A number of organizations are calling for more action from the provincial and federal governments regarding the dwindling mountain caribou herds. The Province has decided to move the remaining six caribou from the South Selkirk herd near Nelson and South Purcell herd near Kimberly to a maternal pen north of Revelstoke.
In the meantime, Candace Batycki, BC Program Director with the Yellowstone to Yukon Conservation Initiative, hopes to see more done to protect their habitat.
“The Province of British Columbia is building recovery plans for mountain caribou for all the herds and our position is that while they’re doing that recovery planning we shouldn’t be losing habitat. That’s kind of the old talk and log approach and we should be preserving all our options until the recovery plans are done.”
Yellowstone to Yukon is one of the organizations that have called for an immediate moratorium on new development in critical caribou habitat and says since May, the BC government has approved 83 new logging cutblocks in critical habitat of BC’s eight most at-risk southern mountain caribou populations.
Batycki says if the government is going to invest in captive breeding than the habitat needs to be there where the animals are ready for release. She adds there are habitat protections in place, but those need to built upon.
Wildsight, along with Yellowstone to Yukon, Wilderness Committee, the Harmony Foundation, Greenpeace Canada and renowned naturalist and artist Robert Bateman, held a press conference in Victoria last month, demanding that B.C. establish an immediate moratorium on destructive activities until recovery plans are not just completed, but implemented on the ground.
Leo Degroot is a wildlife biologist for the Province and says for the South Selkirk population the majority of the core habitat was protected from further harvesting about a decade ago as well as the Dark Woods property which was purchased by the Nature Conservancy of Canada for conversation purposes.
Degroot says protection measures have been in place for a long time; however, when harvesting began at higher elevations during the 1960’s, the consequences weren’t well-known. Altering the caribou’s habitat has resulted in the whole predator-prey system being altered.