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Email: timberwolfinfonetwork@gmail.com
Email: timberwolfinfonetwork@gmail.com

CA ON: Sudbury-area trappers caught ‘blindsided’

By Jim Moodie, The Sudbury Star

Paul VanZutphen may not have a photograph of the first wolf he caught, but he doesn’t have to look too far for a visual reminder.

“I’m wearing it on my head,” he says.

A wolf pelt won’t put a lot of money in a trapper’s pocket — about $100, if you’re lucky — but the fur does make for fine hat material, says VanZutphen.

Lately, however, the trapper has been scratching his head over a decision by the province to ban wolf and coyote kills in a buffer zone outside Killarney Provincial Park that’s bigger than the park itself.

“It goes from Killarney Park right through to Highway 69, including Burwash,” he says. “That takes care of the elk population they’ve been working so hard at.”

Trains have taken a toll on reintroduced elk in recent years, but so have wolves, the trapper says. To him, it makes no sense for the Ministry of Natural Resources and Forestry to further jeopardize a herd it was eager to re-establish in the first place.

“I take about four or five wolves a year,” says VanZutphen, who maintains a trap line in Sale Township, on the edge of Killarney Park around Tyson Lake. “There are probably 15 trappers affected by this ban, and if they’re all doing what I’m doing, that means 75 to 100 wolves a year that won’t be taken out.”

But wolves, according to the province, also need protection — in particular a threatened version called the Algonquin wolf, previously referred to as the eastern wolf.

These medium-sized wolves mostly inhabit Algonquin Provincial Park and its immediate environs, but have been confirmed in recent years in Killarney.

Hannah Barron, director of wildlife conservation campaigns with Earthroots, helped collect data on this species in Killarney in 2013-14 as part of survey helmed by scientist Linda Rutledge.

“We went into Killarney and did non-invasive sampling, which means looking for scat or urine samples and scanning them in the lab for DNA,” she says. “We found there is a cluster of Algonquin wolves on the northeast side of the park.”

Algonquin wolves are a distinct species, she says, but can be easily confused with a coyote or grey wolf, so genetic testing is the only true way to distinguish them.

Barron says there could well be more in other parts of Killarney, but the survey was limited to a fairly small area.

According to the province, there are now fewer than 500 mature Algonquin wolves in Ontario; Earthroots puts that figure much lower, quantifying the population as “a mere 154 adult wolves.”

The species was “up-listed” in June, says Barron, from a designation of special concern to the more worrisome status of threatened, a notch below endangered.

In release issued last week, the government said the species “faces a variety of threats including human-caused mortality, such as hunting and trapping, road-related mortality, and residential housing development causing habitat loss.”

Timber wolves and coyotes are far more abundant, but because of their similarity in appearance to Algonquin wolves, the natural resources ministry has closed hunting and trapping of all wolf species in select areas — including two parks in the Kawarthas, along with Algonquin and Killarney, plus sizable buffers around each — to give the Algonquin wolf a fighting chance.

Brent Chmilar, president of the Sudbury Area Trappers Council, says his group was “kind of blindsided” by the closure of wolf harvesting outside Killarney.

The plan was posted on the Environmental Bill of Rights earlier this year, he says, but only a month was provided for feedback and by mid-September it was law.

Chmilar questions the science behind the management decision, as there is evidence the Algonquin wolf is less a unique strain than “just a mixture of everything else around,” and worries that reduced pressure on coyotes and wolves will lead to weaker moose populations and more conflicts with communities.

“We’ve had a real problem around Sudbury with coyotes, and they’re not excluded in this ban,” he says. “A couple of years ago, coyotes were so bold they were walking the streets of Coniston in broad daylight, snatching little dogs. Bears may have taken a bit of their spotlight, but they’re still a problem.”

Chmilar fears it will only be a matter of time before the protected area for wolves is expanded.

“When you look at the zones around the provincial parks, I think it’s setting a dangerous precedent,” he says. “It’s not that far from Algonquin to Killarney and they’re probably going to connect the dots and shade that all in down the line.”

That would be fine with Barron, who feels the current protection zone doesn’t extend far enough.

“To me they’ve really just done the bare minimum, based on where they’ve found Algonquin wolves,” she says. “But they haven’t looked everywhere, so we don’t know where the rest of the wolves are.”

She says Algonquin wolves, like all wolves, can range widely and there’s “a major knowledge gap” at the moment, as hunters and trappers don’t have to submit samples for DNA evidence.

While wolf harvesting is now banned on the east side of Killarney, landowners in this area can still kill the animals if they pose a threat to livestock, pets or their own safety, stresses the MNRF.

Barron says she understands farmers sometimes have to contend with wolves, but wishes the province would provide incentives for landowners to pursue non-lethal strategies.

“You can conserve carnivores and farm at the same time,” she says. “But you have to work to prevent those livestock losses. You can do things like having livestock guardian dogs or fladry, which is red flags that scare wolves away when you are calving or lambing.”

Barron says scare tactics work better in the long run because killing wolves “imbues social chaos into their family structure and makes them more likely to come back and try to kill the livestock.”

Ideally, the Earthroots campaigner would like to see wider sanctuaries for wolves and stricter limits in areas where hunting and trapping is permitted.

“Theoretically it should be part of the government’s mandate to recover any species protected by the Endangered Species Act,” she says. “And to recover a wolf population, you have to let it spread.”

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