Quote:
Originally Posted by Bushrat
I think it isn't as simple as stopping industry and thinning wolves and bears. In the Maritimes the principal animal was caribou and moose pre whiteman. There were lots of wolves, cougars and bears. About 1850 the caribou started disappearing, at approximately the same time whitetailed deer appeared around the settlements, farms and cleared logged areas. The forest was used for logging but mostly near settlements and farms there still were huge areas of wilderness left. By 1900 deer were moving in and caribou were dying off. By that time Bears, wolves and cougars were pretty much extinct as they were trapped and shot on sight by everybody. There was still plenty of uninhabited natural and excellent caribou habitat left, almost completely without predators and little hunting, by 1925 caribou were gone. The caribou die off seemed to correlate and match timing wise exactly the whitetailed deer entering their habitat until the caribou were gone and the deer had completely replaced them. I have no idea whether they are connected but where there are/were caribou there were historically no whitetailed deer. When man shows up and starts developing, whitetail deer follows this development which is happening in the endangered Alberta and BC caribou habitat for industry and logging the caribou are extinct within 50-75 years regardless of predators.
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I think you have a better handle on the situation then many, perhaps better even then biologists.
Dad used to tell about seeing huge herds of Deer in the Peace River area when he came in the early 1920s.
By the time I was old enough to wonder the county side, all that was left were their trails. The trails were such that I doubt that Deer alone made them, but I'm sure Deer contributed a lot to their formation.
Today those trails are so overgrown that one would not know they were there without prior knowledge of them. The point being that wildlife populations have not been well recorded historically much less studied.
I see two problems with the Caribou herds in this province.
#1 There really is no historic data to work from to determine what is happening or why it is happening much less whether there is indeed a problem that could be solved. To me a couple of decades of records do not give anyone a decent understanding of the population dynamics of such an animal population.
#2 The government that employs biologists to study wildlife tend to commence studies only after a problem is suspected plus they tend to study with the intent of increasing tax revenue, not necessarily for the betterment of any species.
All to often, animals that don't generate tax revenue are not studied at all, except by universities and their budgets very often greatly limit what and when they can conduct studies.
As for the writeup in the Journal, to me it has the smell of a commercial agenda, not the feel of a proper scientific observation.
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