Moving Day
By Victoria Foote
On October 5, two weeks before our move from Don Mills to downtown Toronto, the staff at Ontario Nature smelled something odd. Although one staff person swore it reminded her of chicken soup, to most of us it smelt much more like burning rubber. We went through room after room, sniffing and looking at each other in bewilderment. The smell eventually faded without our ever discovering its source.
Life works in mysterious ways and creaky Locke House, along with its Ontario Nature inhabitants, was no exception. The quirky building that we worked in acquired its own personality over the years and staff became accustomed to its unpredictable ways.
The first week: “I remember my first week here,” recalled one former staffer, “was very strange. On my third day I discovered that Locke House had been struck by lightning – which actually happened frequently. When I drove into work the next day, there was an enormous hole in the driveway. You couldn’t get in.” The hole – a canyon really – had also come as a rude surprise to the newspaper delivery man. The water main underneath the drive had burst in the wee hours of the morning, and the pavement collapsed. Driving at a good clip in the dark, the poor fellow drove right into the canyon, cracking his nose on the steering wheel.
The great flood: Several months into the job, I arrived one day to find my boss, mop in hand, frantically wiping up a large puddle on the first floor hallway. Water poured from above via the light fixture. The hot water pipe had burst in the upstairs bathroom and water gushed and pooled above as staff charged about lifting papers, books, computers and carpets up off the floor. The bathroom door was so warped, it didn’t close properly for weeks.
Food: Barbecues and corn roasts were a constant feature outside Locke House during the warm season – pizza and, more recently, Thai food when it was too cold for a picnic. And it’s no secret that simply any excuse sufficed to buy a cake. In fact, so devoted is Ontario Nature staff to the consumption of cake, that even the memory of someone who once worked with us has been known to justify its purchase.
Animals: Work came to a halt – even job interviews stopped abruptly – when deer glided out of the ravine to graze outside the office. Staff would stand, motionless, at the windows until the graceful creatures wandered back into the woods. Other wildlife encounters were more immediate. We were startled to discover that a skunk lived in the shed. Staff once helped a baby raccoon clamber out of the dumpster by putting a plank in it so that the animal could walk up and out. A former staff person found a milksnake curled up on her desk one morning (she screamed). Another former staffer once erected a hand written sign by the side of the long, winding driveway that said, “Please don’t drive over the snails.” After puzzling over a number of consecutive technical breakdowns, we discovered that mice had been disconnecting the computers one by one by chewing through the wires.
Dianne: Without exception, all staff ended up at some point hanging out in the front office over which Dianne presided until this past summer (see “Dianne (Dee Dee) Slyford: 1957 – 2006, page 46). Dianne was full of good cheer and humour and gossip. Her long, highly informative, pages over the intercom were the stuff of legend and, like so many other aspects of Locke House, could never be replicated.
In the fall, I brought my sons to work for one last look around. On the way home, Jacob, my elder son s aid, “Mommy, when you move, will the same people be at the new office?”
Our new address is: 366 Adelaide Street West, Suite 201, Toronto ON, M5V 1R9. The telephone number, fax and email addresses are the same as before. And so is the staff.
Message Board
Fine dining
You are to be congratulated on your outstanding Autumn 2006 issue, which focuses on the important relationship between food production and ecology. As a retired social science teacher and as an organic farmer with 37 years of experience, I know how critical it is for people of all ages to develop informed opinions and to engage in collective efforts that will ensure the vibrancy of local and organic food production. For a number of years, Ecological Farmers of Ontario has been a leading advocate.
For the past four years, I have been operating a two-acre organic market garden on a 26-acre property in Shelter Valley, Ontario. The gardens share a space with over 3,000 trees and a wide variety of other flora and fauna. I grow over 200 varieties of vegetables, herbs and fruit, from Asian vegetables (for example, daikon radish) to Italian zucchini to sacred basil.
My primary market is made up of local families who want fresh, nutritious, locally grown organic food. However, with the exceptions of a health shop, a spa and a small restaurant, no local food stores or restaurants have been interested in purchasing produce from me.
In Cobourg, which is the nearest town to Shelter Valley, only one supermarket regularly sells organic garlic (in jars, from China), as well as a very limited variety of fresh produce. With the exception of non-organic potatoes, to my knowledge, no supermarket sells any of the local vegetables and herbs that are available throughout the summer and autumn. Yet, at a recent local harvest festival, many people expressed delight at their discovery of varieties of vegetables that they could not find elsewhere.
As Linda Pim articulated in last issue’s “Last Word,” a better provincial attitude towards organic foods is essential for better eating, and the Ontario government has a primary responsibility to lead the way. It is way past the time when governments can justify supporting economic activities that place profits ahead of our environment and our health.
All over Ontario, small farmers face a wide variety of challenges related to growing organic produce. In a previous issue of ON Nature, Andrea Smith highlighted the danger to all life in Shelter Valley if a proposed aggregate pit, adjacent to a closed toxic dumpsite, is allowed to operate. (The matter is before the OMB.) The biological diversity essential to healthy food production will be threatened severely if the plan goes forward.
Rather than catering to private and often transnational interests, our governments must put effective programs in place – programs that will help to educate the public and that will encourage young people to seek employment in sustainable agriculture. Only then will food security and nutritional health be assured for our children and grandchildren. What a joy it is – and will be – to watch young children engage with safe, healthy and fresh vegetables.
Bob Garthson, Valley Pines Organics, Grafton
Adaptive behaviour
The print and broadcast coverage of this spring’s garlic mustard story was disheartening, to say the least.
Dawn Bazely, a York University biologist and an expert on invasive plants, has been keeping a close eye on garlic mustard for more than a decade, watching as it marches inland from the tip of Point Pelee.
At the point of its farthest advance, where it has just arrived, garlic mustard overwhelms the competition, just as Sharon Oosthoek reports [“Deadwood forest,” Autumn 2006, page 9]. But where it first came ashore, at its oldest sites, native plants seem to have adapted and garlic mustard is just one component in plant communities that include thriving hardwood seedlings; the native recovery seems to advance with the age of the other sites.
Professor Bazely also noticed that disturbed forest sites seem especially vulnerable to the invader. Guelph’s and Harvard’s test plots of soil moved there from elsewhere certainly qualify as disturbed and were too new for the recovery Professor Bazely has observed in natural settings.
Researchers who are too quick to declare that the sky is falling turn us into skeptics when they turn out to be wrong. Remember purple loosestrife?
Neil Campbell, Minden
One for the list
By Geoff Nixon
Last spring, one of Ontario’s rarest bird species was spotted at Canadian Forces Base Petawawa. The seldom-seen yellow and black Kirtland’s warbler is protected under the Species at Risk Act and is designated as endangered.
The numbers guy
By Bruce Gillespie
Allan Elgar can pinpoint the moment he became an environmental activist. One spring evening six years ago, planners for the Town of Oakville held a public meeting concerning a proposed development of 3,076 hectares of farmland and woodlots located in the town’s north end. Elgar, a long-time business and finance manager at Bell Canada, had not planned on going to the meeting; it was his wife, Linda, who harboured misgivings about the plans to initiate residential and commercial construction. Unable to attend the meeting, Linda asked her husband to go in her place and take notes.
A bridge too high
By Geoff Nixon
Just outside of Verona Ontario, is a small bridge connecting two lakes west of Frontenac Provincial Park. The mitchell creek bridge, connecting birch and desert lakes, was built in 1930, and for 76 years the bridge has remained in its original form, allowing only small, unpowered watercraft to pass beneath it.
Mining exploration put on hold
By Christine Beevis
An Ontario Supreme Court decision may have set an important precedent concerning the empowerment of First Nations communities across the province. In the last issue of ON Nature, we reported that Platinex, one of the companies the Kitchenuhmaykoosib Inninuwug (KI) First Nation blocked from mining exploration in the Big Trout Lake area, had sued the KI community for $10 billion and requested a ban on protests expressing the community’s position. KI responded by suing Platinex for $10 billion and requesting a moratorium on exploration within its traditional territory, claiming that Ontario’s Mining Act was unconstitutional for not taking First Nations communities’ concerns into account.
Prairie home champion
By Wendy Francis
“No road through, over or under Ojibway.” these words from transportation minister Donna Cansfield are the first hopeful sign that an Ontario natural treasure may be saved. This spring, Ontario nature learned of a proposal to construct a truck route through part of the Ojibway prairie complex, a 332-hectare site in the city of windsor that contains 45 percent of the remaining natural areas in Essex County.
A (very big) book
By D’Arcy Jenish
Why are Carolinian species such as the red-bellied woodpecker and the northern mockingbird moving north of their traditional breeding grounds? Why are grassland species such as the henslow’s sparrow and the loggerhead shrike still in decline despite ongoing recovery efforts? During fieldwork for the atlas of the breeding birds of Ontario 2001-2005, scheduled to be published in September 2007, researchers have made startling discoveries that answer these and other questions. The new atlas will update and improve on the first atlas, which appeared in 1987 and was based on field work conducted between 1981 and 1985. “we’re very excited,” says project coordinator Mike Cadman, a songbird biologist with the Canadian Wildlife Service (CWS). “this book has been a long time in the making.”
Budget woes
By Julee Boan
Vacationers may have noticed some changes to their favourite park this summer. While conservation groups were applauding the new Parks Act, the Ministry of Natural Resources (MNR) was slashing Ontario Parks’ budget, leaving the department struggling to make up a 2.4 million-dollar funding shortfall. As a result, an estimated 226 full-time summer jobs and more than 1,100 seasonal and student jobs were eliminated – 19 percent of the usual summer workforce – leaving park managers strapped to provide park services.
Fantastic flights
Shannon Wilmot
This fall, Ontarians had the rare pleasure of witnessing the largest monarch butterfly migration in 10 years.
Monarchs migrate to Canada from Mexico each spring and return to the sunny south each fall. During the autumn migration, monarchs gather in large groups (numbering from a few hundred to several thousand) along the north shores of Lakes Ontario and Erie before crossing these large bodies of water on their way southward. Between the end of August and early October, enormous groups of the butterflies were spotted at Thickson’s Woods, Whitby (several thousand), on the Leslie Street Spit in Toronto (about 5,000) and in locations along the Niagara peninsula.
The ghost cat
Experts have long believed that 0ntario’s eastern cougar is locally extinct. But mounting evidence now suggests otherwise. Has the cat come back? Or did it never leave?
By Douglas Hunter
It was early autumn, 1968, and a teenaged Dave Anderson was booting along a gravel road in a light green Dodge half-ton pickup with his brother Richard. They were in the northwestern corner of the province, north of Kenora, on the way to a family trapline, when they saw something they supposedly must not have seen and would be foolhardy to admit to seeing.
“It looked like a white-tailed deer lying at the side of the road,” Dave Anderson recalls. “Then it got up, and I saw the tail.” No creature on this continent has an appendage quite like the luxuriant, ropy tail that distinguishes Puma concolor couguar from any other wild cat, never mind from a deer. Wildlife biologists have long maintained that cougars do not exist in eastern North America. The Anderson brothers had just joined a fairly exclusive club of eyewitnesses who have given anecdotal reports of the cats – a club generally thought of as a haven for the nearsighted, the naive and the delusional.
When Dave Anderson informed the local office of the Ministry of Natural Resources (MNR) of his encounter, he received, as he puts it, a “ha-ha” response. “There was a time that if you reported a cougar, it was like you reported a flying saucer,” he says. It was like saying Bigfoot stole your truck.
Ontario trappers like the Andersons, and others, had been reporting cougar sightings since at least the 1930s, and sightings had been reported sporadically in the province’s wilds west of Thunder Bay since the 1950s. Three years after the Andersons’ encounter, the eastern cougar – an animal whose very existence anywhere in Ontario had long been doubted – was formally proclaimed in 1971 (with almost endearing bureaucratic optimism) to be “endangered” in the province and protected under the Endangered Species Act.
The Act’s seeming acceptance that the cougar still existed somehow, somewhere in the province, heartened people who were sure they had seen one or were prepared to believe those who said they had. Dave Anderson remains a true believer, and MNR staff in the northwest corner of the province are no longer laughing at reports of cougar sightings. Cougar believers now have an inside man. Dave Anderson began working for MNR in 1975 and today is the district enforcement supervisor, based at Red Lake, 90 kilometres north of Kenora. Moreover, his family played a central role in at last securing proof that cougars still live in Ontario.
In March 1998, Ralph Anderson, another trapper brother of Dave’s, discovered enticing evidence at a line he operated northeast of Silver Lake, about 15 kilometres northeast of Kenora. Ralph had discovered fresh tracks in the snow, accompanied by “bop” marks made by an animal’s tail, which could not have been made by a lynx, the animal whose tracks are most readily confused with those of a cougar.
Ralph excitedly phoned his sister, Lil, a technician at MNR, who also runs a rehabilitation centre for raptors and owls in Kenora with her husband. She came out a few days later with Rob Moorley, a lands and waters technical specialist with MNR’s Kenora district. There were lynx tracks on the way to the site, and the imprints, with their fuzzy, “powder-puff ” edges made by tufts of fur around the paw, were easy to distinguish from the crisp, well-preserved prints at Ralph Anderson’s find. They also discovered fresh tracks, which appeared to be only hours old. They followed the imprints a distance, watching them dip into a creek and the edge of a lake, something a lynx would never do. Then they reached the evidentiary motherlode: a fresh – still soft, unfrozen – deposit of scat.
Lil Anderson scooped the poop into a baggie and sent a sample to Tom Packer, a forensic biologist at Alberta Fish and Wildlife in Edmonton. Photos of the tracks were forwarded to seven cat experts who happened to be in Canmore, Alberta, for the biennial meeting of the Western Forest Carnivore Committee.
Packer employed thin layer chromatography, a fairly simple and inexpensive chemical analysis, to find signature bile salts that can be used to distinguish between species. On November 9, Lil Anderson finally received her answer from Packer: “The bile salts contained in the scat are characteristic of cougar … and inconsistent with lynx.” Furthermore, Packer found that the track analysis, which provoked much debate at Canmore, also came down in favour of cougar. It was official. There were cougars in Ontario.
This strikingly handsome and powerful animal – the male cougar can exceed 100 kilos (more than 200 pounds) – is the most successful land predator of the western hemisphere, as well as its most successful mammal species. No other species has flourished in North, South and Central America. The historical range of the cougar spanned many ecosystems, from Canada’s boreal forests to the desert buttes of the southwestern United States to the pampas of Chile and Patagonia. A solitary animal, the cougar hunts mainly mid-size prey such as deer, antelope and sheep. Recent tracking studies in the western United States employing GPS transmitters have revealed that individual animals can wander hundreds of kilometres at a time in search of game.
But the cougar has paid dearly for its success, having been aggressively hunted wherever agriculture spread. By the 1930s, the cougar was believed eradicated from eastern North America; no one shot or trapped them anymore.
Over time, the big cat has accumulated many local names: cougar, puma, panther, painted lion (“painter”), mountain lion, catamount and the evocative “ghost cat,” to name a few. In the late 18th century, two different species names were given to the animals within that broad geographic population: Felis concolor and Puma concolor. (Concolor means “of a uniform colour,” even though the cougar is not.) By the early 20th century, the animal had accumulated 32 subspecies classifications in North, Central and South America – including the eastern cougar, the historic cat in Ontario, which, by then, wildlife biologists considered extinct. Not until the 1990s did wildlife biologists agree to remove the animal from the genus Felis, which contains “small” cats ranging from the domestic housecat to the ocelot, and settle on Puma concolor.
Scientists are still trying to agree on what a “cougar” even is. In 1999, Melanie Culver, now an assistant professor at the University of Arizona’s College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, caused a stir with her doctoral dissertation at the University of Maryland, which was expanded in 2000 into a landmark paper with three co-authors. Culver’s DNA analysis of 315 specimen samples indicated the existence of only one cougar subspecies for all of North America. Culver argued that the subspecies name for the eastern cougar, Puma concolor couguar, should apply to the entire population north of Nicaragua. She maintains that there is no such thing as a cougar, eastern or otherwise. The animal is a puma, as it is most commonly known in South America.
Whatever you wish to call the animal, evidence is growing that it is back in eastern North America – a remarkable change, given that when Culver did her DNA analysis, the only samples she could gather for the “eastern cougar” were from museum collections in the United States. Even today, Lil Anderson’s scat sample is the only confirmed physical evidence of a cougar in Ontario. In the United States, debate about the status of the cougar has become deeply politicized. It has embroiled state wildlife officials, nonprofit conservancies and amateur cryptozoologists in, at times, a nasty war of words.
In the eastern United States, people undeniably have been photographing cougars, finding them dead at the side of railway tracks (or hitting them with their cars) or shooting them. The elusive beast might never have left this side of the continent, having survived in remote areas in relic populations. Surviving populations in the west could also be moving east. But many of these examples have either proven to be, or are said by wildlife professionals to be, “exotic” in origin. That is to say, the animals are of captive breeding stock: escaped pets whose bloodlines (and evidentiary DNA) originate in South America.
Captive-bred cougars are at the heart of much of the controversy over the animal’s presence in eastern North America. Incontrovertible photographic evidence – and still none exists in Ontario – cannot prove that an animal is truly wild.
North America is positively teeming with captive “big” cats (lions and tigers) and “lesser” cats (cougars, panthers and the like) held in private collections and unregulated roadside zoos. Time and again, a South American genetic signature has indicated that a cougar is not of native stock. In May 1992, for example, a male cougar shot at Lake Abitibi in northern Quebec, 470 kilometres northwest of Ottawa, seemed to prove that a relic population had survived deep in the boreal forest of the Canadian Shield. But when a curator at the Canadian Museum of Nature in Ottawa learned of Culver’s groundbreaking DNA analysis and sent her a sliver of the preserved flesh of the Abitibi cougar in 2000, Chilean genetic markers turned up.
While no DNA analysis was conducted on Lil Anderson’s scat find at Silver Lake, the cougars encountered in northwestern Ontario, at least, are probably genuine wild stock. For one thing, researchers are aware of wild populations in neighbouring Manitoba and Minnesota.
“Around Red Lake, we get six to 10 sightings per year,” says Dave Anderson. “It seems as if, since the deer population started to move north in 1987, there’s been an increase in the number of sightings. Some of our sightings are iffy, and you don’t know if a person saw a lynx, but some people definitely saw a cougar, plain and simple. One lady, a local justice of the peace, walked right up to one before it ran off. When we get a sighting, we usually have four or five reports in a general area, and then they move on. There’s no doubt in my mind that they’re cougars, and that they’re wild cougars. We’re at the same latitude as where they’re spotting them in Manitoba.”
In the vicinity of Kenora and Red Lake, these cougars may represent a relic population or be animals expanding their territory from Manitoba or Minnesota. Whether the animals believed to have attacked people and horses in more populous southern Ontario are cougars as well, however, is an entirely different matter. Horse breeder Reta Regelink is convinced that a cougar killed her yearling buckskin filly in a pasture near Orillia in August 2005. The attack occurred about 25 kilometres northeast of Creemore, where the last known cougar in Ontario was supposed to have been shot dead in 1884.
The fight for the forest
One of the world’s last, great, intact forests, the northern boreal contains rare species, ancient trees and billions of songbirds. But it is threatened by logging, mining, hydro projects and other industry interests. Can we save this precious wilderness?
By Tim Tiner
Larger than the Amazon rain forest, the great North American boreal forest (more than 5 million square kilometres) stretches from Newfoundland to Alaska. It represents one-quarter of the earth’s surviving original forest, 750,000 square kilometres of which are within Ontario. Although the boreal ecosystem is austere, it is nevertheless a haven for billions of migratory birds and for the continent’s largest populations of winter-adapted mammals: wolves, caribou, wolverines, lynx and moose.
Like the Amazon rain forest, the boreal is being rapidly altered on a vast scale. Roughly two hectares of Canada’s boreal forest are clearcut every minute. In Ontario, logging clears an area up to three and a half times the size of Toronto every year; some 62,000 kilometres of logging roads have fragmented the southern half of the province’s boreal region. With forestry operations nearing the current cutline, roughly along the 51st parallel north of Hearst in the east to Red Lake in the west, the province is considering extending logging into the largest block of intact boreal forest – 370,000 square kilometres of the province – remaining in Canada.
Approximately 4,400 mining claims have been staked across Ontario’s northern boreal forests. More than 1,000 square kilometres in the Moose River basin in northeastern Ontario have been staked for possible coal bed methane wells. Our energy needs have spurred proposals for new generating dams on rivers in the far north and a hydro corridor spanning the region to bring electricity from northern Manitoba.
Ontario Nature and other groups campaigning to protect the boreal forest are demanding that Premier Dalton McGuinty fulfill a pre-election pledge he made in March 2003 to “institute meaningful, broad-scale land-use planning for Ontario’s northern boreal forest before any new major development” is permitted. The Boreal Forest Conservation Framework, drawn up by a coalition of national conservation organizations, First Nations communities and several resource companies, calls for approximately half of the northern boreal forest, both nationally and provincially, to be set aside in an interconnected network of parks, wildlife refuges and other protected areas. The remaining area would be managed under strict guidelines for sustainable development. At present, only 5 percent of the northern boreal forest is protected in Ontario.
Says Wendy Francis, Ontario Nature’s director of conservation and science, “A lot of economic interests … have their eyes on Ontario’s remaining intact boreal forest. Economic development is not a bad thing, but it needs to happen in a way that protects global values.”
The northern hemisphere’s boreal zone contains 80 percent of the planet’s unfrozen fresh water and sequesters 136 billion tonnes of carbon in its 8,000- to 10,000-year-old accumulations of peat, thus slowing climate change. The intense burst of plant and, especially, insect life during the brief growing season in Canada’s boreal region draws one to three billion migrant landbirds from as far away as South America every year, including three-quarters of the country’s warblers and two-thirds of its sparrows and thrushes. Every spring, one in three of all landbirds in the United States is a migrant headed for the boreal forest. Tens of millions of waterfowl, waders and shorebirds fly to the innumerable wetlands, rivers and lakes of Canada’s boreal region to nest.
Frequent wildfires and outbreaks of defoliating insects renew huge swathes of the landscape. The result is a remarkably varied patchwork of habitats. Dense carpets of new growth mix with older stands of black spruce and fir, laced with mazes of grey-green lichen-covered clearings. There are pockets of aspen and birch, jack pine ridges, expansive open mats of bright green and yellow muskeg, wavy-lined sting bogs, beaver ponds, meadows, marshes and creeks, and rivers and lakes of every size and description.
Large-scale mechanized logging and fire suppression dramatically shift the natural pattern of the boreal mosaic. The University of Toronto’s faculty of forestry conducted surveys in the Cochrane–Kapuskasing clay belt area and found that the tendency of clearcutting to convert black spruce forests into second-growth mixed or poplar woods usually eliminates less common conifer forest gems such as moccasin flower, rattlesnake plantain and pinedrops. Little of the immense variety of mosses, lichens and mushrooms that vibrantly colour a northern spruce forest floor is evident in woods in which deciduous trees are dominant. “Once a system shifted to a different state, it stayed like that,” says U. of T. forest vegetation ecologist Terry Carleton, noting that the original spruce forest has rarely returned since mechanized clearcutting began in the area in 1922.
Logging can destroy an estimated 45,000 migratory birds’ nests in a single year in Ontario, and new studies are also finding marked differences between avian communities located in regenerating clearcuts, and those located in young post-fire forests. “You certainly find more snag-nesting species [in a burn],” says Ryan Zimmerling, a research associate with Bird Studies Canada. “Timber operations can’t leave as many snags as a wildfire would.”
In three summers of field work in northern Ontario, Zimmerling found lots of grassland and open habitat birds, such as alder flycatchers, ruby-crowned kinglets, and chipping and Lincoln’s sparrows, in young post-harvest forests, but the number of species declined as the stands aged. No similar decline occurred in aging post-fire forests, which had more snag- and shrub-loving birds, including winter wrens, brown creepers, red-breasted nuthatches and white-throated sparrows.
Zimmerling, who is now conducting northern waterbird research, says clearcutting – which accounts for 90 percent of all logging in Ontario – commonly causes increased runoff, erosion and raised water tables. Bogs scattered with small ponds and mossy hammocks – habitat frequented by greater yellowlegs, Connecticut warblers, yellow-bellied flycatchers and other wetland nesters – are lost to cattail marshes and alder swamps.
Logging, mining and other resource extraction could even have long-term consequences for the boreal forest’s invertebrate composition. U. of T. forestry department staff in northeastern Ontario discovered that some 30 species of hoverflies, whose larvae feed in downed wood, were absent or significantly diminished at logged sites. The faculty’s Jay Malcolm notes that their absence has a potential impact on their predators and parasites and on up the food chain.
“If you look at where we’ve already had development, south of the limit of logging, it’s terribly fragmented and heavily roaded, and the impacts of that are seen in what’s happened to the range of the endangered woodland caribou and the wolverine, both of which have been pushed further and further north,” says Francis. “We have an obligation and the ability to do something different in Ontario.”
Listed here are just 10 of the at-risk species that depend on an intact boreal forest ecosystem.
Troubled waters
Why has the scaup population – a once common type of diving duck – plummeted over the past two decades? Alarming new research indicates that the waterfowl are poisoned as they feed along the lower Great Lakes
By Megan Ogilvie
The small, twin-engine aircraft banks left, making a long, slow turn. Framed by the window, the Lake Erie shoreline comes into view to reveal a collage of colour – cobalt blue, taupe and beer bottle green – below. It’s a sunny day in early autumn; flecks of red and yellow and orange have started to appear in the forests and fields and a nip is in the air. Scott Petrie, research director of The Long Point Waterfowl and Wetlands
Research Fund (LPWWRF), is looking out of the window, watching for great flocks of waterfowl. From the rumbling aircraft Petrie estimates the numbers of all sorts of waterfowl, from scoters to buffleheads, long-tailed ducks to teal. But two species of duck hold special interest: greater and lesser scaup, whose population numbers have been dropping for nearly half a century.
Greater and lesser scaup are closely related diving ducks, and the two lookalike species are often grouped together and commonly referred to as “scaup.” Males of both species are black and white and grey and have striking yellow eyes. The drabber females are a dark, mottled brown. Greater scaup, as their name suggests, are larger than lesser scaup and have a broader, rounder head. Lesser scaup make up about 85 percent of the continental scaup population and breed exclusively in North America, while their slightly larger relative is also found across Eurasia. On this continent, scaup primarily breed on the prairies and in the boreal forests of Canada and Alaska, and winter in the southern United States and Mexico. Due to their vast range, scaup have several migration routes. Thousands of the birds travel through the Mississippi valley, others along the Atlantic coast and many through the Great Lakes region. Each year, during spring and fall migrations, tens of thousands of scaup stop to rest and feed for several weeks on the lower Great Lakes.
There are between 3.4 and 3.5 million scaup in North America, according to recent estimates. This is the lowest number ever recorded for scaup since the Waterfowl Breeding Population and Habitat Survey, an annual evaluation of the spring population size of certain North American duck species, began in 1955. Ornithologists first noticed a decline in the continental scaup population in the 1970s. Over the next two decades, scaup numbers continued to drop – precipitously. But experts weren’t worried. Other waterfowl populations were falling, primarily due to drought conditions on the prairies, which are prime breeding grounds for many of these species. But as water conditions on the prairies improved, so too did waterfowl populations. Except for scaup. “Their population has continued to decline every year, even at a time when most other waterfowl species are returning,” says Petrie. “The scaup population is not coming back.”
SCAUP POPULATIONS have dropped from about 6.3 million in the mid 1980s to about 3.5 million now. Waterfowl scientists across North America are trying to determine what caused the decline in the population and what is impeding its recovery. Christine Custer, a wildlife biologist with the U.S. Department of the Interior who studied scaup in the late 1990s, worries that a plummeting scaup population is indicative of other problems in an ecosystem. “Scaup could be the canary in the coal mine,” she says. “Something is going on somewhere. If their population is having problems, it could mean bigger ramifications for other animal and plant species.”
Waterfowl scientists are investigating three main hypotheses for falling scaup populations. One theory is that human-induced climate change is altering the ecosystem at breeding grounds for scaup in the north. Researchers are also studying whether food limitations – snails are one of the birds’ primary food sources – in the upper midwest prairies are affecting scaup survival. Here in Ontario, Petrie and his colleague Shannon Badzinski, also with LPWWRF, which is run out of Bird Studies Canada in Port Rowan, are investigating how environmental contaminants, acquired when the birds stop to rest and feed on the Great Lakes, affect scaup reproduction or survival.
According to Petrie, scaup are in danger of being poisoned by a new food source – zebra mussels. The non-native species of mollusc was accidentally introduced to the Great Lakes in the mid-1980s and has since multiplied, spreading to all the Great Lakes, choking out other lake life and dramatically changing aquatic ecosystems. As zebra mussels began to cover the rocky bottoms of the Great Lakes, more and more scaup started to spend longer periods of time on their staging g rounds on Lake Ontario and Lake Erie. Scaup numbers at Long Point on Lake Erie jumped from an average of about 7,500 birds during the 1970s and 1980s to nearly 50,000 in the 1990s. Quickly adapting to the new, abundant food, scaup switched to a diet dominated by zebra mussels, eating less of their traditional foods, such as native gastropods and aquatic plants. LPWWRF studies confirmed that scaup now eat large quantities of zebra mussels on the lower Great Lakes in the spring. But this novel food was no blessing, says Petrie. Zebra mussels, which feed by filtering phytoplankton from the water column, accumulate contaminants from the water much faster than do native mollusc species, which feed on algae growing on rocks. The mussels, in turn, pass the contaminants on to their predators, including scaup.
One such contaminant is selenium, a semi-metallic element birds require in trace amounts but that is toxic at high doses. Selenium occurs naturally in rocks and soils. In the Great Lakes region, however, soils are deficient in the mineral and it is believed that the element gets into the Great Lakes as an industry byproduct, primarily from the burning of fossil fuels. Preliminary research has shown that selenium is the only contaminant present in high enough amounts to damage the health of the scaup that spend time on the Great Lakes.
Christine and Thomas Custer of the U.S. Geological Survey published a paper in 2000 revealing that selenium concentrations in scaup collected in Lakes Erie, Michigan and St. Clair in the early 1990s were high enough to be considered toxic. “This paper really got this theory going,” says Petrie. “Prior to their research, nobody knew that selenium was a potential problem for scaup.” Petrie decided to expand the Custers’ work, whose study looked at scaup in heavily industrialized areas, a worst-case scenario for waterfowl. Was selenium contamination in zebra mussels widespread? Were scaup acquiring potentially harmful burdens of selenium from zebra mussels in other, less industrialized, areas of the Great Lakes?
WATERFOWL SCIENTISTS have recently noticed a slight dip in other diving duck populations. North American populations of diving species, such as canvasbacks, buffleheads and common goldeneyes, are not tumbling but are lower than expected. Scaup could be a sentinel species, their sharp population decline illuminating an ominous trend for other wildlife species. Rod Brook, a waterfowl population specialist with the Ministry of Natural Resources in Peterborough, says scaup could be an important indicator species. Waterfowl, he says, are one of the best surveyed birds in North America: “There’s a concern for other boreal species that we don’t monitor as closely as scaup.”
LPWWRF studies have shown that at least 77 percent of lesser scaup and 94 percent of greater scaup in the lower Great Lakes left spring staging areas with potentially unhealthy burdens of selenium. The research is clear: scaup are acquiring selenium after they arrive at the lower Great Lakes in the spring and begin eating hundreds of zebra mussels. Once they have eaten their fill, the birds fly to their breeding grounds. Female lesser scaup may pass the selenium to their eggs by a process called depuration. Waterfowl scientists, including Petrie, predict that selenium burdens in eggs might be lowering the number of chicks hatched in the northern breeding grounds.
That is why LPWWRF researchers are satellite tracking female lesser scaup as they leave Long Point Bay on Lake Erie and Lake Ontario’s Hamilton Harbour. Petrie and Badzinski hope to determine the amount of time lesser scaup stay at spring and fall staging areas on the lower Great Lakes and to identify subsequent staging areas, as well as breeding grounds and wintering areas the birds use after leaving the Great Lakes. Knowing the amount of time female lesser scaup take to fly to their breeding grounds and how long they take to lay eggs will allow researchers to estimate how much selenium these birds are passing on to their unborn chicks. Selenium has a 19-day half-life, which means that one half of a set amount of the element takes 19 days to disintegrate. Petrie says this is a key piece of information. As soon as scaup stop eating contaminated zebra mussels, the birds start to depurate selenium, he explains. “So, if a female starts to lay eggs 19 days after she leaves the Great Lakes, only half as much selenium can be deposited into the eggs.”
The LPWWRF Scaup Tracker program was launched in spring 2005 when satellite tracking devices, used to show birds’ exact migration routes, were implanted in five female lesser scaup. After spending several weeks in May feeding around Long Point, in Lake Erie, the five scaup flew north and west to their breeding areas. By June, the females were scattered from the south coast of Hudson Bay to the Yukon.
In spring 2006, LPWWRF researchers trapped 20 scaup, 15 females and five males from Long Point and Hamilton Harbour. The birds were taken to the Avian Energetics Laboratory at Bird Studies Canada, where a satellite transmitter was implanted into each bird. This is a costly affair: A single transmitter costs $3,000 and the entire process costs $5,000 per bird. For the next two years, Petrie and Badzinski plan to track the scaups’ movements at their breeding grounds, at their over wintering sites and during migration.
Until last year, Petrie’s research focused on lesser scaup, but the population of greater scaup may also be declining. Lindsay Ware, a master’s student at the University of Western Ontario, has begun to investigate whether unhealthy burdens of contaminants affect the overall health of greater scaup. She has made Lake Ontario’s Hamilton Harbour her research spot.
Hamilton Harbour, a 2,000-hectare embayment separated from Lake Ontario by a long, sloping sandbar, is bounded by highways, industry and urban waterfronts. Steel plants loom over the southern shore, rock and rubble form unnatural beaches and piers poke like long tongues into the murky bay. Scaup, like many waterfowl, use Hamilton Harbour as a staging ground during both their spring and fall migrations. But some greater scaup are now opting to winter in the harbour, where warmer lake waters do not freeze over and an abundance of zebra mussels provides a year-round smorgasbord for the birds. “The bottom of boats, the sides of piers, the pillars on docks, they’re all covered in zebra mussels,” says Ware, describing parts of Hamilton Harbour. “Even rocks at the bottom of the lake are completely caked with them.”
Since scaup are difficult to raise in a laboratory environment, Petrie and Ware rely on lab studies conducted on mallard ducks to show how selenium affects scaup. Research has revealed that selenium levels above 10 micrograms per gram are harmful to reproduction in mallards, and selenium levels above 33 micrograms per gram are harmful to the ducks’ general health. All of the greater scaup Ware caught and analyzed in 2006 had selenium levels between 10 and 50 micrograms per gram – high enough to cause both reproductive and overall health problems.
This year, LPWWRF researchers will implant satellite tracking devices in 10 greater scaup to find out this species’ migration patterns. Each of these experiments brings Petrie and his researchers one step closer to understanding why scaup populations continue to drop. If waterfowl scientists could definitively show that elevated selenium levels are affecting scaup health and reproduction, this evidence may be enough to initiate a clean-up of the lower Great Lakes of selenium. “We’re not going to get rid of zebra mussels,” Petrie laughs. “But we could reduce the amount of selenium getting into the Great Lakes by regulating industry in the region.” Doing that could help scaup, as well as a number of yet unknown species, bounce back to traditional population numbers. “This theory won’t be the one silver bullet to solve scaup population decline,” says Petrie. But, he suggests, it may prove to be a final piece in a yet unsolved puzzle.
Megan Ogilvie is a health reporter at the Toronto Star and an avid birder.
City birds
Some adapt surprisingly well – like the peregrine falcons nesting in Toronto’s skyscrapers. But for many birds, the concrete jungle can be a deathtrap
by Ted Cheskey
Many years ago, I received a phone call from a teacher seeking advice on how to extricate an owl from his fireplace. Upon entering the house, my heart sank when I saw a sooty and emaciated eastern screech owl, barely able to stand, behind the screened fireplace opening. The teacher said it had been there for several days and that he was afraid of the “thing.” I opened the fireplace, reached in and gently picked the owl up, feeling no flesh on its sternum. It died at my home a few hours later – a victim of ignorance. A simple mesh chimney cap would have saved this bird’s life; removing the bird while it was still vigorous would have too.
Life in the city is not easy for most birds. On Christmas Day 1992, a friend spotted a great horned owl in a Waterloo park entangled in kite string 20 metres in the air between two large trees. Luckily a fire station was nearby. I explained to the firemen that I needed to use the fire truck’s extension ladder to rescue an owl. The truck arrived quickly, and one of the firemen climbed into the hold at the end of the ladder while another extended the hydraulic ladder level with the bird. The burly fireman looked down at me, unsure of what to do. “Give me a burning house with three kids in it and I’ll go in and get ’em all,” he proclaimed, “but would you mind coming up here yourself and freeing it.” I obliged him and carefully cut the kite line, wound tightly around the wing-pit of this poor dangling bird. The owl was exhausted and did not struggle. I took it home, where it spent Christmas in a box. The next day I took the owl to the veterinary school at the University of Guelph. The bird recovered, but its wing had to be amputated.
Kite string and chimneys are just two sources of danger for birds that migrate through, or live in, urban areas. Office towers, windows, power lines and other hazards unique to the built environment are particularly catastrophic. Four out of five bird species in Ontario migrate into and out of the province every fall and spring. During the migration seasons, millions of birds fly into cities for the first time. Most songbirds actually migrate at night, and artificial lights confuse them, causing them to fly into windows. On overcast or foggy nights the death toll is staggering. The Fatal Light Awareness Program (FLAP) has collected more than 140 different bird species in Toronto alone, almost all killed when they collided with office tower windows. In fact, FLAP estimates that the office towers in Toronto’s financial district kill at least 10,000 migrating birds every year and that between 100 million and one billion birds die in North America annually due to collisions with windows. FLAP’s work influenced Toronto City Council to pass a bylaw in 2006 to reduce structural and lighting hazards. With the city’s support, FLAP also launched a Lights Out Toronto campaign, which encourages people to turn off office lights, use task lighting or blinds when working at night and take similar measures at home. (Visit the FLAP website at www. flap.org/ new/nestegg.htm for other ways to help prevent bird deaths in the city).
However, some species, and the odd individual bird, seem to adapt better to urban living than others. Mark Peck, keeper of the Ontario Nest Record Scheme for the Royal Ontario Museum, says that “Canada geese, usually a ground-nesting species, regularly use train trestles and rooftops for their nest sites. They will also use apartment balconies. One pair, nesting in a large planter on the 17th floor of an apartment in Oakville, successfully raised young with a little help from the owners of the apartment. When the eggs hatched the young were brought down to the ground floor via the elevator.” Peck adds that ground nesters such as killdeers, ring-billed and herring gulls, and common nighthawks often nest on city rooftops to take advantage of the shelter from predators.
Ways to save birds in the city
CHIMNEYS
Put a wire mesh cap over the top of the chimney exhaust. Hardware stores sell a range of mesh products, but don’t buy a fine mesh cap. Creosote can build up on it, resulting in a chimney or roof fire.
WINDOWS
Large picture windows are bird killers mainly because birds fly at their reflection. Drapes or blinds help as does suspending objects that move, such as outdoor mobiles, or sticking on hawk silhouettes – but just a single silhouette is ineffective. Sometimes birds are just stunned by such collisions. A stunned bird lying in the snow will lose heat fast and die. Putting a stunned bird in a box in a dark, quiet, warm place for an hour or so may revive it.
LIGHTS
Turn lights off at night. Encourage owners or managers of office towers and tall buildings to flick the switch as well.
CATS
Keep your cat indoors! Although there are no records of how many birds cats kill in Ontario, a Wisconsin study revealed that free-roaming cats kill between 7.8 and 218 million birds a year.
Glenn Coady, an avid birder and ongoing contributor to the Ontario Breeding Bird Atlas, recalls a day in July 2005 when two recently fledged northern saw-whet owls were found in the most unlikely place: a half-block west of Yonge and College streets in downtown Toronto. Coady discovered that this record is not without precedent. A recently fledged saw-whet owl was found on July 23, 1994, at the corner of Bloor Street and Avenue Road.
The endangered peregrine falcon, a species all but wiped out in Ontario 30 years ago, is now breeding in Toronto (where 11 nest sites are active), Hamilton, London, Ottawa and many other cities. Peregrines nest on cliffs in the wild and have adapted to the built “cliff faces” of skyscrapers.
Langis Sirois, another contributor to the Ontario Breeding Bird Atlas, first learned of ravens nesting near the southwest entrance of the Corel Centre (now Scotia Bank Place) in Kanata near Ottawa in March 2005. Four young fledged from that nest, despite the traffic of hockey fans and concert goers. In 2006, Sirois noticed more nest building almost directly above the north entrance. But even when Sirois was watching the birds through his telescope, he felt the ravens were also watching him. “I had the feeling that if you go on with your own business, not paying attention to the nest and birds, the ravens feel secure; but if you look at the nest, they feel danger.” After all, ravens have many reasons not to trust us.
A frequent contributor to ON Nature, Ted Cheskey is manager of the Canadian Nature Network for Nature Canada.
Field Trip: Weasels
by Dan Schneider and Peter Pautler
Sought after for their luxurious furs and entrenched in popular myth as killers and gluttons, weasels (of the family Mustelidae) are solitary creatures well adapted to catching small mammals, birds and fish.
Of the 11 species of weasels widespread across temperate regions of North America, nine live in Ontario: American marten, fisher, least weasel, short-tailed weasel (or ermine), long-tailed weasel, mink, American badger, wolverine and river otter. Small to moderate-sized animals, weasels have elongated, low-slung torsos and short legs. For most species, the tail is long relative to their body length.
Mustelids possess fewer, but more specialized, teeth than do other carnivores. Extended incisors, with needle-like points, allow mustelids to dispatch prey quickly with a fatal bite to the back of the neck near the base of the skull. The wolverine, which often feeds on carcasses other predators have abandoned, uses the carnassial teeth – modified molars located in the upper and lower jaws – to cut through frozen flesh and crush bones to get at the nutritious marrow within.
The American marten and fisher pursue squirrels and birds through the tree canopy. The American badger uses its formidable front claws to rapidly dig out any prey, such as mice, voles, ground hogs and cottontail rabbits that mistakenly seek the safety of an underground burrow.
Another remarkable adaptation of animals in the weasel family is their reproductive cycle. All mustelids, except for the least weasel, experience delayed implantation. After copulation and fertilization, which usually take place shortly after a female gives birth in spring, the rapidly growing embryo, known as a blastocyst at this stage, ceases development and remains “suspended” in the uterus. In mid to late winter, the blastocyst implants in the uterine wall and the embryo resumes normal development. The birth of kits follows in 25 to 65 days, depending on the species. Delayed implantation provides several advantages. It ensures the birth of offspring at a time of year when environmental conditions are favourable and food supplies are adequate; mustelid mothers are able to meet the energy requirements of nursing and weaning offspring without the extra demands of growing fetuses; and young mustelid kits have sufficient time to grow and become expert hunters before the arrival of the next winter.
Because fewer than 200 American badgers remain in Ontario, the Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife in Canada and the Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources (MNR) have designated the animal as endangered. The two biggest threats to the survival of American badgers are the ongoing loss of grassland habitat and their propensity for being struck by cars.
The wolverine is believed extirpated from the easternmost part of its historical range in Quebec and Labrador. MNR has designated the wolverine as threatened. Development, logging and roads threaten its long-term existence in Ontario. The remaining mustelid species are considered secure in Ontario.
Long-tailed weasel (mustela frenata)
Description: brown above, buff-coloured below and no white on feet in summer; white in winter, always with black tip at end of long tail nearly half length of body; head and body 20–26 cm, tail 8–15 cm, weight 90–340 g
Ontario range: throughout southern Ontario to north of lake superior
Habitat: open brushy or grassy areas near water; small woodlots, croplands, meadows, suburban residential areas
Predators: fox, coyote, wolf, bobcat, lynx, hawks and owls
Prey: mainly rodents; some birds, snakes and insects; occasionally fruits and berries
Who knew? The black tail tip of this species and the short-tailed weasel is thought to divert predators’ attention away from the animal’s head and thus allow it to escape.
American marten (martes americana)
Description: yellowish brown on body, dark brown on tail and legs, pale buff-coloured patch on breast and throat; bushy tail; head and body 35–43 cm, tail 18–23 cm, weight 700–1,200 g
Ontario range: northward from edge of Canadian shield and Manitoulin Island
Habitat: mature coniferous and mixed forest, cedar swamps
Predators: fisher, bobcat, wolf, lynx, coyote, great horned owl, trappers
Prey: mainly rodents and other small mammals; also birds, amphibians, reptiles, fish; occasionally insects and fruit
Who knew? The most arboreal of Ontario’s weasels, the marten has semi-retractable claws that are extended to aid in tree climbing and in pursuing squirrels and finding nests in the trees.
Short-tailed weasel or ermine (mustela erminea)
Description: brown with white underparts and feet in summer, white in winter; tail, always black tipped, about one-quarter of body length; head and body 13–23 cm, tail 5–10 cm, weight 30–170 g (males much larger than females)
Ontario range: throughout the province
Habitat: from tundra to coniferous and mixed forest; borders of open areas
Predators: marten, wolverine, fisher, badger, cats, hawks, owls, coyote and foxes
Prey: mostly small rodents; also some fish, birds, eggs, insects, carrion, reptiles and amphibians
Who knew? White and luxuriant ermine fur was a popular lining for aristocrats’ clothing during the middle ages.
Fisher (martes pennanti)
Description: very dark brown, white-tipped hairs give a frosted appearance; bushy tail; blunter face than marten; head and body 50–60 cm, tail 33–38 cm, weight 1.4–5.4 kg
Ontario range: northward from Manitoulin island, Bruce Peninsula, Kingston area
Habitat: large mixed forests, especially near water
Predators: mainly trappers, but possibly also wolf
Prey: any animal it can overpower – small to medium-sized mammals including porcupine (see sidebar), birds, carrion, fish, snakes, amphibians and insects; some plant material including berries, seeds and fern tips
Who knew? Reintroduction of fishers to original range areas on Manitoulin Island and the Bruce Peninsula and in the Ottawa valley has extended the species’ range into southern Ontario.
Mink (mustela vison)
Description: dark brown thick fur, white chin patch; partially webbed feet; head and body 30–43 cm, tail 13–23 cm, weight 600–1,300 g
Ontario range: throughout the province
Habitat: along streams, rivers and lakes
Predators: trappers, great horned owl, bobcat, fox, coyote, wolf, black bear, dogs
Prey: fish, frogs, crayfish, small mammals, birds and worms, as well as some plants
Who knew? Another species of mink, the sea mink (mustela macrodon), used to live on Canada’s Atlantic coast but was driven to extinction by trapping. The last sea mink was trapped in New Brunswick on Campobello Island in 1894.
American badger (taxidea taxus)
Description: yellowish grey fur; white stripe on forehead, white cheeks with black spot in front of each ear; black feet with extremely long front claws; head and body 46–56 cm, tail 10–15 cm, weight 6–11 kg
Ontario range: two small populations, one along the north shore of Lake Erie in the extreme south, the other in the rainy river area west of lake superior
Habitat: open grasslands and farmland
Predators: humans, coyote, golden eagles
Prey: mainly groundhogs and cottontail rabbits in Ontario; also ground squirrels and other small mammals, birds and eggs, reptiles, invertebrates and carrion
Who knew? Like other weasels, badgers pursue their prey into burrows but differ from other mustelids by digging out their prey. They literally eat their victim out of house and home, and enlarge the burrow for their own use.
River otter (lontra canadensis)
Description: upperparts dark brown, underparts paler and silvery; sleek appearance due to short oily fur; non-bushy tail thick at base; broad, flattened head with small ears; short, powerful legs with fully webbed toes; head and body 66–76 cm, tail 30–43 cm, weight 4.5–11 kg
Ontario range: northward from Bruce peninsula, southern Georgian Bay and north shore of lake Ontario
Habitat: along streams, rivers and lakes; also marine estuaries
Predators: bobcat, lynx, coyote, wolf, trappers
Prey: mostly fish; also mammals, birds, amphibians and aquatic invertebrates
Who knew? The otter fishes well beneath thick ice, often using unfrozen beaver dam outlets to reach the frigid water. Otters are famous for travelling over snow by alternating belly slides with a few powerful, loping bounds.
Wolverine (gulo gulo)
Description: dark brown, pale patch on cheeks and forehead, broad buffy stripes from shoulders join at rump; oversize paws allow buoyancy in snow; resembles a small bear except for large bushy tail; head and body 74–81 cm, tail 18–23 cm, weight 16–27 kg
Ontario range: extreme northwestern Ontario near Manitoba border; a few records north of lake superior
Habitat: tundra and boreal forest
Predators: humans, wolf packs, large bears
Prey: primarily a scavenger; preys on any animal it can overpower, mostly small game but occasionally larger mammals such as deer or caribou; also eats eggs of groundnesting birds, roots and berries
Who knew? The wolverine’s reputation for raiding traplines and food caches of trappers gave the species its scientific name, which means “glutton.” the wolverine is the largest member of the weasel family in Ontario.
Least Weasel (Mustela nivalis)
The least weasel is the smallest Canadian true carnivore. So elusive is the little critter, ON Nature was unable to find a photograph of it. And so small, the wee predator must elevate its metabolism 400 percent higher than normal to stay warm in winter, and eat up to half of its body weight each day.
Description: Summer coat brown on back and white beneath, winter coat white; sometimes a few black hairs but no black tip at the end of short tail; head and body 14 – 16 cm, tail 25 – 35 mm, weight 38 – 63 g (only twice the weight of a deer mouse)
Ontario range: Northward from edge of Canadian Shield
Habitat: Forest and meadows
Predators: Long-tailed weasel, hawks, owls, cats and foxes
Prey: Mostly small rodents; some insects and amphibians
References
Comprehensive text: Mammals of North America: Temperate and Arctic Regions, Adrian Forsyth, Fire fly Books (1999).
Field Guide: Mammals of Ontario, Tamara Eder, Lone Pine Publishing (2002).
Website: Hinterland Who’s Who, www. www.ca/ index_ e.asp
Dan Schneider and Peter Pautler are resource interpreters with the Grand River Conservation Authority.
Dianne (Dee Dee) Slyford: 1957 – 2006
Dianne slyford – whom many here simply called Dee – passed away on July 28, 2006.To staff at Ontario nature, as well as countless members, Dianne was an integral part of the organization, and she is greatly missed.
Dianne worked as the receptionist for Ontario nature for some 20 years. During that time, she came to represent the organization to many of its members, a number of whom would call simply to chat with her. Friendly, personable and outgoing, Dianne had an easy laugh. Numerous prospective employees sat in her office over the years, and Dianne talked with them and put them at ease.
Two of Dianne’s passions, besides people, were plants and birds. Years ago, a couple of birdfeeders were placed not far from the front door of her office, and Dianne brought in a pair of binoculars, which she kept on a hook by her desk. Whenever an unusual bird alighted on one of the feeders, Dianne would immediately page staff over the intercom and describe in some detail the size and colouring of the winged visitor.
Office plants survived and thrived thanks entirely to Dianne’s green thumb. African violets were routinely nursed back to health when Dianne returned from a summer vacation. Although she repeatedly admonished staff to water the plants during her absences, we would always forget, knowing, perhaps, that Dianne would fix everything on her return.
When the postage machine was uncooperative or the fax machine made a
Strange, grinding noise or a large, inexplicable brownish puddle seeped out from beneath the coffee maker, inevitably Dianne came to the rescue. She remembered the names of our children, partners and spouses. And, with warmth and fondness, we remember Dianne.
Dianne leaves behind her husband, terry, and her two daughters, Lisa and Melanie.
Spotlight: the Thunder Bay Field Naturalists
Six enthusiastic nature lovers founded the Thunder Bay Field Naturalists in 1933.Today, the club’s 150 members play a leading role in fostering education and conservation in the northwestern region of Ontario. In particular, the group emphasizes getting local youth interested in nature and involved in environmental issues through its junior naturalist club.
As part of its ongoing outreach efforts, the Thunder Bay Field Naturalists have created a comprehensive, easily navigated website full of excellent photographs of local wildlife and landscapes, with links to information pages about the photographed animal, plant or area.
The club hosts monthly meetings, as well as numerous field trips and events throughout the year. Bird watching outings, searches for amphibians and the popular woodland caribou hunt (with cameras) are open to members and non-members alike.
The club’s long-term commitment to making a difference in the community is evidenced in its many projects. It has produced a vascular plant checklist and a bird checklist for the Thunder Bay district, and participates in fieldwork for the Ontario Breeding Bird Atlas and the Rare Breeding Bird Atlas projects. Club members are also involved in the Blue Bird Recovery Project, Project Peregrine, the Thunder Cape Bird Observatory and the purchase of a nature reserve at the mouth of the Nipigon River. Nature Northwest, the newsletter of the Thunder Bay Field Naturalists, has been in circulation for more than 50 years, and the club has been holding a Christmas Bird Count for 61 years.
Warm , welcoming and eager to inform, the Thunder Bay Field Naturalists continues a 73-year tradition of commitment to “the study of natural history; the wise use of natural resources; the preservation of natural areas; and teaching the public to understand and protect nature.” Visit the organization’s website at www.tbfn.net.
Small is beautiful
Ontario’s new building code is all about energy efficiency, but what happened to smart communities?
by Lloyd Alter
For nearly 4,000 years, builders of houses have had building codes, a minimum standard that a government uses to protect the health and safety of its citizens. In all that time, most builders may have considered it a maximum standard as well – not doing any more or building any better than required.
Those of us who build in Ontario vacillate between loving and loathing the Ontario Building Code (OBC). We love it because it tells us what to do, down to the number of nails needed to hold a wall together. It is a detailed manual for building a house that you can be fairly certain will not fall down on your client’s head. We loathe it when we want to try something different. Officials who examine plans and inspect buildings ensure that what you build is in the code and reject it if it is not. Make rooms smaller to save energy? Sorry, minimum room sizes. A design that promotes natural ventilation? Sorry, every unit must have two means of exit from a corridor, and any other way of building is illegal. The code and those who interpret it can be a significant impediment to innovation and conservation.
Now the Ontario government is issuing a new building code that contains some significant changes. A new section, titled “Resource Conservation,” has been added and provides some improvements in energy efficiency. Proposed changes will increase insulation levels and mandate that better windows be installed, along with more efficient furnaces. The new standards are almost on par with the efficiency standards that Natural Resources Canada and the Canadian Home Builders Association developed – in 1981! In other words, the OBC will mandate some standards that have been recommended for the past 25 years. This is an important first step, but it is not enough. There is a lot more to resource conservation than energy efficiency, and there is more to saving energy than mandating levels of insulation.
For instance, the OBC has increased the amount of insulation required in a wall but does not address the real reason that houses today use more energy: they are bigger. The area of the average 1950s house was 983 square feet; by 1970 the average house was 1,500 square feet; last year it was 2,350. Less energy is consumed in smaller homes than in larger ones, but the code applies the same standard across the board with respect to the amount of insulation required in a home. Let’s have standards that vary according to the size of the house to make smaller houses cheaper (the more you put into a house, the more it costs), and larger houses more efficient.
Moreover, most suburban houses have big windows that look great but usually have small openings for ventilation, yards without trees and walls made of thin materials that have no thermal mass. Let’s have a building code that demands cross-ventilation, ways of maximizing sunlight and shade, and trees to shade the house in the summer.
Building a house, however, is not an isolated event. It happens within a framework of land development and urban planning. Increasing the efficiency of a house by even 20 percent doesn’t do much in the larger scheme of things if you are constructing 5,000-square-foot residences an hour’s commute from work and a 20-minute drive from the corner store. The design of the community, the frontage of the lots, schools and a decent transit system within walking distance – these are the factors that really influence energy use. Let’s have a building code that sets a minimum density for development to reduce the amount of land lost and fuel used for transportation.
Finally, our houses are built of cheap and possibly dangerous materials. Let’s have a building code that insists on materials that do not damage our health and that gets rid of those that contain formaldehyde and vinyl, or have finishes laden with volatile organic compounds.
By adding a section on resource conservation, the OBC has been turned into an instrument for policy and direction. Let’s build on that. Let’s make the building code a planning document that encourages tighter, more efficient designs, walkable communities and smaller, not bigger, dwellings. Let’s ban three-car garages and incandescent lighting in new houses. The building code can be a guide for what we want to build in an Ontario where we conserve all of our resources, not just energy.
Lloyd Alter is an architect interested in small, modern, sustainable prefabs. He writes for TreeHugger (www.treehugger.com), a web magazine.
Winter 2006
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The Problem with Landfills
Tuesday, December 14, 2010
By Conor Mihell
That the majority of Ontarians don’t have a clue where their garbage ends up after its left at the curb has as much to do with society’s general lack of environmental consciousness as it does the province’s lacklustre waste management regulations. Almost six million tonnes of Ontario waste ends up in 32 major landfills and four million tonnes is trucked to the United States. While policymakers bicker over ways to reduce our production of waste and costly dependence on stateside landfills, the Environmental Commissioner of Ontario, Gord Miller, is most concerned with the thousands of small, out-of-date dumps that receive a relatively small percentage of waste but impose significant environmental consequences.
The way of the dodo
Wednesday, December 8, 2010
By Allan Britnell
It was fitting that, late in 2010—a 12-month period that the United Nations had dubbed the International Year of Biodiversity—dignitaries gathered in Nagoya, Japan for the 10th meeting of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD). Unveiled at the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, the CBD’s stated goal was to reduce the global rate of species extinctions. Since then, the CBD has been ratified by almost all of the countries in the world.
