It’s been a long, drawn-out, complicated mess for the people of Three Mile Lake,” said Susan Pryke, mayor of the Township of Muskoka Lakes, in early December 2005. Toxic algae had bloomed in the lake in September, and everyone hoped it would disappear in a few weeks. But the bloom only began to die off in late November. “It’s almost been like a poltergeist, moving from one end of the lake to the other,” she added. “To think of it lasting all the way into December is really quite staggering.”

The bloom was an unhappy first for the Muskoka Lakes district and for the Simcoe-Muskoka District Health Unit.

Only a few species of blue-green algae – actually a form of bacteria – produce a neurotoxin that makes even treated water unsafe to drink and can kill pets that lap it up. Algae blooms have occurred in Three Mile Lake before, but the colour of this one, says Pryke,was different. When a local resident reported the bloom in September, the Ontario Ministry of the Environment (MOE) tested it to confirm the presence of the toxic form of algae, and the health unit issued a public health warning on September 23. After MOE collected water samples on November 14 and 30 and found them to be free of toxin, the advisory was finally lifted on December 22.

The persistent bloom was more than an aesthetic annoyance for the lake’s more than 500 property owners.Without a safe source of potable water, some owners were forced out of their homes into rental accommodations. But it has also been something of a black eye for central Ontario’s Muskoka Lakes. The region has been experiencing a development boom in resorts, golf courses and increasingly urbanized, year-round waterfront properties. All contribute to stresses on local ecosystems.

“A combination of conditions has to be there for an algae bloom,” says Bernie Mayer, safe water manager for the health unit. “You need shallow,warm water along with nutrient loading. This past summer, being so hot, the conditions were right to cause a bloom.”The mayor agrees but adds, “We can’t discount the other factors, that phosphorus is getting into the lake.” Phosphorus, as well as nitrogen, is pumped into vulnerable water bodies like Three Mile Lake through septic systems, agricultural runoff and fertilizers.

The bloom spurred the creation of a lake association to tackle the nutrient issue, and Pryke says that the township will be encouraging property owners to restore natural vegetation on shorelines. Also on the township’s “to do” list are following up on site plans and making sure that people are retaining trees as promised and that zoning bylaws are being honoured. In addition, the township’s entire septic reinspection program is being focused on this single lake this year. “We can turn this lake around,” the mayor vows.

In 2010, the Wikwemikong First Nation (Band 175) of eastern Manitoulin Island concluded a multi-year audit of plant and animal species at risk, with financial assistance from Environment Canada’s Habitat Stewardship Program and the provincial Ministry of Natural Resources’ Species at Risk Stewardship Fund. As a key component of Wikwemikong’s land-use planning, the species-at-risk audit of Wikwemikong lands – at the unceded reserve 26 on eastern Manitoulin and the unceded reserve 3 at nearby Point Grondine – is helping to identify areas suitable for resource extraction, urban and rural development, and recreational use, and to protect other areas for environmental and cultural reasons. “We’ve identified 13 federally listed species, with potential for an additional three, as well as four provincially listed species,” says Wikwemikong’s land-use planner John Manitowabi of the survey, which coordinator Theodore Flamand led. Already, the discovery of common nighthawk nesting sites could affect plans for a wind farm in the southern area of reserve 26.

The audit may also prove to be instrumental in settling – in Wikwemikong’s favour – a land claim that has been in negotiation with the federal government since 1997. The Wikwemikong’s current reserves are unceded because the band refused to sign the 1862 treaty that granted indigenous holdings on the rest of the island to the federal government. The Wikwemikong have laid additional claim to at least 41 islands, ranging from Heywood Island in the North Channel to coastal islands of eastern Georgian Bay as far south as Twelve Mile Bay, that are federal Crown land today.

The Wikwemikong surveyed species at risk on the islands subject to the land claim. Manitowabi is optimistic that the claim will be settled in the band’s favour as early as this spring, and says the attention paid to the status of species at risk shows that the Wikwemikong have systematically evaluated the claimed lands. “We’ve already identified areas of islands that need protection.” The Wikwemikong species-at-risk audit thus could help preserve wild spaces and species in Georgian Bay and the North Channel, far beyond the present holdings of reserves 26 and 3.

“We’re taking the lead in First Nations in Canada” in conducting species-at-risk research, he adds. “It’s a new subject for First Nations.” He notes that the band is pursuing research on Hill’s thistle, a plant species at risk associated with Manitoulin Island’s alvar habitat, in nine test plots containing up to 40 plants. “We’re fortunate that we have a large enough area for research. We’re currently managing 220 kilometres of shoreline, and the land claim would double that amount.”

In all, he says, the current reserve lands, informally known as “Wiky,” total some 4,000 hectares, and the land claim would increase that to 6,000 hectares. The Wikwemikong have applied for a new round of funding to allow them to monitor the species at risk that their survey efforts have identified.

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.

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.”

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.” 

BUY THIS ISSUE! 

 

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. 

As the Deepwater Horizon oil rig disaster in the Gulf of Mexico continued to unfold throughout the summer, Canadian scientists began considering the consequences of this unprecedented environmental disaster on the bird species that depend on the gulf region as a major winter stopover and migratory pathway.

Joe Nocera, a research scientist with Ontario’s Ministry of Natural Resources and an adjunct professor in the environmental and life sciences graduate program at Trent University, watched the impact of the spill on avian wildlife with concern. Nocera’s specialty is species at risk, and he has paid particular attention in his fieldwork to the white pelican, officially listed as threatened in Ontario. Like their cousins the brown pelicans, white pelicans are in the front ranks of migratory waterbirds under dire threat from the oil leak. The list of waterbirds – in addition to songbirds, on which the potential impacts are more difficult to gauge – in harm’s way is extensive.

“I would say it’s the fish-eating birds that will experience the earliest impact,” Nocera says. “[the oil spill] will affect any waterbird species that are in the gulf as more than a migratory path. The ones that stop over and eat fish are directly in contact with the oil.” Terns, cormorants and sea ducks are the Ontario birds most likely to suffer. Sea ducks alone include a range of species, among them mergansers, eiders, buffleheads and goldeneyes. As for white pelicans, he says, “we know very little about their wintering habits. It’s fair to say some of them do winter over there.”

Birds that use the watershed or wetlands of the gulf coast region also could suffer, depending how much damage the oil leak ultimately inflicts, directly and indirectly, on those areas. “It could range to even freshwater waterfowl using coastal areas temporarily. A lot of freshwater herons would be the most noticeably affected. Not all of them winter down that far, but some do.”

The scale of the potential impact of the oil spill is unknown, but seeing how many birds return in the spring of 2011 will provide insight into its effect on a number of species. The impact, however, could play out for years. “We learned some lessons from Exxon Valdez,” Nocera says, referring to the oil tanker spill 20 years ago in Alaska’s Prince William Sound. “But this is far worse. Hydrocarbon poisoning could shut down the reproductive ability of birds. We just don’t know at this point.”

“And if the oil enters the Gulf Stream and reaches Cape Cod,” Nocera adds, “the number of affected species will grow.”

By Douglas Hunter

Illustration by Marco Cibola

On March 4, the Obama administration marshaled enough bipartisan support to table legislation in Congress for the five-year, $650-million-a-year Great Lakes Restoration Initiative (GLRI). The U.S. government is determined to deal with pollution hot spots identified by the International Joint Commission, as well as combat invasive species, restore and preserve natural habitats, and make public beaches safe for swimming. 

One might have hoped for a parallel commitment on our side of the border. After all, Canada shares in the ownership and stewardship of four of the five Great Lakes, as well as Lake St. Clair and the St. Lawrence River. Our country is a partner in the International Joint Commission and a co-signatory of the Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement, under which the pernicious Areas of Concern requiring remediation are identified. Yet there was nothing comparable in dollars or enthusiasm when the Harper Conservatives introduced a new federal budget on the very same day that the U.S. legislation was tabled. 

Comparing Canadian initiatives with the Obama megaplan is difficult, as the U.S. umbrella program encompasses many areas. Nevertheless, our federal response constitutes less than one-eightieth of the annual funding under the Obama initiative. More Areas of Concern are on the U.S. side of the Great Lakes than on the Canadian side, but not 80 times as many; currently 26 such areas are in the United States, nine are in Canada and another five are shared. 

Our federal budget was a letdown for anyone expecting a meaningful response to the multifold challenges – and opportunities – the Great Lakes present, despite the assurance that “cleaning up the Great Lakes is a key objective of our government’s Action Plan for Clean Water.” The budget plan says Environment Canada will receive “$8 million per year ongoing to continue to implement its action plan to protect the Great Lakes.” That’s it: no specific details are included about how Environment Canada will spend this “ongoing” $8 million, for how many years the funding will continue or how this figure relates to previously announced funds for cleanup efforts that have not yet occurred. 

The federal Conservatives evidently understand that they can afford to neglect the environment without annoying the bulk of the electorate. Many Canadian voters probably think the Great Lakes should be the sole concern of Ontario, as it is the only province that borders on them. But above and beyond the economic importance of the Great Lakes to the entire country, pollution problems and environmental degradation are a federal responsibility, and Ottawa must show leadership and commitment in dealing with them. 

The failure of the federal budget to recognize how restoring and protecting the Great Lakes might be part of a job creation effort is noteworthy and perhaps understandable: we have come to equate economic stimulus with pouring concrete and laying asphalt, the sorts of activities in which people do something for a paycheque, creating physical infrastructure everyone can see. The economic benefits of environmental spending come in less obvious, but nevertheless quantifiable ways – everything from increased tourism dollars to improved property values to major savings in health care. 

A prime example of our failure to address Great Lakes rehabilitation – and benefit financially from doing so – is the unfinished restoration of one of the worst Areas of Concern: Hamilton Harbour. A 2007 study by York University’s Institute for Research and Innovation in Sustainability concluded that remediating the harbour would produce $914 million in economic benefits for local taxpayers, businesses and municipal governments. Ottawa cited this long-term payoff as a justification for the partnership struck that year between the federal, provincial and local governments (and local agencies) to split equally the estimated $90-million cost of capping Randle Reef, a notorious submerged coal-tar dump in the harbour. Only Nova Scotia’s Sydney tar ponds had a greater concentration of harmful polynuclear aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) in this country before Public Works Canada finally tackled that mess. 

Yet despite the Hamilton Harbour cleanup having been on the agenda since 1987, the Randle Reef project is currently stalled; cost estimates are escalating and the local partners are unable to provide their agreed share. If Ottawa really wants to show it cares about Great Lakes water quality, Environment Canada should do what it takes to rehabilitate this chronic, dangerously polluted, Area of Concern – and reap the economic benefits that were promised three years ago. It is time for everyone – voters and politicians alike – to recalibrate our commitment to restoring the Great Lakes and not watch our neighbours south of the border get on with the job. 

Since their introduction in the 1960s to North America through fish farms and research facilities, Asian carp have become an environmental disaster. Having escaped Arkansas aquaculture farms, the invasive fish have established self-sustaining populations in the Mississippi River basin. Their northward migration reached a crisis point in late 2009, when Asian carp DNA was discovered in the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal, which links the Mississippi system with the Great Lakes.

Four different species of Asian carp are of concern, the most worrisome being the bighead, grass and silver. The black carp, which is also causing alarm, was introduced in U.S. fish farms in the early 1990s to control snail-borne parasites.

Asian carp mainly feed on plankton, algae and aquatic insects, and their voracity threatens the entire food chain. By competing with the young from other fish species, Asian carp have an impact all the way up the food chain to birds and mammals that feed on native fish. Competition for food resources also affects molluscs and puts endangered or threatened freshwater species at further risk. The black carp feeds directly on mussels and snails. Grass carp eat what it sounds like: generally aquatic plants, and plenty of them. A single adult can consume 40 percent of its body weight in a single day. This species’ destruction of plant life can radically change ecosystems.

A risk-management study by Canada’s Department of Fisheries and Oceans in 2004 determined that Asian carp were sufficiently tolerant of the northern climate to colonize the entire Great Lakes if introduced there. Both Canadian and U.S. risk- management studies have rated colonization potential as “high.” Asian carp are known to carry the Asian tapeworm and, biologists fear, could introduce other parasites and pathogens to native species.

Northern Ontario residents witnessing forestry companies’ large-scale spraying operations carried out from helicopters want to know why an activity that is considered harmful in the south is acceptable in their neck of the woods.

Opposition has been growing to the use of products containing glyphosate, the active herbicide in weed killers such as Roundup. While such products are now forbidden under the new Cosmetic Pesticide Ban Act, except as a control measure for noxious plants such as poison ivy, the Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources (MNR) has permitted forestry companies to conduct aerial spraying of large areas with the glyphosate-based herbicide Vantage Forestry. A fact sheet from Dow AgroSciences on Vantage Forestry says that it “provides non-selective vegetation control, i.e. ends growth of almost all species of weeds and grasses that compete with trees in reforested areas … On contact with the soil, glyphosate binds very tightly to soil particles and there is very low leaching potential to groundwater. In the soil, Vantage Forestry is degraded by natural processes into harmless compounds.”

Nevertheless, Sierra Club Canada has been highly critical of glyphosate products. A fact sheet posted on its website concludes: “Glyphosate is a herbicide that is constantly lauded as benign. These affirmations are based on studies examining the active ingredient only. In the field, our lawns, and our communities, however, a different result has emerged. Glyphosate has caused a host of acute and chronic effects ranging from red blood cell destruction to increased propensity for miscarriages. The effects on wildlife, from fish to birds and also non-target species, have been observed at doses lower than the application rates suggested.”

Critics do not believe that aerial spraying operations can be accurate enough to keep the product away from human habitations and out of watersheds. One such critic is Lisa Pilgrim, who operates Sure Catch Baits of Walford. She first became concerned in 2008 when she encountered MNRposted warning signs advising people not to eat blueberries in a spray area. “I have many harvest areas for minnows and leeches and we have noticed a change in the water chemistry,” she says. “What used to be vibrant minnow ponds now are not. Not only do we notice the difference in the water but we have noticed the lack of wildlife such as rabbits and birds hanging around. It is quite ironic that Toronto does not want spraying but [the forestry industry] has certainly done enough of it in our area.”

Concern has reached the municipal level. In July, the council of the Township of Sables-Spanish Rivers requested more information on spraying programs but, according to the Mid-North Monitor, was far from reassured by the written response of the management forester of Northshore Forest that Vantage “is not very toxic to people, animals or fish.” The council then passed a motion requesting MNR to halt all aerial herbicide spraying in the Aux Sables River watershed. On September 15, local MP Carol Hughes wrote the federal and provincial ministers holding the portfolios of health, environment, and natural resources, calling for an inquiry into the use by forest companies of glyphosates, particularly in aerial spraying. At press time, Hughes had yet to receive a reply.

On July 15, the coalition group Citizens Concerned for Michipicoten Bay (CCMB) lost a seven-year fight against a proposed traprock quarry on the eastern shore of Lake Superior. The Ontario Municipal Board (OMB) declined to overturn an amendment the municipality of Wawa made to its official plan that allows Superior Aggregates Co. to open the quarry on 35 hectares of rezoned shoreline property.

The quarry site is located less than five kilometres from Michipicoten Provincial Park and 6.5 kilometres from a provincial conservation reserve.

“We were really disappointed with the decision,” says CCMB president Mark Leschishin of the ruling made by OMB member J.E. Sniezek, a former director of long-range planning for the city of Sault Ste. Marie. Leschishin’s coalition feared that the quarry, which will include a rockcrushing operation and feature periodic dynamiting, would negatively affect seasonal and year-round residences and the area’s natural resources, and discourage development of ecotourism.

While a lack of progress on developing the controversial site offers faint hope that it might not happen any time soon, the OMB appeal delivered some sobering messages to other groups wishing to oppose an industrial development in an environmentally significant area.

The Province’s decision to designate the project under the Aggregate Resources Act removed the requirement for an environmental class assessment. Issues that could have been raised under an environmental assessment process were difficult if not impossible to air within the limitations of an OMB appeal.

Anthony Usher, the planning consultant for CCMB, did argue (according to the OMB decision) that “the recreational use surface of the lake was an amenity area or outdoor space and the odour, noise and other contaminants would create an adverse impact. These impacts would include lighting and blasting impacts.” But the decision went against this argument, stating that “the Board finds no policy basis for the protection of recreationally used waters [from noise and lighting impact].”

“Recreationalists have no voice at all [in such a hearing], which is absurd,” says Leschishin. “It doesn’t look at recreational, social or economic impacts.”

The OMB decision made this fact startlingly clear. “[Lake Superior] and its rugged coastline are a treasure and the number and extent of the provincial and national parks and nature reserves is a testament to how important the lake is to the citizens of Ontario and Canada,” Sniezek wrote. “These facts do not in effect give the Board or anyone else the right to say to a private landowner, ‘you live on a beautiful lake, give up your right to development so that we may maintain what we consider a pristine wilderness.’”

Leschishen says his group has not appealed the OMB decision. “But CCMB is not going away. People want us to stay and ‘watchdog’ this thing. There’s also a broader function for us of protecting Lake Superior.”

The full 72-page decision (PL040025) can be downloaded from the OMB decisions page:

www.omb.gov.on.ca/english/eDecisions/eDecisions.html.