temperatures, other species will fail. On average, plants migrate approximately one kilometre a year. But given the rate of warming, plants will need to migrate much farther than that to keep up with their shifting ecozone. Predictions hold that some Ontario ecosystems will be brought to the brink of collapse by the end of the century.

Should I, or anyone else in the community, attend the Green Neighbours meeting? On the macro level there’s this: Between 1990 and 2002, greenhouse emissions in the United Kingdom dropped 14.4 percent (surpassing the targets of the Kyoto Accord) while the economy simultaneously grew 36 percent. On the micro level, the individual is a consumer and what we choose to buy or not buy will, over time, influence what is and isn’t sold. According to the American Council for an Energy Efficient Economy, if every household in the United States used only energy-efficient light bulbs, growth in U.S. carbon dioxide emissions would cease altogether. If we think about the consequences of our daily actions, it would indeed be a different world.

Poplar improvements

by Sharon Oosthoek

We know that food can be genetically modified. Now, it appears that trees can be genetically rearranged as well. Last fall, a team of international scientists announced they had sequenced the complete set of genetic “instructions,” or genome, for assembling the black cottonwood poplar. Read the full article…

Mine the gap

by Wendy Francis

Dufferin Aggregates intends to expand its operations on the Niagara Escarpment, one of Ontario’s four UNESCO World Biosphere Reserves. Premier Dalton McGuinty’s cabinet has approved the plans to enlarge its 468-hectare Milton Quarry, already the largest active quarry in Canada, by a further 83 hectares. This decision runs contrary to the intent of the Greenbelt Plan, which includes the Niagara Escarpment, and will cause irreparable environmental damage. Read the full article…

Escarpment hotspot

by Wendy Francis

Late last year, the Ontario Municipal Board (OMB) issued a decision that paves the way for the largest single development on the Niagara Escarpment since 1975. Castle Glen Developments wants to build more than 1,600 residential units and 300 hotel units, as well as commercial and retail space, and up to three golf courses within the Town of Blue Mountain in Grey County on a 620-hectare tract that spills over the brow of the escarpment. Read the full article…

Profile: The Kunstler Imperative

It’s not all gloom and doom – is it? James Kunstler, author of The Long Emergency: Surviving the end of oil, climate change, and other converging catastrophes of the twenty-first century, speaks of global warming and the harsh new reality that awaits

By Lisa Keller

James Howard Kunstler’s latest book, The Long Emergency (2006), presents a deeply disturbing vision of humankind’s not-so-distant future after cheap and plentiful fuels like gas and oil are depleted. His thesis is frighteningly simple: the cheap and easy extraction of gas and oil is all that has enabled the last 150 years of planet-wide prosperity. Fuel reserves are finite, and expert estimates indicate that we have used up about half of them. The remaining reserves are more difficult and expensive to reach, and because of our massive – and growing – consumption rates, they will probably be exhausted in a few decades.

As Kunstler notes, this eventuality is far more significant than most of us seem to understand. What does petroleum do for us? It underpins every modern nicety of life. Food is transported easily and cheaply because of inexpensive fuel. Plastic, made from petroleum, is used in every facet of our lives. The roads we drive on are made from asphalt, a fossil-fuel-based material. Our extraordinary health care system relies on high-tech equipment, modern drugs and electricity, all of which require plastics and fuel.

Kunstler reviews the known history of the planet in terms of global warming. He says that as our planet heats up, population “culling” is inevitable, as we struggle to grow and harvest food, and feed, water and cool huge populations that are able to live in places like Las Vegas and the deserts of the Middle East only because of cheap fuel, irrigation on massive scales and air conditioning.

At worst, Kunstler predicts that unless we urgently develop sustainable living patterns and scaled-back expectations, countries will wage war over dwindling resources, possibly as soon as within the next 30 years.

The author of several books, including The Geography of Nowhere and An Embarrassment of Riches, and a contributor to The Atlantic Monthly and The New York Times Magazine, Kunstler spoke in Ottawa last September. He lives in Saratoga Springs, New York.

Lisa Keller The Long Emergency is largely critical of U.S. lifestyles. You differentiate, for example, Europeans who have not embraced the car and big house mentality with the same fervour. How do you view Canadians and our lifestyles?

James Howard Kunstler As a practical matter, where cities are concerned, the salient difference is that Canada does not allow a federal tax deduction on mortgage interest. This eliminates a major disincentive against rental housing, and for apartment living in particular. Hence, Canadian cities by and large have more people living near and at their centres. American cities, by and large, are dead at their centres (with a few exceptions).

LK You’ve written that as cheap fuel becomes less and less available and ultimately vanishes, society may experience intense upheaval, including wars over dwindling resources. Do you think it’s possible your country would attack Canada for its resources?

JHK Of course, I do not want to be seen as a nut, but I don’t think it’s realistic to paper over the growing conflicts of interest between the United States and Canada.

I am surprised that Canada has not yet chafed over the terms of NAFTA, which require you to sell us as much natural gas as we want to buy – and both the United

States and Canada are past peak production. If I were Canadian, I would be very concerned about this. [Tar sands are found worldwide, but one of the largest reserves is in Alberta. They are a mixture of sand, clay and bitumen, a semi-solid form of degraded oil that can be converted into synthetic crude, but which is extremely difficult and expensive to produce. Kunstler predicts that as cheap fuel production disappears, the world’s nations will begin fighting over whatever reserves are left.] One might also expect that the western provinces of Canada either on their own or by coercion will be drawn into the United States either tacitly or officially.

LK The building of an experimental fusion reactor in France was recently announced. It is the result of a multinational program to develop nuclear fusion. [Nuclear reactors produce radioactive waste. Nuclear fusion is an energy-producing process that produces relatively little waste. So far, humans have not been able to harness fusion as a controlled power source on a scale large enough to reliably produce commercial energy.] A demonstration power plant may be ready by 2040. Many, of course, are hailing this project as humanity’s solution to the fuel crisis. What do you think, both in terms of the project’s viability to produce alternative energy, and the timing?

JHK Lotsa luck on that one, is all I can say. I think our problems may be so far advanced by 2040 that a successful outcome to this venture will not be possible.

LK A large wind farm opened recently in southern Ontario, making this province the top wind-power producer in Canada. Still, the farm will add just 90 megawatts to the energy grid, enough to power about 50,000 homes, which is a tiny portion of the electricity currently needed throughout the province. Your thoughts?

JHK There is lots of delusional thinking right now about alternative energy sources. This comes from the wish to not lose all the investments in the systems we are currently running – suburbia, happy motoring, mega-cities, all the comforts of profligate electricity consumption. I believe we will try to use whatever we can in the way of alternative energy. But I also think we will be ultimately disappointed in what they can ultimately do for us. For instance, I doubt we will build many giant wind farms of the type you describe. We will more likely use [wind power] on the household or neighbourhood basis. Huge hopes are – in my view, mistakenly – invested in the notion that we can run the happy motoring system on biofuels and other non-conventional liquids, or hybrid systems. This is the biggest delusion of all.

LK If you could convince governments that action is needed right now to avoid the worst of the coming emergency you predict, what course of action would you advise?

JHK I would advise immediately repairing and restoring comprehensive passenger railroad service in North America. No other project would have so great an impact on our oil use. It would put scores of thousands of people to work at good jobs at every level. It requires no new technology. The infrastructure is out there rusting in the rain, waiting to be fixed. And it would build our confidence to go forward with the other great tasks of necessary reform in our systems of food production, commerce and manufacturing, and urbanism that are desperately required.

LK Your book is alarming. Do you think the average person can do anything to help avoid the scenario you predict? What would you advise people to do?

JHK Get out of debt, if possible. The energy/ economic/finance/political crisis that constitutes “The Long Emergency” is going to create a lot of disorder in people’s lives. One of the more obvious features will be a declining standard of living. Incomes and jobs will be lost. Social safety nets will prove to have large holes in them and many will fall through and hit the ground hard.

Be careful about choosing where you will live (e.g., check the “no” box on Arizona). [Before the advent of cheap fuel, large portions of the earth were uninhabited such as very hot areas with little naturally occurring water. Later, global populations exploded, because with oil we could grow more food than is naturally possible, and transport it to places like Arizona. Without cheap fuel, Kunstler predicts that human populations now living in these kinds of places will either die off or move, causing huge disruption.] If you are a young adult, give careful consideration to learning truly useful hands-on skills [for example, those involved in farming, carpentry, gardening, canning, weaving, knitting and the like].

LK How do you sleep at night?

JHK These days, pretty well, after 20-odd years of chronic insomnia. I have no idea why [my sleep patterns have] improved. Perhaps from eating my own homemade granola, which is heavy on the flaxseed, which is good for brain function.

Lisa Keller is a communications consultant and founding partner with Ottawa-based Meta4 Creative Communications Inc. She rarely drives her car, and reuses and recycles everything she can.

Temperature rising

From the lush Carolinian zone in the south to the spectacular boreal of the north, climate change threatens to bring forest ecosystems to the brink of collapse. Douglas Hunter reports on how global warming is changing Ontario’s landscape

By Douglas Hunter

In 1998, Stephen Murphy began noticing strangers in his neck of the woods. An associate professor in the department of Environment and Resource Studies at the University of Waterloo, whose expertise includes forest ecology and the struggle between invasive and native species, Murphy is intrigued to have found 11 tulip-tree saplings – normally limited to Ontario’s Carolinian zone – growing around Kitchener and along the west side of Waterloo. Also called yellow poplar Liriodendron tulipifera is a broad-leaf deciduous tree with unmistakable tulip-like flowers. Millions of years ago, when the climate was much warmer, tulip-trees could be found as far north as the Arctic. Today, its range is limited to parts of the eastern United States and the lower limits of southwestern Ontario.

It appeared that the tulip-trees Murphy came across were not deliberately planted. Does their presence mean the entire Carolinian ecosystem is shifting northward? These trees could be “preliminary indications of movement where I am,” Murphy observes. “It’s sporadic, but it’s enough to make you think: I didn’t see that before.” Murphy suspects the reason for the tulip-tree’s migration is a change in the local “thermo-period,” with longer stretches of warm weather year-round for several years in a row.

Murphy’s 11 tulip saplings are part of a broad basket of evidence suggesting that ecozones are changing in response to global warming. It is hard to say with confidence that any particular local ecological change can be attributed exclusively or even partially to global warming, especially given the cyclical nature of environmental elements such as temperature, water levels and species population dynamics. Ecosystems are complex, and the factors involved in the local successes of particular plant and animal species are numerous and intertwined in ways we do not fully understand.

Still, evidence of change driven by global warming is growing and is particularly persuasive in Canada’s north. The Arctic is warming at almost twice the rate as the rest of the world, and in the next 100 years, the permafrost line could retreat 300 kilometres north. Sea ice is undergoing a pronounced retreat. Summer ice breakup on western Hudson’s Bay now occurs two weeks earlier than it did 20 years ago, and killer whales have moved their hunting into the bay. Hudson Bay polar bears could be extirpated by 2050. Plant life in the far north has begun to change. Deciduous shrubs like dwarf birch and green alder are displacing ground cover such as lichen and moss. The spread of shrubby vegetation could affect threatened herds of caribou that feed on lichen. The red fox will probably expand its range by outcompeting the less adaptable Arctic fox.

In Ontario, academic studies have been considering the impact of global warming in a broad range of ecological areas. Warmer lake water, for example, is expected to be deleterious to cold-water species such as lake trout. But determining the causes of ongoing changes in species numbers and ranges in Ontario is difficult. Moreover, while concerted efforts are being made to build species databases for Ontario, generally not enough information is available to draw definitive conclusions as to why some plants and animals in Ontario are thriving and expanding, while others are in retreat, during a period of what is believed to be incremental global warming. “As far as I’m aware,” says Murphy, “we don’t have that developed a database. It has come together on an ad hoc basis, but is becoming more systemic. We have an emerging sense of what we have.”

Climate change is one factor among many to consider in explaining population shifts and species appearances and disappearances. “We’re seeing changes in ranges for a number of birds,” says Ted Cheskey, manager of the Canadian Nature Network at Nature Canada. But he offers the mourning dove as an example of a species that both invites and resists global warming as a possible explanation for its population changes. The bird has expanded its range considerably, becoming far more prevalent in southwestern Ontario over the past 20 years. And reports of the dove’s breeding activity in the boreal forest have been increasing despite the species’ low tolerance for cold. “Its very large fleshy feet are vulnerable to freezing,” says Cheskey. “I’ve seen them lose parts of their toes. I suspect that a limiting factor to their northern range is persistent cold temperature.” The presence of bird feeders and agricultural activity may contribute to the mourning dove’s expanding range. If the mourning dove is moving northward because the boreal zone is in retreat due to rising temperatures, one would expect to see a coincident retreat in the boreal forest.

But uncertainties over current impacts of global warming should not be taken as evidence that global warming is not in fact under way. Temperature-depth profiles produced from drill holes northwest of Lake Superior indicate that surface temperatures there began increasing 200 years ago. Most sobering are the latest efforts to model the province’s future ecosystems, and to determine their composition and diversity circa 2050. According to University of Toronto forestry professor Jay Malcolm, a mean two-degree Celsius rise in global temperature by the middle of this century could bring Ontario’s forest ecosystems to the brink of collapse. The landscape you know now will look very different by mid-century.

In November 2005, the WWF-World Wide Fund for Nature of Gland, Switzerland published “Implications of a 2°C Global Temperature Rise for Canada’s Natural Resources.” Malcolm, with then post-doctoral fellows Danijela Puric-Mladenovic and Hua Shi, provided a chapter of that report titled, “Projected tree distributions, tree migration rates, and forest types in Ontario under a 2°C global temperature rise” that delivers a stunning assessment of the imminent future of the province’s forest ecosystems.

Their study, says Malcolm, “projects huge changes. In almost every location in the province, all six climate models we used show a shift of some kind in the forest type. One model, for example, shows black spruce moving entirely out of the province. The potential for change is enormous.”

What are our options?

How to make sense of carbon-free energy alternatives and what the province plans to do about it

By Sharon Oosthoek

Never has it been more important to push for a clean energy agenda. In our fast-growing province – Ontario’s population is predicted to increase by nearly four million residents to reach 16.4 million by 2031 – we are ravenous consumers of electricity. In fact, Ontarians are among the biggest consumers of electricity in the world – we use 60 percent more per capita than neighbouring New York state. Like it or not, we are significant contributors to global warming.

Our demand for electricity grows by 1 percent every year, and the nuclear power plants that supply more than half the energy we use are nearing the end of their productive lives.

At the same time, the governing Liberals are grappling with an election promise to close polluting coal-powered plants that represent one-fifth of the electricity supply mix.

The Ontario Power Authority predicts that unless major changes occur, the demand for energy will outstrip the supply in less than a decade.

In June 2006, the provincial government announced its intention to dedicate $46 billion to averting an energy crisis. Twenty billion dollars will be invested in nuclear power, $20 billion in renewable energy sources and $6 billion will go toward conservation efforts.

Ontario’s target is for 5 percent, or 1,350 megawatts, of all generating capacity to come from renewable sources by year’s end. That represents enough energy to power 325,000 homes. Meanwhile, the government’s conservation strategy calls for reducing electricity demand by 6,300 megawatts by 2025, the equivalent of taking more than one million homes off the energy grid.

Outlined in these pages is a primer for making sense of Ontario’s conservation efforts and the pros and cons of alternative sources of energy. Sustainable energy reduces our dependence on fossil fuels, air pollution and the causes of global warming, all of which is worth keeping in mind as the fall election approaches.

The agenda

To increase energy usage from renewable sources, the Ontario government, with its Renewable Energy Standard Offer Program is offering fixed prices for energy initiatives that produce up to 10 megawatts thereby guaranteeing small producers a set price for the energy produced.

David Suzuki Foundation research and policy analyst José Etcheverry calls this initiative “the most progressive environmental policy Canada has ever implemented” and says standard offer contracts are the reason European countries such as Germany and Spain have had such success in producing electricity from renewable sources.

The government is also introducing net metering so that Ontarians who generate up to 500 kilowatts of power, from a renewable source and mainly for their own use, can send any excess power to the energy grid for a credit toward their electricity costs. The local utility subtracts the value of electricity you supply to the grid from the value of what you take from the grid. What you see on your bill is the difference between those two amounts. If you supply power that is worth more than what you take from the grid, you will receive a credit that can help lower your future energy bills. You still pay the distributor’s fixed monthly customer charge.

The standard offer program has generated 400 proposals for new sources of renewable energy in 2006, up from three in 2005.

That said, conservation remains the cheapest and most efficient option for tackling our energy woes.

The Province plans to use the following measures to reach its conservation goal of reducing demand by 6,300 megawatts by 2025:

• Expanding Toronto Hydro’s 2006 Summer Challenge pilot program. Electricity consumers who signed on to the program got a discount on their electricity bill if they reduced their power consumption by 10 percent or more over the summer. Toronto Hydro estimates more than 150,000 customers will get a rebate equal to 10 percent of their bill. Officials say the electricity savings are the equivalent of taking 80,000 homes off the energy grid for a month.
• Expanding Toronto Hydro’s residential and small business Peaksaver program, a voluntary program that lets utilities remotely turn down a customer’s air conditioner or temporarily turn off a water heater or pool pump when summer electricity demand is at its highest.
• Expanding a refrigerator retirement program launched by Hydro Ottawa that offers free pickup and environmentally friendly disposal of inefficient fridges and freezers. This is an effective conservation strategy only if consumers replace fridges with those meeting Energy Star standards – the most efficient fridges on the market. At press time, Hydro Ottawa said it had removed more than 5,000 fridges and freezers and were continuing to remove an additional 500 a month.
• Putting 800,000 smart meters in homes and small businesses by the end of 2007, and in all homes and businesses in Ontario by 2010. Smart meters allow a utility to record when and how much electricity a customer is using. Armed with this information, a utility can set time-of-use pricing to encourage consumers to switch when they use electricity from expensive peak times to cheaper off-peak hours. The initiative, which is designed to get consumers to shift when they use electricity rather than to conserve it, is meant to relieve pressure on the transmission system.
• Starting this year, building new houses according to codes designed to make them 21 percent more energy efficient than ones built last year. And by 2012, new non-residential and large residential buildings will be required to meet standards 25 percent more stringent than those of 2006. The Ministry of Municipal Affairs and Housing estimates that over the next eight years, the changes will save enough energy to power 380,000 homes and reduce greenhouse gas emissions to an extent equal to having 250,000 fewer cars on Ontario’s roads.
• Introducing minimum energy efficiency standards for small and large appliances. But the Province’s standards are not nearly as high as those set by the Energy Star rating system. Environmentalists are calling on the government to make Energy Star the minimum standard for efficiency.

The house that Bill built

Fourteen years ago, William Kemp went off grid, turning his home into a model of energy efficiency without losing any of the creature comforts. His books explain how you, too, can shrink your power-hungry footprint

By Peter Christie

Suspended by great latticed metal towers, transmission wires stretch across William Kemp’s view of the wilderness in front of his home. The wires cross the forests and fields of the bucolic landscape like a scar, delivering electricity for legions of power-hungry Ontarians.

Kemp, however, is not among them. For almost 14 years, he and his wife, Lorraine, have lived in Lanark County cut off from the traditional power grid, generating their own electricity from renewable sources. If the Kemps derive any satisfaction in a vista interrupted by power lines, it is as a reminder that the wires pass them by.

“It is impossible to describe this to somebody who doesn’t live it,” says Kemp. “Anybody who comes here for the first time, particularly from the city, is horrified at the thought of not being connected to the umbilical cord of hydro.

“But once you do it, there’s this sense of pride, but also a sense of wonder that the sun that’s shining and the wind that’s blowing are turning the lights on here. It becomes almost an addictive sort of game to play. I think that’s what pushes me to want to take it to the next level.”

The next level is precisely what distinguishes Kemp. The 46- year-old consultant and author not only lives off-grid, he has made the quest for energy self-sufficiency his life and his work. His three books – The Renewable Energy Handbook, $mart Power and Biodeisel: Basics and Beyond – have become bestsellers in Canada. Published by Aztext Press, each one recounts (simply, but with engineering detail) the lessons that Kemp has learned in his search for clean energy.

Not your stereotypical bearded back-to-the-lander in a checked shirt, Kemp more closely fits the image of a soft-spoken, carefully groomed businessman. His home, too, is no generator-powered shack in the woods. The 306-square-metre (3,300 square foot) replica farmhouse, built mainly by Kemp and his wife, is elegant and almost sumptuously equipped.

Inside, Kemp froths milk with a cappuccino machine. His bright country kitchen is complete with a microwave and an electric bread maker. His living room features a 52-inch, high-definition television and stereo. Downstairs, a satellite-linked office has computers and electronics equipment. A well-outfitted gym is in the next room.

And the power? Standing unobtrusively near the horse shed, an array of photovoltaic panels quietly turns (thanks to a computerized tracker) to follow the sun. Above it, a small wind turbine whispers as it chops at the breeze. In a nearby outbuilding – as a backup for windless, cloudy days – a diesel generator is fuelled by biodeisel that Kemp makes using waste cooking oil from a pub in a nearby town.

“I wanted to show that energy sustainability doesn’t mean freezing in the dark,” says Kemp. “As you can see, it doesn’t have to mean doing without.”

The quest began when Kemp, who was living in the nearby village of Fallbrook, agreed with his wife to build a country home at the back of the farm belonging to her family. The lot was on a beautiful hilltop down a long, dirt lane. The downside was that installing a hydro line and poles to access useable electricity would have cost at least $13,000 (nearby transmission lines notwithstanding). Kemp knew there had to be a better way. He got to work designing their energy self-sufficient home.

“When we first moved in, a lot of people thought we were crazy,” says Kemp. “But then the ice storm happened and that sort of changed things.” The ice storm of January 1998 downed power lines and transmission towers across Ontario, Quebec and New Brunswick. Within days, the Kemp household became shelter to all manner of relatives and friends, including several residents from a senior’s home that was forced to shut down. The episode helped crystallize for Kemp the potential impact of his own example to change attitudes and the way other people use energy.

The solar panels provide 80 percent of Kemp’s electricity needs. The turbine kicks in for 15 percent, and the generator provides the remaining 5 percent. A battery bank in a wine-cellar-like room in the basement collects and stores the energy. Hot water (and Kemp’s hot tub) is substantially supplied by a vacuum-tube solar heating system on the roof. Two diesel cars – one a high-mileage Smart car – run, in part, on the homemade biodeisel.

More than this, however, the Kemp household is a model of energy efficiency. The blown-in cellulose insulation (made from recycled paper) effectively traps the heat, and the many amenities have all been carefully chosen for their sparing use of energy. “Everybody gets very excited about the photovoltaic panels and the wind turbines, because they’ve got the most visibility and the most sex appeal. But energy efficiency wins hands down for the least capital cost and the greatest return on investment.”

Trained in electronic technology at Algonquin College, Kemp is an engineer enthusiast and businessman first. He was the impetus behind two successful electronics companies. One, Powerbase Automation Systems of Carleton Place, makes control systems for hydroelectric generators for projects as far afield as China.

Although Kemp is a committed environmentalist, he is less interested in appealing to people through their ecological conscience than through their wallets. His message – that being green pays – is significantly bolstered by his own carefully documented, real-life example.

“You’re always standing on firmer ground when you’ve tried to grapple with these challenges yourself,” says David Chernushenko. The Ottawa environmentalist and senior deputy to the leader of the federal Green Party has grown to admire Kemp in the four years since he first became familiar with Kemp’s work. “Bill Kemp has shown how you can dramatically reduce your energy consumption in quite a comfortable home. That sends the message to people that reducing energy demand is not about living in a cave.”

These days, Kemp is designing what he calls “a zero-carbon car” (and writing his next book about it). Exhaust from typical automobile engines is a major source of climate-affecting carbon gas in the atmosphere. Kemp’s car, on the other hand, will run mainly on batteries charged by renewable power sources.

“It’s fine to wax poetic about how wonderful the rural lifestyle is, but you have to remember that there are trade-offs,” Kemp observes. “Let’s face it, from here, you’ve got to drive everywhere.

“A lot of people think that living off-grid is the most sustainable lifestyle, but that’s not true. The lawyer in the Armani suit who lives in a downtown condo and walks to work is going to have a far more sustainable lifestyle than any back-to-the-land farmer who lives off-grid and drives his organic vegetables to market every day.” Indeed, a zero-carbon lifestyle is one of the next-level goals Kemp has set for himself.

“Change in the way we use energy and affect the environment has to come from the bottom up, as well as the top down,” says Kemp, who recently helped convince the Ontario Power Authority to increase the amount it will pay independent producers of renewable electricity. “Policies and everything else are important, but there’s so much people can do to improve their own energy efficiency and make a difference.”

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Peter Christie, a writer and editor, lives in Kingston. His latest science book for kids, Naturally Wild Musicians: The Wondrous World of Animal Song, will be published this fall by Annick Press.

Field Trip: Poisonous plants

by Dan Scheider and Peter Pautler

A terrible story in the Schneider household goes back to the 1800s. Two young boys, on their way to bring in the cows, mistook the roots of water hemlock for tasty wild parsnip and enjoyed a snack. Some time later, one boy was found dead on the doorstep, the other in the kitchen.

Why are some plants poisonous? What evolutionary purpose does toxicity serve? After all, many plants depend on insects and other animals to disperse their seeds and pollen. Yet plants must also protect life-giving leaves, stems and roots from a host of hungry herbivores. To this end, some plants have thorns, while others have evolved a chemical defence.

Brush against a nettle, and stinging toxins are injected into your skin. Touch the sap of poison ivy, and, if you are allergic to it, you will be driven to distraction by a rash that defines the word itchy. Chew a jack-in-the-pulpit, and your mouth feels like it is on fire as needle-like crystals penetrate tender tissue.

Some animals have a tolerance for poisonous plants and may even benefit from their toxins. By ingesting and concentrating the toxin from milkweed, for example, monarch butterflies and other insects acquire a bad taste. The monarch’s orange-and-black coloration serves as a warning to insectivores.

Humans also benefit from certain poisonous plants, since their toxins may have important medicinal uses. Mayapple, for instance, provides us with an anti-cancer medication, and foxglove, a widely planted European flower, is the source of digitalis, a treatment for heart ailments.

Ontario’s many poisonous plants vary widely in toxicity, from merely annoying to extremely dangerous if eaten. Some grow wild, while others are common house and garden plants, such as American yew and poinsettia. Distinguishing poisonous from harmless plants is difficult, although their names – bittersweet, dogbane and poison ivy, among them – can be a clue to their nature. Your best defence against accidental poisoning is to familiarize yourself with the plants in your area. Take note: poisonings occur most often in autumn when berries and mushrooms are abundant.

Dan Schneider and Peter Pautler are resource interpreters with the Grand River Conservation Authority.

Excess baggage

They clog our landfills, shorelines and closets. Time to ban the plastic bag

By Edward Keenan

I’m at my local variety store buying a single pack of gum when I begin to suspect a conspiracy. How else to explain why my gum should be handed to me in a plastic grocery bag? Don’t these bags cost the stores money? Why can’t I ever convince a clerk that I don’t need or want one?

Despite being the type of guy who puts the gum in my pocket and hands the bag back to the cashier, a large cupboard in my kitchen is stuffed with nothing but plastic bags. No matter how conscientiously we refuse them or how creatively we reuse them, my wife and I cannot seem to get rid of these things as fast as we accumulate them.

Canadians take home more than 10 billion plastic bags every year. The environmental wreckage of simply producing them is staggering: plastics are made out of fossil fuels (natural gas and oil), which are extracted from the ground, refined into something called low-density polyethylene and then mixed with other additives, manufactured into bags and sent to stores. Every step of the process consumes energy and creates toxic by-products. Yet it’s when you leave the store with your plastic-bagged purchase that the true ecological menace begins.

We can’t incinerate bags without creating toxins, and low-density polyethylene is difficult to recycle (bags of different textures and thickness each have a different chemical makeup and can’t be mixed together in the recycling process). You can’t throw plastic bags into a blue box in most of Ontario.

So where do they end up? Many are stowed forever under my sink. Many more – 1 to 3 percent – wind up as litter on the street, caught in the branches of trees or clogging up drains and sewers. (Plastic bags in drains were a major factor in catastrophic floods that struck Bangladesh in 1988 and 1998.) The vast majority of plastic bags become liners for wastebaskets in the home, and eventually are placed at the curb to be shipped to the landfill. There, the average bag will take roughly

400 years to biodegrade. As it does, it releases toxins into the soil. Before it biodegrades, the bag blocks the supply of air and water to the underlying soil, slows the decomposition of the garbage in and under it and destabilizes the water table.

All kinds of wildlife mistake plastic bags for food, an error that leads to poisonings and death. The environmental group Planet Ark estimates that every year 100,000 whales, seals, turtles and other marine animals die as a result of ingesting plastic bags. Inland, farm animals and birds are known to often make the same deadly mistake.

The most astounding thing about all this is how utterly replaceable plastic bags are.

Recyclable, biodegradable paper could do the same job but would require cutting down a lot of trees. Simply replacing Canada’s annual plastic bag consumption with new paper would result in the logging of more than 14 million trees, and, while using recycled paper could slow deforestation, this material requires substantial energy in both transportation and processing and creates toxic emissions at every step of the way. A far better solution would be to use reusable cloth bags. Cloth is economical – the average Ontarian’s 200 plastic grocery bags per year cost stores about $10, while cloth bags retail for around $5 each – and virtually eliminates the burdens of landfill and recycling. We did fine without plastic bags before they appeared in the 1970s, and we could do fine without them again.

Short of banning plastic bags, other measures could stem the tide. Ireland imposed a tax equivalent to 25 cents per bag in 2002, which resulted in a 90 percent drop in the number of bags distributed (bonus: the money collected from the tax went to environmental initiatives). Voluntary measures taken by grocers in Australia have reduced the number of bags in circulation by 45 percent in two years. Force people to think about bags – and pay for them – and they naturally decide they have no need for them.

There are bigger environmental crimes than plastic bags, but few things are simultaneously as ubiquitous, harmful and easily replaced with sustainable alternatives. We in Ontario ought to look at banning plastic bags or taxing people who use them. Such measures will be good for the state of organization in my kitchen cupboards, and even better for our wildlife and our planet.

Edward Keenan writes regularly about urban issues, politics and culture. He is the city editor of Eye Weekly in Toronto.

Spring 2007

Climate change and the power of one  by Victoria Foote Wee shorebird takes on the Feds; Dufferin Aggregates mines more of the escarpment; genetically modified trees What may be the last, viable population of the pint-sized wildfowl can be found on Walpole Island by Tim Tiner The urban environs are tough on street trees. But some municipalities are starting to look out for their welfare  by Loraine Johnson Extreme protection for flora  by Dan Schneider and Peter Pautler Join us at the Green Living Show; fundraising for a trumpeter swan; excellent new bird book The clog our landfills, shorelines and cupboards. Time to ban the plastic bag  by Edward Keenan

From the lush Carolinian zone in the south to the vast boreal of the north, global warming threatens to bring about the collapse of Ontario’s forest ecosystems.   By Douglas Hunter Why are birds that feed on insects disappearing? New findings point to answers that touch on a range of troubling environmental factors. By Douglas Hunter William Kemp has turned his home into a model of energy efficiency without forfeiting any of the creature comforts.  By Peter Christie

Urban Nature: Help for city trees

For too long, they have suffered from the ravages of the urban environment. Now some municipalities are taking a kinder approach to caring for our street trees

By Lorraine Johnson

“I don’t have any political genes,” says Marg Drummond, a retired teacher who lives in the town of Mitchell, near Stratford in southern Ontario. “I just have the tree-planting gene.” For four years, Drummond and a small team of volunteers canvassed the town, counting, measuring, assessing and identifying its trees. Ask her how many trees grow in Mitchell and she answers quickly and precisely: “13,758.” The information the volunteers gathered will help the town develop a comprehensive plan for the urban forest. Drummond’s favourite species, white birch, grows in Mitchell, as do silver maples, black walnuts, spruce and cedar hedges. But Drummond recalls with indignity a sad row of crabapples: “Those poor things were planted between the boulevard and the road, right underneath wires, so they get trimmed back to destruction every year!”

Life is tough for urban street trees. It’s no wonder that city trees – imprisoned in concrete planter boxes or sidewalk cut-outs, neglected after planting, assaulted by salt and sometimes people, blasted by exhaust fumes and the reflected heat off asphalt – often succumb to urban ravages after just a few years. (There’s a whiff of defeat in the name of Oakville’s tree department: Forestry and Cemetery Services.) For too long, our municipal planting practices have guaranteed streettree mortality. Statistics from the United States paint a bleak picture: the average life of a downtown, urban street tree is about seven years. But there is hope. Municipalities are reconsidering not only the kind of trees they plant, but also where and in what type of soil they plant them and how well they’re maintained.

“Urban forestry used to be a kind of orphan,” says Michael Rosen, vice-president of Tree Canada. “The ‘real’ forest was considered to be elsewhere, in the bush, not in major urban centres. But awareness of the value of street trees, and urban forests in general, is increasing.”

People often think that all we have to do is plant trees,” says David Schmitt, environmental and urban forest project manager for the City of Kitchener. “But there’s a lot more to it than that.” Schmitt, like many urban foresters, sees a pressing need for more long-term planning focused on what street trees need below the ground: “If we’re going to achieve healthy, tree-lined streets, then we need to create better soil habitat and root habitat.” Says John McNeil, manager of Forestry and Cemetery Services for the Town of Oakville, “You can’t plant an oak tree in a thimble and expect it to become a large shade tree.”

A number of municipalities are now engaged in proactive projects to improve the prospects for street trees. One of the most promising innovations involves “structural soil.” Structural soil is a mix of gel-coated gravel and soil. The gravel provides structural support to support the sidewalk without compacting the soil, thus allowing tree roots to grow and develop. The gel enhances the ability of roots to absorb nutrients.

Other innovations include the design of street-tree planting pits instead of small sidewalk cut-outs. Toronto’s new tree pit design provides eight to 15 cubic metres of shared rooting space for trees, as opposed to 1.2 to 2.5 cubic metres of soil per tree in the old design. Toronto is also experimenting with removable panels on trenches so that when underground utilities need servicing, the panels can simply be lifted off without tree roots being harmed.

While planting designs can improve the chances that street trees will survive, choices about what species to plant are also important. “There is no miracle street-tree species,” says Stephen Smith of the Toronto company Urban Forest Associates. “Instead, it’s always a question of what is the right tree for any particular site.”

Determining “rightness” can be complicated. “We used to plant a lot of white ash and green ash,” says Bill Roesel, manager of forestry and horticulture for Windsor’s Parks and Recreation department, “because they are so tolerant of poor soil.” But as emerald ash borer, an invasive, tree-destroying pest, swept through Essex County, Windsor paid the price for depending so heavily on just one tree genus, losing 6,500 ash trees – or 10 percent of the city’s street tree population. “We try to plant as many native Carolinian species as we can,” says Roesel, “and we’ve had good success with Kentucky coffee tree, hackberry and tulip-tree.”

Keeping street trees alive and healthy is often a matter of getting back to the basics of maintenance. “Sidewalk trees were largely neglected through the 1990s,” says Richard Ubbens, director of urban forestry for the City of Toronto. But maintenance crews now water and fertilize Toronto’s sidewalk trees and in the past year have been experimenting with compost tea, which, according to Ubbens, gives “a nice little microbial boost to the soil.” The Town of Oakville also has a watering program and a mulching program.

In other places, volunteers are enlisted for maintenance duty. In Windsor, a notice is left on adjacent homeowners’ doors asking them to water young street trees. Likewise, Toronto’s urban forestry department asks storeowners in some areas to water street trees during a drought. This approach has risks, however. “Sidewalk trees can die from drowning,” says Ubbens. A professional city work crew, checking conditions with soil probes, is often better equipped than well-intentioned citizens to evaluate trees’ need for water.

Ultimately, though, the will and involvement of the public will influence the resources a city devotes to its street trees. Andy Kenney, senior lecturer of urban and community forestry at the University of Toronto and a leading light in Canada’s urban forestry movement, says, “It all starts with public education because citizens of the city own the urban forest. They have to be the champions.” One Ontario municipality that has taken this to heart is Thunder Bay, where the volunteer group Trees Thunder Bay finds a sponsor to pay one-third of the cost of planting a street tree. (The city and adjacent homeowner share the other two-thirds.) In communities like this, citizens are taking the lead to protect and enhance what is, after all, a public resource, with benefits for all.

“Growing a tree is like raising a child,” says Gérald Lajeunesse, chief landscape architect for the National Capital Commission in Ottawa. “You need to keep an eye on it and take care of it, or there’s going to be trouble.”

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Lorraine Johnson is the editor of a collection of essays on the Carolinian zone, to be published this year.

Ontario Nature’s Biodiversity Charter

Our 20/20 Vision for Ontario

If you love wildlife, please sign our charter. You can help protect Ontario’s natural wonders by sending a message to our government.  Add your voice to ours.

www.ontarionature.org/protect/campaigns/biodiversity_2020_vision.php

Power struggles

By Mark Carabetta

For the past two years, Ontario Nature has been battling a controversial electrical power plant in King Township, and the fight isn’t over yet. Most recently, the organization is opposing an unprecedented regulation passed by the Ontario government that has created a loophole that permits the power plant to be built, undermines the public review process and facilitates inappropriate industrial development in a part of the countryside that falls under the protection of the Greenbelt.

Read the full article…

Living fences

By Allan Britnell

That good fences make good neighbours is a commonly held truism, but fences can also be good for the environment, particularly when they are made from trees. In southwestern Ontario, the County of Wellington has initiated a number of innovative programs that incorporate so-called living fences to do everything from boosting crop yields for local farmers to reducing the amount of ploughing and road salt needed to keep winter roads safe.

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Heavy breathing

By Sharon Oosthoek

The earth’s plants collectively inhale – wait for it –123 billion tonnes of carbon through photosynthesis each year, according to a team of international researchers who say their finding will eventually allow a more accurate prediction of the impact of climate change on trees, shrubs and crops.

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Join the club

By Amber Cowie

Sometimes, bigger really is better. The borders of the Greenbelt surrounding the Greater Toronto Area continue to extend, allowing additional lands to be incorporated under the Greenbelt Act. This past summer, the City of Guelph asked that more than 800 hectares of important habitat in the Guelph area also come under the protection of the expanding Greenbelt.

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The buzz is gone

By John Hassell

Around the world, researchers have noted with increasing concern the rapid decline in bumblebees, yet another once common creature now at risk of disappearing altogether. The decrease in bumblebee populations is so severe that the Committee on the Status of Species at Risk in Ontario added the first bumblebee, the rusty-patched bumblebee (Bombus affinis), to the Species at Risk in Ontario (SARO) List, designating the species as endangered.

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A royal rebound

By Allan Britnell

With its distinctive black, orange and white-speckled patterning, the monarch (Danaus plexippus) is probably the best known of all North American butterflies. It is also one of the continent’s most well travelled insects, migrating more than 3,000 kilometres from its summer retreats as far east as Newfoundland to its overwintering grounds in Mexico.

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Field work

By Joe Crowley

Ontario Nature conservation staff have now completed two field seasons conducting research on some of the province’s rarest creatures. This summer, in my capacity as coordinator of Ontario Nature’s Reptile and Amphibian Atlas project, I worked with John Urquhart, staff ecologist, collecting data from Pelee Island and Lost Bay Nature Reserve for the atlas, a citizen-science project that will provide key information for conservation strategies for species at risk (see “Secret worlds,” page 32).

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Stand up for nature

By Victoria Foote

The 10th meeting of the Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity has come and gone. Delegates from around the world flocked to Nagoya, Japan, and over a two-week period in October set the global conservation agenda for the next 10 years.

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Mining messes

I was naturally more than a little upset to read the article “The Ring of Fire” [Autumn 2010, page 18] which discusses the extent to which mining exploration has already begun in the Ring of Fire area in Ontario. If anyone doesn’t know what damage future mining operations can do without adequate environmental controls, please read The Nation magazine (August 19, 2005) which recounts the difficulty of obtaining information about mining pollution in northern Quebec in the Ouje-Bougoumou area.

Although studies were done by Quebec environment ministry, the Cree people of that area had to enlist the help of an American geologist to obtain the information that is published in The Nation. To quote one of the two American scientists who did some initial testing in 2000 and 2001, “It makes the Love Canal look like a dirty backyard.”

I don’t know how the story has unfolded since then, but the warning that it may eventually cost a whole lot more to clean up toxicity in these water systems than to attempt to moderate the pollution at the start is a story that has already unfolded elsewhere, in the U.S. at Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, in the 1970s and 1980s, and more recently in the Gulf of Mexico.

Both our governments, and the mining and oil industries, have to adjust their attitudes. We need the technology to put in place effective environmental controls, as well as the will to prosecute parties who ignore them. If the fact that BP hasn’t gone bankrupt over the Gulf oil spill cleanup doesn’t reveal how much profit could be diverted into control as you go, then we are really not paying attention to what is going on.

Sarah Trueman, Kingston, Ontario

Fresh air

Kudos for a thoughtful article, “Wind Wars,” on wind turbines [Autumn 2010, page 46]. Anne Bell is exactly right when she says, “the bird and bat mortality at wind farms pales in comparison to the widespread and devastating consequences of society’s continued reliance on fossil fuels.” There is also no comparison between how wind and fossil fuels affect humans. The number of people sickened each year by Ontario coal plants is over 120,000. The number made ill by wind is about 100. (Coal produces more electricity, of course, but even if wind produced as much, it would do orders of magnitude less harm.)

If we want to protect human and animal health, we should close Ontario’s huge coal facilities, whose greenhouse gas emissions are equivalent to those of almost seven million automobiles. In fact, the province has enough coal-free generation capacity to end coal use in the current year – a policy advocated by health groups such as the Registered Nurses’ Association of Ontario, the Ontario Lung Association and the Ontario College of Family Physicians.

Gideon Forman, Toronto, Executive Director, Canadian Association of Physicians for the Environment

Honouring Graeme

Once in a while, we receive a donation that humbles us. Ontario Nature recently became the beneficiary of a life insurance policy. (In this form of planned giving, the donor names Ontario Nature as the beneficiary and receives a tax receipt for the premiums paid annually.) The gift is in honour of Graeme Whistance-Smith. Suzanne and Peter, Graeme’s parents, write:

Our son Graeme was born on March 12, 1974. Even as a baby, he always loved to be outdoors. When he was very young, we took him for long walks on the trails along the Credit River valley near our home in Mississauga. We introduced him to the beauty of the rushing water, the dense forest, the bird life and the wildflowers.

When he was only four months old, Graeme became a true camper. We filled the car with baby gear and set off for the northwest shore of the Bruce Peninsula. The fresh air must have agreed with him because he slept soundly each night, oblivious to the storms that raged around our tent. The days, however, were bright and sunny, and he slept in his baby carrier for most of our long walks along the rocky shore.

During the next decade, we camped in most of the provincial parks and conservation areas in southern Ontario. Graeme was able to explore lakes and rivers, sand dunes and wetlands, caves and mighty cliffs and to observe all the wildlife living there. His favourite adventures were in our canoe very early in the morning when many creatures could easily be seen in the water and on the shore.

When Graeme was in his early teens, we started travelling outside Ontario and then outside Canada. He explored the Pacific coast of Vancouver Island and the beautiful forests, lakes and mountains of the interior of British Columbia with us. We floated around the Queen Charlotte Islands on rafts and camped in the rainforests. A National Geographic special about the Galapagos Islands convinced us to go there. It was a most memorable trip. At the end of the 1980s, only a very few tourists were allowed to visit the Galapagos, and on our 10-day cruise on a small boat we were the only people hiking on the islands.

In the summer of 1991, Graeme and his friend Tim set out with us in a rental RV to discover Australia. It was a remarkable, six-week trip. The vast outback, the beautiful rainforests and Heron Island paradise on the Great Barrier Reef were stunning – and also a perfect backdrop for girls, music, beer and everything Aussie.

Graeme was an avid reader. He liked books about nature, but he didn’t read animal stories because he thought that they would be too sad. He read all of Gerald Durrell’s humorous stories about life as a naturalist and a traveller. I think that Graeme would have liked to follow in his footsteps.

At the beginning of Grade 13, Graeme was diagnosed with a very rare bone cancer. Tragically, he died on April 23, 1993 just after his 19th birthday.

Because of his love of nature, we thought that a “Graeme Whistance-Smith Nature Reserve” would be the perfect way for him to be remembered. If he were alive today, Graeme would be very pleased to know that a small part of our beautiful province would be protected in his name as a safe haven for many of the plants and animals that had so fascinated him.

When nature calls

This September, some 250 enthusiastic participants showed up at the joint Ontario Nature and Ontario Power Generation (OPG) Cootes Paradise Biodiversity Festival despite cold and blustery weather. The family-oriented event, held at the Royal Botanical Gardens (RBG) in Burlington, Ontario, inspired people of all ages to consider how we can protect biodiversity in local environments.

Attendees paddled canoes, went on guided hikes and planted native prairie species. They also got up close and personal with a beaver from the Muskoka Wildlife Centre, a great horned owl from the Mountsberg Raptor Centre and rat and garter snakes from Sciensational Sssnakes! Says Barbara MacKenzie-Wynia, Ontario Nature’s regional Nature Network coordinator, “We have had extraordinary partnerships with so many organizations at the grassroots level right up to OPG. Everyone really came together to provide these communities with a great experience.” Participants explored the RBG’s interpretive centre and surrounding Cootes Paradise ecosystem, where as many as 200 bird species can be spotted during the fall migration.

One of the highlights of the festival for Kimberley MacKenzie, Ontario Nature’s director of development, was when “my friend’s daughter touched a real live beaver and jumped back with a gasp of surprise at how soft it was. Children need real experiences to appreciate our natural world. For many kids, we have to bring nature to them. That’s why these events are not only a lot of fun, but also important.”

The Cootes Paradise festival was the third Ontario Nature – OPG biodiversity event held this year. Ontario Nature also co-hosted Biodiversity Day at Springbank Park in London with the Upper Thames River Conservation Authority, and the Second Annual Butterfly Festival at Tommy Thomson Park in Toronto with the Toronto and Region Conservation Authority. “At OPG, we believe that industry has a key role to play in conserving, sustaining and protecting nature,” says Tom Mitchell, OPG’s president and CEO. “We’re pleased to work with Ontario Nature and all our partners to encourage awareness of the importance of biodiversity through interactive events like the Cootes Paradise Biodiversity Festival.”

Adds MacKenzie, “Corporations can do amazing things. With their sponsorship, OPG helped us meet hundreds of people who love nature and care about biodiversity.” Visit the Ontario Nature website for updates about upcoming educational events and other programming scheduled for 2011. For further information on OPG biodiversity events, visit www.opgbiodiversity.ca.

Friends of the Osprey

Concern for deteriorating nesting platforms and poor bird monitoring led to the founding, in 1995, of Friends of the Osprey in the Kawartha Lakes area.

The group, which has more than 150 members, is a one-stop shop for osprey conservation. It holds talks and seminars at elementary schools, colleges, seniors’ homes and youth groups, raising awareness about the masked raptor and its habitat needs. Members also monitor osprey populations, conduct surveys and rescue osprey nestlings that get blown out of their nests during storms. With help from supporters at Sir Sanford Fleming Community College, the group has built 30 osprey nesting platforms mounted on six-metre cedar poles.

One of the group’s proudest achievements occurred on March 25 of this year, when it launched a high-tech satellite telemetry project in partnership with Bird Studies Canada, the culmination of nearly six years of fundraising. Two female ospreys from the Kawartha Lakes area were captured, measured, tagged and then fitted with solar-powered satellite transmitters, which will be used to track their migratory routes and overwintering habitat. (You can follow the birds’ progress at www.friendsoftheosprey.org.)

The elder of the two ospreys, bird 95050, left Sturgeon Lake on August 30 and at press time was located off the coast of Venezuela. The younger osprey, bird 54706, lagged behind, heading south on September 2, 2010, and was last spotted in Puerto Rico. Friends of the Osprey members believe that the ospreys are probably close to their wintering grounds.

As the ospreys departed, onlookers were concerned that the raptors would pass over the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, putting them at risk of getting covered in oil as they dived for fish. Fortunately, the ospreys bypassed the gulf on their way south. Now, Friends of the Osprey members eagerly await the birds’ return to the Kawartha Lakes next spring.

Frontier conservation

Northern Connections, Ontario Nature’s new program based in the far north, is bringing isolated communities together to create a unique environmental voice that speaks for the big boreal landscape.

By Conor Mihell

Sometimes, environmental controversy spurs even the most reticent citizens to action. Soft-spoken Ted Schintz says he was “indignant” when he caught wind of a proposal to fill a healthy coldwater lake with toxic mining by-products near his hometown of Marathon, in northern Ontario. A startling loophole in the federal Fisheries Act allows for the reclassification of bodies of water as “tailings impoundment areas,” offering mining companies a cheap and easy solution for dealing with mine waste.

Toronto-based Marathon PGM Corporation, the proponent of the platinum, palladium and copper mine, wanted to dump more than 60 million cubic metres of tailings into pristine Bamoos Lake over 11 years of mining. As compensation, the company promised to rehabilitate the storage area for warmwater fish species once ore deposits were exhausted. “I couldn’t believe it,” says Schintz, who has lived on the north shore of Lake Superior since the 1970s. “There’s something wrong if someone is allowed to take away a deep, cold lake capable of supporting trout in favour of a shallow, polluted pike pond.”

But Schintz was daunted by the prospect of speaking out against a mine that promised much-needed jobs for his community, which is suffering from chronic unemployment in the wake the 2009 closure of a pulp and paper mill. “For a while, I thought, ‘What am I going to do?’” he says. “But then someone else mentioned that they were not happy with the situation, either. That got the ball rolling.”

Schintz’s diffidence is a common affliction among residents of northern Ontario who consider challenging development. The resource-rich, sparsely populated and ecologically significant region that sprawls across 968,000 square kilometres north and west of Muskoka has a turbulent economy. “There’s such a long and established history of booms and busts in the north,” says Peter Rosenbluth of Ontario Nature’s Thunder Bay office. “This has bred an increased environmental awareness, but at the same time it’s often a bit of a subdued effort because of the strong feeling that you don’t want to bite the hand that feeds you.”

This is but one challenge that Rosenbluth faces as coordinator of Ontario Nature’s Northern Connections program, funded by the Ontario Trillium Foundation through its Future Fund. He is also dealing with the fact that promoting sustainability in a geographically immense region is difficult. A complex, interconnected array of environmental threats – from waste management to forestry, mining, road building and energy developments – affect isolated communities and intact boreal ecosystems of global significance.

The two-year-old Northern Connections initiative seeks to spread environmental awareness and mobilize conservation efforts working in partnership with Environment North, the Sault Naturalists of Ontario and Michigan, the Anishinabek of Gitchi Gami, Food Security Research Network and the Northern Ontario Sustainable Communities Partnership. The program organizes events, coordinates workshops and offers online lectures on topics such as nuclear energy and forest tenure reform. Its annual “Sustainable Communities in the North Conference,” held last February in Thunder Bay, included keynote speakers Peter Robinson, CEO of the David Suzuki Foundation, and author and sustainable development advocate Hunter Lovins.

Early in his tenure, Rosenbluth was surprised to discover more than 100 environmental organizations active in communities across Ontario’s north. For instance, a group in Sioux Lookout, a northwestern town of 5,200, successfully lobbied for a ban on bottled water at municipal events and convinced the local council to pass a bylaw to eliminate plastic shopping bags, creating the first outright “bag ban” in the province. Meanwhile, community gardens and local food initiatives are sprouting around the region. As well, far-north First Nations communities, such as the Matawa Tribal Council, are applying treaty rights to ensure adequate consultation with prospective developers to gain greater control over natural resources on their traditional lands.

Resident polls support Rosenbluth’s work and challenge the Ontario government’s blind rush to develop areas like the far north’s “Ring of Fire” mineral deposit. A 2007 survey, for example, revealed that the environment was the number two voting issue among northern Ontarians, second only to health care and twice as important as the economy. Similarly, a 2010 poll found that 86 percent of respondents agreed that the protection of ecosystems should be emphasized before industrial projects are approved. “The thing that stands out is that northerners care about the environment and nature,” says Rosenbluth. “Even after an economic crisis that hit the north particularly hard, the environment still matters as much as ever. People want to make sure that we maintain a relatively healthy, intact boreal ecosystem and that natural values are protected before we commit to new activities.”

Schintz, along with fellow Marathon residents Michael Butler and Teri Burgess, and Bonnie Couchie, a friend from the nearby Ojibways of the Pic River First Nation, formed Citizens for a Responsible Mine in Marathon (CRM) last spring. They turned to MiningWatch Canada, an Ottawa-based nongovernmental organization, for a crash course in mining policy, started a blog and shared their message with people in the community. Their Facebook site racked up hundreds of supporters. All the while, they took the unusual tack of stressing their support for mining; they knew it would be suicidal to be in outright opposition to development. “We decided that if we didn’t define who we were, someone else would do it for us,” Schintz recalls. “Quite often and quite early we said that we supported the mine, but we didn’t support irresponsible mining activities.”

CRM focused on tactfully engaging Marathon PGM and bringing out facts about mining, such as the precedent setting implications of turning a healthy lake into a tailings pond and the importance of properly funded mine closure plans. “Until we got involved, the narrative was tightly controlled by the proponent,” says Butler, a fisheries biologist. “Bits of corporate spin were being printed verbatim by the newspaper. What we were able to do is present a counterbalance to that corporate message. It became a public dialogue instead of them controlling the message.”

Even though CRM’s campaign galvanized local support, Marathon PGM’s sudden shelving of the Bamoos plan last July came as a surprise to everyone. In an e-mail to CRM, Raymond Mason, the company’s vice-president of operations, said, “After consultation with First Nations, government agencies and residents of Marathon and surrounding communities, it became clear that the loss of the fishery in Bamoos Lake was undesirable.”

For Schintz and his colleagues, it was a “great victory” that brought them one step closer to creating something the mining industry has yet to achieve: a carefully planned mine that imposes the least possible environmental impact, respects regulations and does not hold taxpayers accountable for costly, long-term, government-led cleanups once production ceases. Says CRM’s Butler, “Hopefully, the example we set here will be one that shows that even in a depressed economy there’s an opportunity for people to speak up to make sure that environmental concerns are taken into account.”

Rosenbluth often talks about northern Ontario’s “doppelganger identities” when he opens a presentation about Northern Connections. Paradoxically, northerners desperately need the jobs that development brings, but they also have personal ties to the landscape and are loath to see it tarnished. According to Anne Bell, Ontario Nature’s senior director of conservation and education, when it comes to land-use planning, the Province should mobilize northern residents’ intimate knowledge of the land. “Good decisions need to be grounded in local knowledge of the landscape,” she notes. “Northerners know that landscape best.”

The success of Schintz’s Marathon group shows that northerners have the capacity to instigate change in their communities. After his first crack at environmental activism, Schintz is eager to stay involved. “Now that I’ve been drawn in, enjoyed some success and made some good friends, I’m more encouraged to take on something again in the future or lend my support to a cause elsewhere,” he says.

Ultimately, this is the attitude Rosenbluth wants to foster across the north, and he hopes his growing list of networking events will bring more concerned citizens together to build on the successes of others. “I’m convinced that change won’t come from established groups elsewhere,” Rosenbluth says. “It has to come from the grassroots. If the outcome of Northern Connections is that there’s an increase in the ability to speak out about the environment, that will be a significant thing in itself. We will enable the conservation voice in northern Ontario to be stronger and louder.”

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Freelance writer Conor Mihell is based in the northern Ontario community of Sault Ste. Marie.

Secret Worlds

Intrepid conservation staff poke into the earth’s dark nooks and crannies in search of salamanders, frogs, turtles and other rare creatures. Welcome to the making of Ontario Nature’s Reptile and Amphibian Atlas.

By Peter Christie

 

John Urquhart is rolling back old logs in this midsummer forest the way a kid in a just-discovered corridor opens door after hallway door. He’s moving from one fallen tree trunk to the next, up a bright wooded slope at Lost Bay Nature Reserve north of Gananoque. He lifts each log gingerly and peers beneath it as if into a dark passage – past a threshold to some secret world.

“There,” he says, as a tiny black shape suddenly skitters from the shadows. It looks at first like a fast escaping beetle, but Urquhart deftly scoops it up and reveals an impossibly small, fully formed salamander, its glistening eyes no bigger than specks.

“Baby redback,” he explains brightly. “This might have hatched a week ago … maybe just days.”

Urquhart pauses with the motionless eastern redback salamander in his palm. It could be a miniature glazed replica of a slender black lizard. The red on its back is barely discernible.

Urquhart blinks with boyish wonder at the creature’s proportions; an animal this tiny is a rare find even for a regular visitor to the cryptic places a rolled log reveals.

“Redback salamanders are the only amphibians in Ontario that don’t have an aquatic larval stage,” he says, beginning a sober biology lesson that seems curiously at odds with his earlier moment of delight. “Other young salamanders and frogs live as tadpoles in ponds and streams. Baby redbacks like this are the only ones to hatch on land looking like miniature adults.”

Urquhart is Ontario Nature’s staff ecologist with the Ontario Reptile and Amphibian Atlas project, an ambitious effort to map the whereabouts of some of the province’s most secretive and enigmatic creatures. Like the Ontario Breeding Bird Atlas project before it, the Ontario Reptile and Amphibian Atlas is gathering observations submitted by hundreds of volunteer naturalists who scour large areas that comprise squares of a grid superimposed on a map of the province. The volunteers then report the species of salamanders, frogs, toads, snakes, turtles and lizards they find there. Started in 2009, the project – spearheaded by Ontario Nature in cooperation with the Eastern Ontario Model Forest, the Ministry of Natural Resources (MNR) and other partners – will also bring together existing amphibian and reptile records from museums and volunteer projects such as the Ontario Turtle Tally, FrogWatch Ontario and the Marsh Monitoring Program.

The new atlas is not only providing important information for conservation biologists and others, it is also raising awareness. While Ontario’s beleaguered snakes and turtles have received a lot of attention recently – 18 of 32 reptiles that have been found here are now considered species or subspecies at risk – many amphibians in the province are also in trouble. The atlas is an overdue opportunity to shift some of the conservation spotlight to these lesser-known and more enigmatic creatures.

Urquhart and his long-time friend and colleague Joe Crowley, the atlas coordinator, are charged with the massive task of orchestrating the enterprise and rallying legions of citizen scientists to help. Of course, when an area of the province needs special attention or when volunteers are not covering an important grid square, the biologist duo takes to the field – “just get dirty,” says Crowley.

This morning, for instance, Crowley is up to his chest in marsh muck, checking nearby turtle traps, while Urquhart shows me around other areas of Lost Bay, Ontario Nature’s recently expanded 101-hectare nature reserve on Gananoque Lake in eastern Ontario. The reserve – and a supportive neighbour’s log cabin – has been a kind of summer home base for Urquhart, who divides his time between atlas work and surveying the property for rare turtles and snakes as part of Ontario Nature’s Reptiles at Risk project.

Our hike keeps a herky-jerky pace as Urquhart constantly interrupts his long strides to look under logs and rocks or to lunge at fleeing frogs. Other redback salamanders turn up, as well as a wood frog, some green frogs and young bullfrogs near a shaded pool. Gray treefrogs, stirred by the warm August sun, trill intermittently from the trees. Beside a lane near the marsh, the summer’s cohort of northern
leopard frogs leaps in deep grass.

After several attempts, Urquhart nabs what he calls an “in-betweener.” It is a pickerel frog, a less-than-common animal usually distinguished from its near-twin species, the leopard frog, by the shape and arrangement of its spots. Usually. The spots on our captive are ambiguous; it doesn’t fit the typical field guide description. Urquhart has to look for other clues to make the identification.

“These animals don’t read the books,” he remarks dryly.

In truth, few people read the books either: amphibians simply don’t get much attention. As a group, they are among our least familiar and most poorly understood animals, apart from insects. Other than during the spring chorus, when common frogs and toads are at least audible, Ontario amphibians are extremely successful at remaining inconspicuous. Even for many naturalists, amphibians are a kind of natural-history blind spot.

The irony is that greater numbers of amphibians live in our forests than do any other land vertebrates, including birds and rodents. More significantly, few other animals are as vital to local ecosystems – as food for other creatures and for moving nutrients into the forest from pools and ponds as they metamorphose from water to land dwellers. Meanwhile, their dual citizenship in both aquatic and terrestrial domains makes amphibians especially qualified as harbingers of environmental change.

“So of course they’re important,” says David Green, speaking by phone from McGill University’s Redpath Museum, where he is a renowned expert on amphibian ecology. “Without the amphibians, who knows what would happen, because they are such a critical cog in the workings of all the ecosystems in eastern Canada – or in the rest of the world.”

Yet these days the cog is showing signs of stress: frogs, toads and salamanders comprise the most at-risk class of animals on the planet. Scientists say a third of the world’s nearly 6,000 known amphibian species are threatened with extinction (compared with 12 percent of all birds and 23 percent of mammals). Nine species are believed to have disappeared since 1980, and another 113 have not been seen in years (see sidebar above). In the tropics, the rate of vanishing amphibian species is threatening to rival some of the great mass extinctions of history.

The news for Ontario’s frogs and salamanders is not as grim. Even so, many of the 27 species and subspecies that have been found in the province – 13 salamanders and 14 frogs and toads – are showing signs of trouble. Eight of them, for instance, are designated threatened, endangered or even extirpated on the Species at Risk in Ontario (SARO) list. Seven are also listed on the national species-at-risk list. Three species – eastern tiger salamander, northern spring salamander and Blanchard’s cricket frog – were last reported so long ago that most people consider them gone from the province for good. Meanwhile, populations of formerly common western chorus frogs in eastern Ontario and Quebec have been falling fast in recent years.

Read the full article…

Plight of the bug eaters

Why are birds that feed on insects disappearing?
New findings point to answers that touch on a range of troubling environmental factors.

By Douglas Hunter

  

Late in our conversation, Jon McCracken, director of national programs at Bird Studies Canada (BSC) in Port Rowan, mentions whip-poor-wills. In turn, I observe that in some 15 years of exploring Georgian Bay, I have never heard or seen one. “Oh, 30 years ago, they were very common where you live,” he says. 

For decades now, Ontario’s skies have been losing not only whip-poor-wills but many of their fellow aerial insectivores – that agile “guild,” or group, of birds that feasts on the wing, snapping up airborne insects. “Frankly, most of the avian insectivores are declining in northeastern North America,” says Mike Cadman, a songbird biologist with Canadian Wildlife Service (CWS), Ontario region, in Burlington. He quickly reels off a list of species: “Swallows, nightjars, a lot of the flycatchers and the swifts … We have no clue why that would be, and it seems fairly consistent across the group.” 

The steady decline that has affected the guild since the 1960s, and which has been approaching freefall since the mid 1980s, has landed some of the birds on both the provincial and federal lists of species at risk. Flagged are the common nighthawk and olive flycatcher (threatened nationally, of special concern provincially), Acadian flycatcher (endangered nationally and provincially), chimney swift (endangered nationally, threatened provincially) and whip-poor-will (threatened nationally and provincially). But other, once numerous aerial insectivores have also declined as severely as those among the listed species. Provincially, the number of barn swallows has declined 64 percent, and chimney swifts 98 percent, between 1968 and 2008, according to North American Breeding Bird Survey data. 

The causes are multi-faceted and have proven difficult to identify, and sometimes are little more than educated guesses. “It makes you think there might be something consistent and pervasive across the group,” says Cadman. “But one thing that is fairly noticeable is that you can come up with a reason for each species that is not the case across the group.” 

For Gregor Beck, director of conservation and science at Long Point Basin Land Trust, one of the most worrisome aspects of the decline is that this broad range of species occupies very diverse ecological niches and habitats. “They have a huge range in feeding preferences. Some feed on small prey, others on medium or large insects. Some are daytime feeders whereas others are crepuscular or nocturnal. Some are open-country birds whereas others are woodland, shrubland, wetland or another habitat. This suggests that there are likely multiple issues at play.” 

There may well be no single cause to account for the guild-wide crisis. Fortunately, we know much more than we did even a year ago about the nature of this troubling decline. In the past few months, important new findings have emerged, and ongoing studies promise major insights. This research is complementing – and at times challenging – a multitude of standard explanations and is pointing researchers in fresh directions. Indeed, new evidence suggests a connection to environmental factors much larger than the woes of any particular bug-eating bird. In the process of trying to solve the riddle of what has laid low one of these species, we may be on the verge of learning fundamental truths about the plight of this entire group of birds, as well as about broader environmental issues. 

Through puzzling over the cause of the declines, researchers have not failed to recognize that, with names like barn swallow and chimney swift, they are clearly dealing with species that long ago adapted to humans. It follows that changes in the human environment would negatively affect the numbers of such birds. The decline in barn swallows, to take one species, has been blamed in part on new agricultural practices. Family farms have been giving way to more industrialized operations, and that means fewer wooden dairy barns dotting the rural landscape. Take away the barns, and you take away nesting opportunities. 

The same goes for chimneys – and chimney swifts. A bird that centuries ago shifted its nesting preference away from hollow trees and caves presumably ran out of breeding shelter as people started installing chimney caps and liners and sealing the tops of old chimneys with wire mesh. Even the whip-poor-will’s decline is being linked to human-induced habitat change. The species is a creature of the Canadian Shield that frequents “edge” habitats between forests and clearings. As reforestation progresses throughout Ontario, those edges are disappearing. What’s been good for forests has been bad for the whip-poor-will. 

Because data has been collected for only a few decades for many bird populations, we don’t know what their numbers were before they began adapting to human habitation. Perhaps populations of some species exploded after moving in with us, and are now dropping back to more “normal” levels. Data from Illinois, for example, suggests an increase in chimney swift numbers in the first half of the century that could be due to adaptation to human shelters. On the other hand, the increase in the nesting opportunities provided by chimneys could have been more than offset by the habitat loss caused by the clearing of hollow trees. 

“A lot of these birds were helped by humanity and are now turning more towards the habitat that was there before,” says Cadman. “It raises questions of whether we should be worried. We should put the priority on learning more about these species.” 

Beck, who surveyed swifts this year as part of his fieldwork in southern Ontario, believes people have had a direct effect, in some cases by altering both natural and human-made habitats. “There are definitely fewer and fewer nesting sites available,” he says, noting that the historic snags of old-growth forests are few and far between in the south, and open chimneys are growing scarce. “Some of the active sites I’ve observed are in abandoned buildings, which could be demolished anytime.” But he also suspects a linkage between habitat change, food supply and the numbers decline. “As natural habitats were lost and the species increasingly used human structures, changes in prey type may have been an inevitable and unfortunate companion.” 

One expert, at least, has had a significant change in perspective recently. Joe Nocera, a research scientist at the Ministry of Natural Resources and adjunct professor at Trent University, became interested in aerial insectivores after chimney swifts were listed as threatened in Ontario has occurred at only one. While research into nesting boxes continues, their discouraging lack of use to date has led
Nocera to conclude that something beyond habitat is causing the plunge in swift numbers. 

Fresh clues are emerging in a study whose findings were recently published in the journal Avian Conservation and Ecology. McCracken, one of the co-authors, is keenly aware of the guild’s problems through research on bank and barn swallows. With support from Ontario Power Generation, a team of biologists at Bird Studies Canada has been conducting a survey of bank swallow nesting sites along the shore of Lake Erie. (Other similar studies are also underway.) 

McCracken’s study outlines two interesting spatial patterns for aerial insectivore populations. One shows that the largest drops have occurred in the east and north. “The more severe declines are in eastern Canada, from Ontario eastward, and they’re more pronounced in Quebec and the Maritimes,” he says. “We don’t know why, but it opens plausible research hypotheses.” For instance, the declines correlate with the environmental pattern of the impact of acid rain. Acid rain, McCracken notes, is associated with the loss of calcium in the environment, which could affect birds’ eggs and reproductive viability. There also may be a connection to the way contaminants such as mercury and lead are transported through the atmosphere and deposited far from their industrial source points. 

The other spatial pattern McCracken found relates to migration. Birds with the longest southerly journeys, to South America, are suffering the most. “Fewer banded barn swallows may be coming back,” McCracken reports. Again, we don’t know why, in large part because we know little about the winter habitats of these birds. “The birds could be hit by a double whammy from their breeding grounds and wintering grounds,” he says. “I suspect that is the case.” 

Another curiosity is that while broad population declines have occurred across the aerial insectivore guild, two distinct waves hit different species. “Nighthawks, chimney swifts and whip-poor-wills were declining in the mid-1960s,” McCracken says. “Most of the rest were doing okay. But then around the mid-1980s, something happened. That breakpoint is of real interest. 

“There is something about this guild,” McCracken further reflects. “I suspect it has something to do with the food supply.” 

If he is right about that, the answer may lie in a chimney in the heart of the Queen’s University campus. 

The discovery started with Chris Grooms’s desire to do something for chimney swifts after they were listed as threatened federally in 2008. Grooms, who was then president of the Kingston Field Naturalists, is a technician with the Paleoecological Environmental Assessment and Research Laboratory (PEARL) at Queen’s University. The lab is especially well known for its groundbreaking work in the Canadian Arctic, where its lake sediment studies have shown that migratory birds are introducing industrial contaminants to nesting areas. They are ingesting the contaminants when feeding in the Arctic ocean and depositing them via their guano. 

While speaking with one of the naturalist club’s older members, Grooms was surprised to learn that swifts once congregated in the massive chimney of the university’s Fleming Hall. It turned out that a banding study was even conducted there between the 1920s and the 1950s. Researchers banded about 2,000 birds daily and the flock at one point was estimated at 4,000. Grooms discovered that the chimney was sealed with wire mesh in the early 1990s, but by then the swifts were well into their steep decline. 

The university agreed to have the mesh removed to again provide habitat for the birds. (Swifts built a nest the very first year.) Grooms and the naturalist club also decided to investigate what was in the massive chimney. When it was built between 1902 and 1904, Fleming Hall housed the plant that provided heating for most of the campus. Grooms was hoping the chimney might contain unrecovered bands from birds that died in the chimney. Instead, when club members opened the inspection door at the chimney base, about a metre square in area, they found a two-metre-deep column of organic matter. 

What at first appeared to be more than a half-century of accumulated guano turned out to be something else entirely. Swifts cough up the hard bits of the insects they eat, much like owls do pellets of animal bones. While there was some guano, virtually all the material that had piled up in the chimney was insect remains. Grooms was planning to excavate and sift the material to find old bands when he realized its value as a research opportunity analogous to PEARL’s lake sediment cores. Soot and roof material at the base of the deposit appeared to mark 1933 as the year of a catastrophic fire in the building, and the top of the deposit had to date to 1992/93, when the mesh was installed. Ergo, about 50 years of sequential insect remains were deposited between those two dates; material below the fire layer dated back to 1928, when the heating plant was taken out of service. 

In 2009, Grooms shaved off one-centimetre strips of a vertical section of the material to compile the “core sample.” The lab dated the sample strata and identified 1963 as the last year of atmospheric atomic testing. Among others, the investigation soon involved Nocera (who had done postdoctoral work at Queen’s); Leah Finity, a member of the Nocera Lab at Trent University; and Jules M. Blais, a biology professor at the University of Ottawa. 

Preliminary findings were revealed at the annual conference of the Ecological Society of America in Pittsburgh last August. The team found that the crash in the swift population in the mid-1960s correlated with a dramatic change in diet. “True” bugs (insect species of the order Hemiptera) and beetles were replaced by flies, and nitrogen levels in guano deposits plunged. The swifts’ diet changed, a change the authors stated “could easily affect individual survival and brood rearing.” 

In other words, kill off the bugs and beetles, and you kill off the aerial insectivores. 

The findings suggested that swifts shifted their feeding behaviour because of a dramatic change in bug and beetle populations that may be related to the use of pesticides and other contaminants. They are now examining the samples for changes in contaminants such as metals, PCBs, DDT and hope this will be a way to gauge environmental change that hasn’t been done before. 

“We can’t illustrate causation,” says Nocera, “but there is correlation between diet and the population drop. It’s the first historical evidence of what may be affecting other aerial insectivores.” 

While the findings in the Fleming Hall chimney don’t knock all other causes out of contention – after swifts’ nitrogen levels recovered between 1977 and 1988, their depleted numbers continued to fall – they could go a long way to explaining why an entire guild of birds has been disappearing. Individual species, placed under stress by severe diet shifts and challenged by habitat loss, could have become more susceptible to a host of other factors, including pollutants. 

Like other bird scientists, McCracken is intrigued by the new discoveries. He also thinks it’s too early to panic about aerial insectivores’ long-term viability. Take the bank swallow: while its numbers have been declining steeply in bird counts, last summer the Lake Erie survey team found “nearly 130,000 nests” between Rondeau and Turkey Point. Next summer, the survey may tackle the shore between Rondeau and Point Pelee. “On the good side,” he says, “all are common enough that we have some time to do the research to understand the problem before it’s too late.” 

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Douglas Hunter is a freelance writer based in Port McNicoll, Ontario. He has previously written for ON Nature on subjects ranging from cougars to fish farms. 

Sanctuary for Shorebirds

The glorious James Bay saltwater coastline is a birdwatcher’s paradise and critical way station for long-distance fliers. But as the northern landscape hovers on the cusp of transformation, how much longer can this magical part of the province withstand the dual threats of climate change and development?

By Ray Ford

  

With binoculars swinging from their sweat-stained collars and tripods and scopes slung over their shoulders, Mark Peck and Doug McRae splash across kilometres of tidal flats. The sun is hot and high. The sky is azure. Extended expanses of wave-rippled sand give the scene a tropical feel, heightened by McRae’s French Foreign Legion-style hat. “It’s dorky,” he admits, “but it keeps the flies away.” 

On a warm day like this, the horseflies are never far away – squadrons of them, droning overhead like Lancaster bombers. They are a reminder that we’re in northern Ontario, a distant and magical margin of the province, on James Bay, Ontario’s saltwater coast. Dark clouds of shorebirds and waves of waterfowl congregate here, offering a glimpse of what this continent must have been like before the loss of the passenger pigeon or the taming of the buffalo. 

Peck, an ornithologist with the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM), and McRae, a ROM volunteer, are here with a team of government biologists and crack birders to witness the natural spectacle of shorebird migration. More specifically, they’re tracking one of the greatest of its long-distance participants, the red knot. Even though it’s little bigger than a robin, the knot’s 29,000-kilometre journey stretches from Canada’s Arctic archipelago, through James Bay as far south as the southern tip of South America, and back again. One banded knot had flown at least 480,000 kilometres when it was last checked – far enough to reach the moon and start back. 

Despite that stamina, the knot has landed on Canada’s endangered species list. Numbers of the rufa subspecies, have fallen at least 80 percent since the 1980s, from some 150,000 birds to just 30,000, maybe fewer. As Peck notes, the little bird with the terra cotta-coloured breast has become “the poster child for shorebird conservation.” 

That’s where James Bay comes in. “This is one of the most important staging areas for shorebirds in eastern Canada,” Peck says. At least a quarter of the world’s rufa knots stop on the bay during their southward migration. 

“James Bay and the breeding grounds are the last intact regions where these birds haven’t faced much in the way of human disturbance,” Peck adds. “With the opening up of the boreal forest and the lowlands, all that can change.” 

And change, in the form of a planet hungry for minerals, is on the way. 

Few Ontarians have seen a red knot. Perhaps fewer still have seen James Bay. You might get lucky and spot knots on a stormy day near Presqu’ile on the Lake Ontario shore, when foul weather interrupts their migration. But to see the bay, you need to travel more than 1,000 kilometres from Toronto by car, train and helicopter before reaching this 67,000-square-kilometre extension of the Arctic Ocean. James and Hudson bays form a vast tidal shore that funnels migrating birds southward. Despite James Bay’s reputation as a cold and inhospitable place, on a midsummer day the coast is alive with birds and wildlife – an increasingly rare sight in a world where shores are filling with condos, oil rigs and beach volleyball courts. 

Indeed, the birds and animals have the place pretty much to themselves. Survey the beach at high tide and on some days you will see hundreds, sometimes thousands of shorebirds along the water’s edge. Flocks of Hudsonian godwits use their long bills to jackhammer through the sediment, readying for a non-stop flight to Brazil. Arctic terns flex their wings for a globe-trotting migration that will take some to the coast of Africa and south toward the Antarctic. Flocks of white-rumped sandpipers, their voices tinkling like wind chimes, will soon sweep toward the southernmost tip of South America. 

“I just love working out in the field,” Peck says as he strides over the rust-coloured kelp that piles up on the shore like autumn leaves. “Getting out to places like this is what really makes the job great.” 

Loping through sedges and flats on his long legs, Peck is a bit of a shorebird himself. The son of George Peck, an Oakville veterinarian and amateur ornithologist who volunteered as a research associate at the ROM, the younger Peck got hooked on birds as a kid. Family vacations centred on finding nests of yellow-bellied flycatchers in Quetico Provincial Park or spotting cactus wrens in Big Bend National Park in Texas. 

The two-year-old field camp at Longridge Point, 60 kilometres north of Moosonee, is a rough-and-ready continuation of those early adventures – exploration for big kids. “We didn’t know much about this area of northern Ontario before, but by being here, we can better learn how shorebirds are using the area,” says Peck. “We’re collecting information about the routes the birds are taking, and how long they’re staying in place.” 

Tracking birds along 11 kilometres of coast means a lot of walking – some days, 15 kilometres or more – on terrain that is rarely firm and dry. The sedges hide boggy holes deep enough to swamp a rubber boot. Nearshore tidal areas are a mix of clay-bottomed pools and spongy hummocks. Walking in them is like using a StairMaster in quicksand. At night, legs ache or cramp from a day spent wrenching boots out of the mud. Crew members become experts at treating blisters with a combination of Band-Aids, moleskin and duct tape. 

But they slog through it all, burdened by scopes and binoculars and backpacks containing extra clothes and rain gear. “A lot of people have no idea how physically hard you have to work to do this,” says McRae. “I mean, the endurance, the walking, the bugs – it’s hard. But it’s a really good hard. This is the best office in the world.” 

Like other camp members, McRae developed a near-obsessive interest in birds and nature at a tender age and, as he says, “almost by osmosis.” As a child, during visits to his grandmother’s cottage, he slept in a boathouse filled with glassy-eyed stuffed birds – specimens that a client of his lawyer grandfather collected around Peterborough early in the last century and handed over to cover a bill during the Depression. “The story is, he brought the case of birds home and my grandmother said, ‘Oh, Tom, why did you get that?’” McRae explains. “My grandfather said, ‘Well, I could have had the case of stuffed mammals.’” 

Longridge Point is a six-kilometre finger of boulders, pebbles and sand, crowned with a grove of pretty white spruce that seem to float above the aquamarine waters like a mirage. Tidal flats stretch for kilometres on either side of the point, punctuated by smaller spits the ROM crew nicknamed Bear Point (home to a shaggy black bear tagged Scruffles) and Beluga Point, so named because it’s a good spot to see the curving white backs of foraging whales. 

For shorebirds, the tide sets the table and establishes the menu. Even the knot’s scientific name, Calidris canutus, hints at the tide’s importance. The bird is named in tribute to King Canute, the 11th-century monarch best known for his attempt to forbid the tide’s advance. The Viking king claimed to be illustrating the limited power of even the mightiest mortal. 

If that was his intent, knots have taken the lesson to heart. When the tide flows in around Longridge, unfurling fronds of stranded kelp, linking tidal pools and pushing a white line of foam and feathers across the flats, the birds go with it. Equipped with a sort of wet-sand sonar, the knot creates waves of water pressure by probing the flats with its bill. The waves bounce off submerged clams and worms and register in the sensitive nerve endings of the bill, allowing the knot to home in on its prey. 

While most shorebirds look streamlined and elegant, a well-fed knot is akin to a small football with wings. During its layover on James Bay, it nearly doubles its weight, packing on fat that is crucial for surviving migration. The bird also undergoes physiological changes that seem fantastic to us land dwellers. Readying for the long flight, the bird’s digestive organs shrink (the knot does not eat while in the air) while its heart and flight muscles expand. When the knot arrives at its destination, it shunts energy the other way, bulking up its legs, gut and reproductive organs, and deflating its heart and wings. 

The result is a bird that can fly as high as 3,600 metres, cruise at 50 kilometres an hour or more, and cover hundreds, even thousands of kilometres non-stop. Scientists are able to track the bird because 10 percent of the world’s endangered rufa knots bear tiny plastic “flags” on their legs, colour-coded to denote the country where they were banded and bearing an individual two- or three-digit code. A handful also wear “geolocators,” tiny yellow knapsacks strapped to their upper right legs. Equipped with two-year batteries, the geolocators record sunset and sunrise times as the bird flies, allowing a glimpse into its daily movements. The results are astounding: one bird flew 5,100 kilometres, non-stop, in an eight-day marathon from Hudson Bay to the Caribbean. 

Before the use of the flag bands, one of the main ways to track shorebirds was to wait until the tide concentrated them in the inshore area, fire a net over them and look for banded birds. Now, the precision optics of spotting scopes make it possible – though not easy – for researchers to creep within 100 metres of the bird and read the bands. 

Trudging back from Bear Point, Peck and McRae spot about 130 knots waddling and drilling the sediment. Peck slips away on the right flank. McRae creeps forward with the exaggerated caution of a hunter, his olive-coloured boots making a sucking sound in the mud. Eighty metres from the flock, he splays the tripod, drops to his knees and hunches over the eyepiece. The codes on the tags are only half a centimetre tall, so to read them researchers need a good scope, decent lighting and luck. The three don’t always coincide. 

For McRae, so far, so good. Most of the knots are foraging for food, some shoving their heads completely beneath the water. Others are roosting, standing with one foot up, head tucked behind a wing and feathers fluffed in a position that usually hides the flag. McRae is motionless, checking each knot leg, straining to see colours, numbers and letters. Minutes go by. 

Then he yanks a yellow notebook out of his vest. Drawing a pencil from the duct-tape pocket plastered on the notebook’s cover, he scribbles a flag colour and code: Lime HEV. Knots banded in the United States wear lime-coloured flags, and this bird, it turns out, was first banded in Mispillion Harbor, Delaware, back in 2005. Since then, it has been sighted more than 40 times in Delaware and New Jersey. This is the first James Bay sighting. 

Next, McRae spots Orange AK, a bird banded in Río Grande, Argentina, in 2003, and sighted every year since then. A few minutes later, Lime MT5 turns, revealing a flag applied in Florida in 2007. The ROM crew sights bird MT5 another nine times over 13 days. (Sightings are tracked on the Shorebird Banding and Resighting Data Management website, http://report.bandedbirds.org.) 

Now on a roll, McRae hoists the tripod and creeps forward. Three metres. Then two. Then two more. A few knots watch; most snooze or dig for food. McRae kneels and focuses the scope. 

Down at the other end of the flock, a knot twitches, looks around and leaps into the air. Its neighbour follows suit. Then the next and the next, until the entire flock peels off like airborne dominoes. As the flock retreats, McRae rises and stands, hands on hips. He glances at Peck with a thin-lipped look of exasperation. Finally, the two shrug and pick up their tripods. 

“All you need is one to go, and they all follow,” McRae sighs. “Still, it’s a nice way to make a living.” 

“You’re not under the misconception you’re getting paid?” 

Peck shoots back. They slog across the hummocks, grinning and trading barbs. 

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John and Mary Theberge: Natural leaders

– As told to John Hassell

Until he retired in 2000, John Theberge was a professor with the Faculty of Environmental Studies at the University of Waterloo. John’s co-researcher and wife, Mary Theberge, is a wildlife illustrator and educator. The Theberges are Ontario’s leading experts on wolves and wolf conservation. Their most recent book, The Ptarmigan’s Dilemma, is a finalist for the Writers’ Trust Non-Fiction Prize.

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Winter 2010

Working together for conservation. By Caroline Schultz Speaking up for nature; citizen science in action; the monarch butterfly makes a royal rebound; Ontario lists its first endangered bumblebee. What may be the last, viable population of the pint-sized wildfowl can be found on Walpole Island.. By Tim Tiner Donor spotlight: honouring Graeme Whistance-Smith. Standing together to protect wildlife. By Ontario Nature

The glorious James Bay saltwater coastline is a birdwatcher’s paradise. But as the northern landscape hovers on the cusp of transformation, how much longer can this magical margin of the province withstand the dual threats of climate change and industry? By Ray Ford Why are birds that feed on insects disappearing? New findings point to answers that touch on a range of troubling environmental factors. By Douglas Hunter Intrepid conservation staff poke into the earth’s nooks and crannies in search of salamanders, frogs, turtles and other rarities. Welcome to the making of Ontario Nature’s Reptile and Amphibian Atlas. By Peter Christie Northern Connections, Ontario Nature’s new program, brings isolated communities together to create a unique environmental voice that speaks for the big boreal landscape. By Conor Mihell On the cover Join the team: If you’ve seen an eastern newt like the one on our cover, or any other reptiles and amphibians in Ontario, you can contribute to Ontario Nature’s atlas. Photograph by Robert McCaw

Northern bobwhite

The grasslands and savannahs of Walpole Island support what may be the last, viable, native population of this pint-sized wildfowl.

By Tim Tiner

Indigenous to Ontario’s nearly disappeared tallgrass prairie and savannah, the northern bobwhite highlights the plight of many imperilled grassland birds. The pint-sized wildfowl, which in Canada is found only in southwestern Ontario, once took to and thrived on farmland but has all but vanished with the changes to agriculture in recent decades. Today, the species just barely holds on at the extreme southwestern edge of the province and is in steep decline across its range in the eastern and central
United States.Unlike many species at risk, the bobwhite has been well studied because it is a popular game bird in the United States, especially in the south. The plump, chicken-like native quail stands about the height of a robin but weighs two or three times as much. The bobwhite forages, roosts and nests on the ground, and is beset by a long list of predatory raptors and mammals, though it’s capable of short, low bursts of flight. About 80 percent of bobwhites live less than a year. However, the species has a high reproductive rate, laying clutches of up to 16 white eggs, starting in May. From late summer to early spring, these birds form flocks, called coveys, usually of three to 20 individuals.

Bobwhites once inhabited the approximately 1,000 square kilometres of prairie that flourished in southwestern Ontario. Their habitat requirements are very specific. These birds require open, grassy fields or croplands for feeding, and make their nest in shallow ground depressions concealed by tall vegetation and arching canopies of grass and plant stems. Though pioneer farmland largely replaced native prairie and savannah, it proved a good substitute for them. The birds’ range expanded north to southern Muskoka and the Kingston area, and peaked in the mid-1800s.

“Bobwhites did pretty well on small, diverse farms for many years. The hay was cut later and it was not all just corn and soybeans,” says Patrick Hubert, a senior avian biologist with the province’s Ministry of Natural Resources (MNR). “They were able to use fallow fields, pasture and haygrounds, and hedgerows in the winter.” Fallow fields were ideal, notes Hubert, because fruitful annual weeds provided abundant seeds and excellent nesting and brooding habitat.

Over the past 40 years, however, the bobwhite, like many grassland birds, has been hit hard by the shift toward larger, less varied fields of crops, less pasture and the near disappearance of fallow lands and hedgerows. Farmers in the province now leave well under 1 percent of their fields to rest and rejuvenate naturally, instead usually applying nitrogen fertilizer or planting nitrogen-fixing soybeans.

Land devoted to pasture in Ontario fell by 65 percent between 1921 and 1986, and again by more than 40 percent over the following two decades. Herbicides and pesticides, meanwhile, reduced bobwhite food sources and poisoned the birds.

While bobwhite coveys require winter home ranges of five to 20 hectares, suitable habitat has become highly fragmented, exposing these birds to predators such as foxes, coyotes, raccoons, skunks and cats. As well, bobwhites’ diminished haunts often lack enough dense shrub thickets for winter cover. In many areas, the birds have been unable to recover from heavy losses caused by long periods of deep snow and cold or ice storms. Since the birds tend to move less than a kilometre in their lifetimes, many local extirpations have resulted.

Ontario had an estimated population of a little more than a thousand bobwhite coveys in the early 1970s – mainly in Lambton, Elgin and Middlesex counties – before their numbers were severely knocked back by three consecutive hard winters later that decade. Based on surveys in 1989 and 1990, MNR calculated that the population had fallen to only about 185 native birds in 16 coveys. Hunting, which usually involved released, pen-raised birds, largely stopped in southwestern Ontario by the early 1990s, and the species was designated as endangered nationally by the Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife in Canada in 1994. In 2007, Ontario’s Endangered Species Act ended hunting even of pen-raised birds, except on private game bird preserves away from remnant native populations.

Breeding Bird Survey records in the United States from 1965 to 1995 show the bobwhite has declined by 70 to 90 percent in four-fifths of the states in which it occurs and has disappeared completely from many areas. Habitat loss is thought to be the main cause. The grassland and savannah of Walpole Island, on the north shore of Lake St. Clair, are thought to have the only viable native bobwhite population left in Ontario, though some coveys may remain in nearby mainland areas. About 8 percent of the island’s 24,000 hectares is still considered prime bobwhite habitat. However, the last partial survey for the quail in Ontario, in 2006, found just a few calling on Walpole Island. Despite their camouflage colouring, the birds are fairly easy to count in spring when males, which sport striking white chins and eyebrows, whistle their distinctive namesake “bob-WHITE” calls to attract mates. According to the latest Atlas of the Breeding Birds of Ontario, a few bobwhite sightings have been reported as far east as the Niagara Peninsula and north to southern Grey County. But authorities think that quails turning up beyond the far southwest are probably escaped or released pen-raised birds. Such birds often come from southern stock that’s less suited to a northern climate and usually die out within a year. Worse, they may weaken the original population by interbreeding and passing on their less-hardy genes.

Kyle Breault, however, isn’t so sure that all bobwhites beyond the Walpole Island area are non-native birds and is frustrated that MNR is not surveying and doing genetic testing to find out. The program coordinator for Tallgrass Ontario, an umbrella organization supporting groups doing prairie restoration, Breault says that upland game bird hunting was never popular in Ontario, and very few captive bobwhites have been released in the past 30 years. “We don’t have enough information,” he asserts. “There hasn’t been any work done by MNR.”

In recent years, according to Breault, about 30 organizations – county stewardship councils, conservation authorities, municipalities and naturalist groups – have been creating or restoring an average of about 243 hectares of prairie and savannah annually on private and public land. He hopes these scattered projects can be coordinated to establish areas large enough to support bobwhite populations, which require about 1,000 hectares of fairly contiguous habitat to thrive. Even so, recovery would be very slow without the reintroduction of wild birds from other areas, something Breault and other prairie enthusiasts would like to see. While such reintroductions have taken place in parts of the United States in the past decade, says Breault, he believes that MNR is deeply divided over the issue. “I don’t know why. It worked with turkeys,” which, he notes, were reintroduced in Ontario in the 1980s.

“There is a lot of difference of opinion on what should be done,” agrees Ken Tuininga, senior species-at-risk biologist with the Canadian Wildlife Service, which is taking the lead in drafting a bobwhite recovery strategy, in cooperation with MNR, Walpole Island First Nation and others. Much work on the strategy and the issue of reintroduction still needs to be done, he says. “There are so many unanswered questions right now. What are the most significant threats? How much habitat is there left that is appropriate? What is our population and how many are native?”

Until researchers have those answers, the bobwhite remains in danger of following the greater prairie chicken into extirpation from Ontario. “My concern is whether we can restore enough habitat in time to re-establish a viable population,” says Hubert. “The future is uncertain at this point.”

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Tim Tiner is the author of several nature guidebooks and a long-time contributor to ON Nature.

The power of partnerships

By Caroline Schultz

Ontario Nature has been in the biodiversity business for almost 80 years. We have had some huge conservation successes through the decades, resulting in permanent protection and lasting change. These successes are not only ours to celebrate, but are often triumphs we share with others – always with our members and donors, and frequently with fellow conservation and environmental organizations. The key ingredients for a big conservation win almost always include effective partnerships.

A current case in point is Ontario Nature’s latest and one of our most ambitious nature reserve acquisition projects. The Malcolm Bluff Shores project to acquire more than 400 hectares of Niagara Escarpment and Georgian Bay shoreline in Bruce County (“Natural wonders,” page 8 in the Autumn 2010 issue of ON Nature) is not only “our” project. It is a joint initiative with the Bruce Trail Conservancy, with which we have had a long-standing relationship ever since the Bruce Trail Association was formed in the 1960s. Add to this our national sister organization, Nature Canada, which has contributed more than $300,000 from a trust for land acquisition toward the land purchase – a gift that is also symbolic of the unique relationship between the two organizations – and we have the near perfect storm to drive this project to a successful conclusion. This project is possible only because of the partnerships.

Another powerful partnership is our Northern Connections program. This initiative is designed to link environmental organizations and individuals with environmental and conservation concerns across northern Ontario. In his article “Frontier conservation” (page 40), Conor Mihell describes this collaborative venture in which Ontario Nature is coordinating with several partner organizations – Environment North, the Sault Naturalists of Ontario and Michigan, the Anishnabek of Gitchi Gami and Northern Ontario Sustainable Communities Partnership – to strengthen the northern conservation voice through building capacity and sharing knowledge, by organizing events and workshops and also by offering online lectures on topics such as nuclear energy and forest tenure reform.

Partnerships can be powerful, but they aren’t always easy. Trickier ones involve unlikely bedfellows such as industry. Even more unlikely are our ventures with governments that frequently have difficulty with the concept of a partner also being a critic. While some initiatives, such as the Ontario Breeding Bird Atlas and the Ontario Reptile and Amphibian Atlas, lend themselves to highly fruitful partnerships with government, we don’t get a free pass when we take on the role of watchdog and critic of government policy. A big part of our job is to ensure that our governments develop and implement effective environmental protection policy and legislation. (For example, our biodiversity charter for Ontario on page 46 is part of our current campaign to stop the loss of biodiversity in this province through more effective policies and legislation.) A wise former president of Ontario Nature told me that our message to government must be this: “We will work with you when we can, but we will oppose you when we must.” I think he’s right.