From Canoe to Computer: Memoirs of a Career in Wildlife Management

By John Raymond Gunson

The life ways of Native and other northern Canadian inhabitants and the animals they live with, respect, and use are featured in this book. The author describes the aboriginals (First Nations people) and other northern peoples historical and current involvement in the use, studies, and management of wildlife. Recommendations for the accelerated involvement of Native peoples in wildlife management are presented. In addition, interesting observations of the ways of life of northern animals and their populations are described.

Details of long-term studies and management of problems with bears, wolves, beaver, elk, and other species, and their diseases and parasites, are highlighted as well as the resulting human politics. The continuation of recreational, subsistence, and commercial hunting are recommended and the need for development of complex management techniques are presented. Changes to wildlife management education are suggested.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Jan 11, 2017
• ISBN: 9781524655877

John Raymond Gunson

John Raymond Gunson worked in wildlife management at various locations in northern Canada between 1960 and 1997. Following graduation from a fisheries and wildlife management course at the University of Guelph in 1963, he journeyed to northwestern Canada (especially Saskatchewan and Alberta) to help manage wild populations of animals important to Native and “white” residents of several northern areas. He initiated long-term research projects to allow an improved understanding of complex wildlife relationships necessary for management. He also researched and managed several nuisance/problem wildlife situations. He has authored numerous publications on wildlife management in both technical and popular literature. He is a member of the Wildlife Society, the Saskatchewan Archaeological Society and the Ottawa Field-Naturalists’ Club (CFN). His interests include nature, outdoor living, hunting and fishing, northern peoples and their histories.

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© 2017 John Raymond Gunson. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by AuthorHouse 02/01/2017

ISBN: 978-1-5246-5586-0 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-5246-5585-3 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-5246-5587-7 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2016921026

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Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Contents

Preface

The Canoe

The University Years

Muskrats of the Cumberland Marshes

The Moose-Checking Station

The Beaver of Saskatchewan’s Northern Forest

The Great Beaver Disease (s)

Historical and Recent Values of the Beaver

Canadas Everywhere

Forests of Spruce and Pine

The Spear Points

The First Canadians

Rethinking the Late-Pleistocene Extinctions

Wolf Control in the North

The Barren Lands

The Peace-Athabasca Delta

The International Biological Program

Some Fur Work in Alberta

The Striped Skunk in a Northern Habitat

Alberta’s Flying Mammals

Management of the World’s Most-Feared Disease

Other Diseases and Parasites

The Tree Bear

Recreational Hunting of Black Bears

Bears and Beehives

Bear Safety

Management of the Great Bear, the Grizzly

More on the Grizzly Bear

Bears as Predators

Wolf-Livestock Research and Management

Wolves and Hoofed Mammals

Studies of Wolf-Ungulate Relationships in Alberta

Wolves for Yellowstone

The Evolution of Wolf Management

Wolf Specimens and Related Things

The Story of Alberta’s Elk

Crop-Munching Ungulates

Another way to Count Ungulates

The Gunson Pipes

The Need for More Complex Hunting Management: a Case History

About Hunting

The Antis

Hunting by Aboriginal Peoples

Should Natural Predation be Managed?

Other Considerations of Wildlife Management in Northern Ecosystems

The Carnivore Conservation Area Concept

Education, Planning and Priorities in Modern Wildlife Management

Thoughts for Beginning Wildlifers

Environmentalists, Media and Management

The Computer: the Final Years

Appendix 1 Encounters with Wildlife

Appendix 2 Reports*, papers, manuals, articles, posters, databases

Recommended Readings

References Cited

Seventeen of my Heroes

Acknowledgements

Illustrations

Dedication

To the memory of my Native colleagues

Iqqaat, Alex; Rankin Inlet/Baker Lake, Nunavut

Linklater, Simon; Pelican Narrows, Saskatchewan

McKay, Gilbert; La Ronge, Saskatchewan

Stoney, Jack; Fort Severn, Ontario

They all rest in peace now… in the north

"For this is the journey that men make: to find themselves. If they fail in this, it doesn’t matter much what else they find. Money, position, fame, many loves, revenge are all of little consequence, and when the tickets are collected at the end of the ride they are tossed into the bin marked FAILURE.

But if a man happens to find himself — if he knows what he can be depended upon to do, the limits of his courage, the positions from which he will no longer retreat, the degree to which he can surrender his inner life to some woman, the secret reservoirs of his determination, the extent of his dedication, the depth of his feeling for beauty, his honest and unpostured goals — then he has found a mansion which he can inhabit with dignity all the days of his life."

James Michener

The Fires of Spring

Preface

Early on the morning of August 18, 2015 prior to starting once again to work on the manuscript that became this book, I glanced out the bedroom window to see a merlin (pigeon hawk) fighting with two magpies while two crows looked on. A few minutes later, I watched five newly-born squirrels scampering around the squirrel house. For beginning a new day, it doesn’t get much better than that!

It has now (at the completion of the manuscript, 2016) been fifty-seven years since I began a career of wildlife management that spanned some thirty-seven years of active duty. During those years of work, I came to experience and understand many diverse viewpoints and philosophies of people-wildlife relations; the hunter, hunting guide-outfitter, trapper, commercial fisherman, angler, beekeeper, cattleman, farmer, rural landowner, forest logger, petroleum explorer and developer, government authority, wildlife manager, enforcement officer, wildlife consultant, university academic, environmentalist, city-resident, and rural and urban wildlife viewer. I had to learn to comprehend the history of the relationships of each of these groups with the various species of wild animals, to learn how each species and humans of different backgrounds interacted in varying regions and habitats and, eventually to develop methods of management including the reduction of any people-wildlife conflicts that existed.

Wildlife (including mammals, both large and small, birds, fish, reptiles, amphibians and invertebrates; and plants, too) had become of serious interest, love and concern to Canadians for different reasons. Consumptive users wanted large, healthy and harvestable populations; those who did not hunt, fish or trap, desired many of these same populations (approachable, interacting and functioning in their natural environments) to view and enjoy and to know they were healthy and continuing. Others just wanted to know they were out there. But, in the modern world many people had problems with a wide variety of wildlife; these conflicts included maintenance and spread of disease to people or livestock or pets, use and destruction of agricultural crops, predation of livestock, flooding of roads, lands and crops, natural predation of valued herbivores and even maulings and kills of humans by the larger carnivores. The use, protection and management of these populations led to the development of wildlife programs by people, including governments, sportsmen groups, businesses, and residents and their organizations. Despite the ever-growing addition of technical and scientific wildlife knowledge, the application of new techniques of species management, and the development of societies both professional and public, resulting controversies on how and if wildlife should be managed were never-ending.

The history and background of people are important in the development of their philosophies of how wildlife should be used or not used — managed or not managed. If a beekeeper was losing beehives to bears most night, he was upset and looking for answers and, no doubt, blaming government for an overpopulation of pests. Cattlemen did not want to see their livestock killed and eaten by wolves or other predators. Farmers needed help in accessing their lands and crops if beaver dams flooded their area. Hunters wondered why their favourite species were less abundant than years before and why hunting was becoming more restrictive. Native Canadians wanted information on and protection of the animals they trapped, hunted, and held in historical or religious significance. People feared wildlife diseases. And so on.

In its broadest sense, wildlife management is aimed at sustaining or restoring animal populations and their habitats for their own sake and for human benefit. Management for human benefit must consider the opinions and viewpoints of those impacted by or using wildlife; others, some with little experiences with wildlife, but with just as legitimate concerns, need to be heard and respected. During my projects with wildlife of diverse descriptions and habitats, I came to realize just how intense and emotional the problems and even the following research and management projects could be to the various stakeholders and the general public. These disagreements often developed into highly polarized positions and arguments, often with one public society warring with another or with government. The quarrels will undoubtedly continue and perhaps even accelerate over the long term — as habitats and wild populations continually change due to human development and use — or change with natural, especially climatic, modifications.

The wildlife manager not only has to interact with various publics but also with a strong academic community. Academics, like most of us, can become entrenched in personal attitudes, value judgements, often become suspicious of resource-managing governments, and envious of other human wildlife-oriented communities. They pass their philosophies and attitudes on to their students and the general public. This, it seems, is just human nature. Academics may have strong public following, depending on the issue, and the wildlife manager must take this into account. They also have fine minds and can discover how, and where, research can help describe or solve wildlife-related problems. Joint projects with academia were necessary and I shall make note of such efforts in the descriptions of the projects that follow. Similarly, the wildlife manager must work with groups, both consumptive and non-consumptive, to arrange support, co-ordinate activities and ensure joint accomplishment. I have written this book, in part, to outline some of the above ideas, to describe the problems I encountered, and to provide the interesting, and sometimes, unexpected results of both research and management projects. Research invariably creates further questions and I often wondered during projects, on so many diverse species and interactions, if I would ever answer them all.

Theories concerning wildlife biology, including evolution of life forms, survival and intricacies of ecosystems, and intra- and inter-specific population relationships, change over time. For years, a balance of nature theory suggested life of myriad forms always found ways to maintain itself for the long term. I shall deal with this concept as it may or may not have applied to the species and systems I worked with. Similarly, the complexities of, and ideas concerning, predator-prey relationships continue to develop; there have been great disagreements and arguments about how, or if, predators influence numbers of prey populations and their effect on prey health and habits. I had the opportunity, with colleagues, to study several predator-prey interactions and I shall attempt to present these results in basic form and to interpret how the results of such studies could influence wildlife management in future years.

During my career, which included field projects in the boreal coniferous north including its forests, rivers, lakes and marshes, the aspen parklands, western foothills and high mountains, and with some experiences in the eastern hardwood forests, the barren-land tundra, and short- and mixed-grass prairies, I kept field-notes, diaries, datasheets and other records, most of which I still have. Other wildlife biologists may have an interest in the unpublished reports and databases. As well, during my working years, I often came across old unpublished reports that contained historical notes and information that, to me, seemed valuable and, even at times, crucial to the current management of many wildlife species. I employ some of these in the following chapters. I have noticed descriptions of some recent studies that could have made use of such old information, but, in the main, did not.

I could not help but develop various philosophies and principles of wildlife management as the projects unfolded. The results of so many, often controversial projects, that may or may not have included the culling of individual or groups of animals, compensation programs, special hunting and trapping management systems, land-use (both public and private) approaches, various methods of handling animals, and the understanding of opinions and responses by the public to such projects, all contributed to a never-ending process of learning and development of my own viewpoints. I shall comment on philosophies and principles throughout the book.

Managing bear and wolf populations in Alberta had an international component. Americans involved in projects on enhancing grizzly-bear distributions and numbers wanted information on Alberta’s grizzlies often in the hope of obtaining animals for transplant and release. That did not happen with grizzlies but it did with wolves. Yet, in addition to our own studies and programs, we learned a lot about the habits of grizzlies and ways of encouraging their populations from work by the Americans. The wolf transplants from Alberta to the northwestern states were highly controversial and led to extreme emotional states, encompassed years of planning, and involved participation of trappers, regional wildlife managers as well as numerous wolf experts from various locations in America and other parts of the northern world. The details of the transplants and follow-up observations of the population growth of the transplanted wolves and their behaviour are provided.

Because such work included numerous conferences and meetings with other wildlife people, both technical and theoretical, both public and professional, I also could not help but notice a wide range of judgements, beliefs and values. At times, judgements ranged from agreement to total opposition to what I was doing, often depending on the background of the judge or that person’s current work, recreation and public association. As well, I came to understand that social and political pressures often control the direction and results of scientific and management work and that deep-rooted worldviews and often, assumptions, lead to wrongful opinions and outcomes. In addition, I noted (as have others) that those who follow a party line are often those who reap the most rewards whether they deserve them or not. I shall discuss these various concepts.

My early experiences of working with Native Canadians in several areas followed by a growing understanding of their histories and philosophies of living with wildlife and nature helped develop my own values and beliefs. That was buttressed by my investigations of early Americans via the archaeological collections and associated readings. My research, presented in The Spear Points and The First Canadians, revealed that modern Amerindians have a wide variety of original homesites, ethnic backgrounds and cultures, and genetic variation substantiating they are highly intelligent and well suited to continue in modern wildlife management. I shall refer to numerous stories of our Native peoples concerning their knowledge and respect for the northern animals. I shall recommend a much larger role for Native peoples in wildlife management in Canada.

Throughout this book I have referred to various dates as years before present (BP). I believe that using BC (Before Christ), BCE (Before Christian or Common Era) or AD (Anno Domini; years since Christ’s birth) can be an insult to peoples outside of the Christian religion. Is it not time to begin a new system of dating that would be acceptable to all? One idea is to use astronomy; as an example, with knowledge of axial precession (precession of the equinoxes; a planet-Earth wobble cycle of 25,772 years that goes on forever at the rate of one degree every seventy-two years), we could determine a year-1 date using the position of one star or star-group. A good example is the position of the constellation Orion, observable throughout the world. This large group of stars has been important to early societies in many areas, such as in dynastic Egypt, but even earlier at Nabta Playa (Egyptian Sahara) 7,000 years ago. Its last lowest meridional position could be year 1 (about 12,500 years ago; when it gets back to that lowest position, it would be year 25,772). Then we could start back at another year 1, if so desired; this would go on through each cycle — for ever, and ever — eternally. Perhaps those who study astronomy can suggest a better example. In this way, all peoples on Earth would use the same dating system without religious implication. Other ideas include the date of the first Homo sapiens or the date of first human agriculture and settlement.

Because plants (unlike most animals) have many different common names that vary from one region to another, I decided to provide the Genus of each plant on its first appearance in the text, especially for the reader who wants technical accuracy. Because animals are generally recognized by their usually-only-one common name, I decided not to confuse the reader with unnecessary scientific nomenclature in their cases. Use of numbers in books is inconstant. In text, I have used numerals for measurements of distance, weights, volumes, percentages, numbers over ninety-nine, and special identifications; all other numbers are in word-form.

So, here we go. Learn why I wanted to become a wildlife manager. Read on to share my years of work, to understand the diverse ways that Canadians interact with wildlife, to comprehend how wildlife concerns develop and become polarized depending on the background of different peoples, to learn how governments react to public demands, to recognize the need for research, and to appreciate the necessity for such a wide variety of management philosophies, principles, systems and tools. Read on to fully appreciate my own gradual development and understanding of the multiplicity of life systems in the northern habitats and to know how I learned to respect and follow the long-term observations and philosophies of northern peoples. Perhaps, even more importantly, read about the joy of living with wildlife and the many ways that both you and wildlife can benefit from these experiences.

JRG (MSc), Parkland County, Alberta, Canada

The Canoe

There was a small bump of muscle on my left forearm; I couldn’t explain it, partly because I was skin and bones at age nineteen, but Darrell Dennis offered: It might be from paddling your canoe. I thought about that and was inclined to believe he was right. We were at the Ontario Agricultural College (OAC) in Guelph, Ontario in 1960. I was in my second year of university intending to advance into a career of wildlife biology and Darrell was to proceed to a major in honours chemistry. Later, he switched to join my major; that of fisheries and wildlife management and continued into a life-long career with wildlife as did I. The canoe he had referred to was the focus of stories I had told him of growing up near the small town of Geraldton in northern Ontario (in fact, as far as we could figure out that year, I was from the most northerly location in Ontario of any of the students at the three-partitioned colleges; OAC, Ontario Veterinary College and MacDonald Institute). I had purchased and used the canoe when I was sixteen years of age. The canoe was a 15-footer, canvas and cedar (the Cadillac of canoes), pointed at both ends. It was a Peterborough paddling canoe (built in Peterborough, Ontario) and I had ordered it directly from the catalogue; brand new and shining green.

I needed the canoe, or so I thought to expand my activities of duck hunting, trapping and general exploration in the boreal woodlands, muskegs and never-ending lakes and rivers of the northern Precambrian Shield country surrounding the small gold-mining town. In those years, there were few roads; human presence north of the town amounted only to workers of the northern line of the Canadian National Railroad and habitants of the much smaller hamlet of Nakina; beyond that were the northern boreal forest, the land of the little sticks— the lowlands of James and Hudson Bays.

Each fall, my brother Reg and our buddies Raimo and Mauri Mikkonen would hike through a mile or so of muskeg to get to the cattail (Typha) marsh of a small river (Pine Creek) in which the town poured its wastes. The fertilizer had encouraged the growth of a sizeable and productive delta where it entered Kenogamisis Lake (ask a northern Cree to explain the meaning of the lake’s name — I can’t do it here in public; by the way, it does not mean long lake as reported on the internet). Various species of ducks summered there and late-fall migrants, especially black ducks, would arrive to rest and feed for a few days. The duck-hunting season was the highlight of the year for me; the four of us always missed that day of school when the season opened, but the teachers knew about it and tolerated our absence. Shooting the ducks, especially the large black ducks on the wing was terribly exciting and enjoyable. We made our own decoys from cedar (Thuja) wood and with the canoe, we were able to place them out in the shallow water. Reg shot a green-headed mallard drake in 1956 and mounted it; this was one of the first indications of this species moving into northern Ontario from the west.

At an even earlier age (in the 1940s), the summers were occupied with helping out in the garden, which included gathering little bits of organic soil from the nearby forest for the vegetables. We picked blueberries (Vaccinium) all-day-long during some August days (after a five-kilometer hike, followed by the hike back, carrying six- and eleven-quart baskets full of berries) so our mother could preserve them in quart sealers for the winter (as many as fifty sealers per year). We picked mushrooms for the same purpose, used dandelion (Taraxacum) leaves for spinach and generally eked out a living from the surrounding woodlands of black spruce (Picea), jack pine (Pinus) and white birch (Betula). We hand-picked jack pine cones and sold them to the tree nursery. During those years we had few, if any, toys. Rocks and sticks were abundant, so we made slingshots and used these to war against the Mikkonen brothers, when we were not just simply throwing rocks at each other at an abandoned mineral-drill site. I can still remember, while standing next to the garden at age eight or nine, listening to the cries of a pack of wolves not that far away.

Of course, we fished for northern pike and pickerel (walleye) in the nearby lake. On one occasion, while fishing off Little Long Lac Bridge, we noticed a huge pike-like fish trying to grab a 2-pound pike on one of the lines. Four or five of us boys immediately attached other small pike to our lines, and threw them out to catch the monster, but to no avail. This large fish, which we compared to the length of our bicycles, must have been a muskellunge, never before reported from that lake, or if not, one of the largest northern pike ever! In summer, we somehow survived the mosquitos, blackflies, no-see-ums, horse flies and deer flies, all so common in Ontario’s northern woods with never-ending water bodies. When I travelled back to my home country in later years, I often wondered how I had survived the bugs. Swimming was our most common summer sport; our beach was the tailings of the local gold mine (Little Long Lac mine, one of nine producing mines) that were dumped right into the lake. Here, on the slimes, the water was shallow and warm and we could dive off the sudden drop-off into deeper, cooler water. Later, the beach was condemned for swimming; that after we had used it for years!

The first house we lived in had few amenities; the diamond-drilled water well with one pipe leading cold water to the kitchen sink was one. If we needed hot water, the wood stove was stoked and a pot of water placed on top. Baths were infrequent because of the shortage of hot water, but occasionally a galvanized tub was hauled out and we took our turns. Naturally the oldest child went in first, and that wasn’t me. There was no fridge and not even an icebox. Most organic degradables (preserved wild fruits, potatoes, rhubarb, and other vegetables) were stored in a dugout hole below the boys’ bedroom. We occasionally had to drink milk that was ageing with floating yellow curds; I have hated milk ever since. There were no cows or horses within 150 miles (240 kms). We had our own chickens and collecting eggs was one of the daily chores. Occasionally, we chopped off some chicken heads, stuck the remainder in boiling water, and then pulled out the feathers. Splitting and carrying in the firewood was another tedious daily task. One spring I shot a Canada goose; my dad threatened to report me to the local game warden (he was a bird watcher), but my mother overruled him because we needed meat. That’s the only animal I ever poached! Now, in the twenty-first century, the province of Ontario is initiating a spring goose hunt because the Canada geese in that province rarely stop in autumn on their way south to their winter ranges. I was ahead of them!

As youngsters growing up in this northern environment, we were used to travelling in the bush especially during winters when it was easier to get around (reminiscent of the year-round activities of wolves, as I was to learn in later years). Cutting a few scrawny logs of black spruce with the Swede saw for firewood and then hauling them home on a home-made sleigh over the winter’s snows, snaring snowshoe hares (rabbits), trapping weasels, and snowshoeing and skiing (home-made, wooden skis with twisted-rubber inner-tire-tube bands for foot anchors) through the muskegs and Canadian Shield rocks at every opportunity were common activities during the colder season. We snowshoed a lot, and as a result the high school held a 6-mile snowshoe race in March, 1959. To advertise the event, it was agreed that I would give all the rest of the boys a head start. You can check the story in the Thunder Bay Times News of March, 1979, twenty years later, to see who won!

I played hockey virtually every night in winter on a nearby outdoor rink; we had a small shack to put on the skates. First, shovel off the snow, then play hockey with occasional fights, listen to and watch the sizzling and wavering aurora borealis on late, clear, cold nights, and tramp home through the snow fields. I just have to wonder why some people still argue that one cannot ever hear the northern lights. When they appear near during low ambient temperature, they produce a rustling sound; when far-off, you do not hear them. Here is how Samuel Hearne described the northern lights in December 1771: I can positively affirm that in still nights I have frequently heard them make a rustling and crackling noise, like the waving of a large flag in a fresh gale of wind.

Hockey, hunting and trapping — they were what kept me going. Winters could, however, be tough to handle. The trip to the outhouse when it was forty below could be an adventure in itself (although the smell was less during freezing temperatures, and all the large black spiders were gone). Walking the 2 kilometers to school in the same weather was challenging (in high school years, Reg, Raimo and Mauri usually rode to school in Mauri’s car while I walked). Leo Sten joined me on some of these winter walks; when we were finally in the school, we sometimes had a good laugh at our frost-scarred faces with tiny icicles here and there. One winter day — when the temperature was about twenty degrees below Fahrenheit and snowing, and when still quite young (ten or so years of age) — the four of us returned from a skiing trip to find the town contemplating a search for us. We thought this silly because we were used to the bush and the searchers probably would have got lost!

A few years later, in spring, I looked over towards a new field that Roy Barker, our multi-millionaire neighbour, had cleared (after discovering the mineral lode that became Geco Mines and that led to the town of Manitouwadge, some miles to the south). Brother Reg and I (at ages sixteen and seventeen) worked for Roy — to make what was probably one of Ontario’s most northern farms — a potato farm. We learned how to work during those summers with Roy! With Wally McMahon, Roy’s helper, we burned a trench through solid bedrock to bring water into Roy’s new three-story house. We built a hot fire with tamarack (Larix), dumped water from full 45-gallon drums, then picked and shovelled the cracked and broken rock out. We cleared several acres of jack pine-covered sandy forest a couple of kilometers north of town, excavated tons of organic soil from a muskeg and spread it on the new fields, planted, tended, picked and bagged the potatoes, and looked after several acres of flowering plants and vegetables in front of the house, as well as many other chores.

Twenty or so Canada geese on their way north in spring had landed on the new field to feed on the green growth poking their slim stems above the surface. The geese would land in our area in spring, but rarely during the fall hunting season. Another neighbour, old Grandma Lewkoski, walked stealthily towards the geese, scattering seeds in an attempt to feed them. The geese shied away and finally took off. I still wonder if Grandma wanted to eat one of them. Grandma raised pigs. While dangling on a high wooden fence with our heads stuck over the edge, I and the other neighbourhood boys would watch them being slaughtered in the small pen behind her house. That year, you could buy a whole pig for $5.

In later years as a teen, I became more interested in trapping much larger or more wilderness-type furbearers. My partner, Errol Newhouse, and I again used the canoe to set out our brand-new Newhouse (no known relation) number-4 jump traps for beaver along a creek a couple of miles from town. We were assistant trappers on Kaarlo Niemi’s registered trapline and Kaarlo sold our pelts to the local furbuyer. When the winter sealed off the lake and creek, we eventually expanded into trapping marten and mink in the same area. It was exciting to trap during winter when you always wondered what might be in your trap, if an animal had approached the trap (as evidenced by tracks in the snow), or if an animal escaped the trap. The trapping was stimulating and invigorating and because of this recreation and the duck hunting, I eventually decided to get into wildlife work.

Trapping could be educational too, for example, it taught a person what not to do in special circumstances in the bush. Once, near an active beaver lodge, I suddenly disappeared through the ice into the creek. With Errol’s help I made it out and we journeyed to an old abandoned trapper’s cabin, lit a fire, and I soon dried out enough to get home. On another occasion while mistakenly wearing leather boots on the trapline in freezing weather, I froze my left big toe; it turned into a sack of mush completely surrounding the toe for about a month or two, but later healed. I never saw a doctor— who sees a doctor when that young? On a trip through lowlands in summer, a bent willow (Salix) branch slapped into my eye and it was quite sore for a few days. Sixty years later (in 2015), an optometrist could still see the scar on the surface of the eye! I guess I was lucky.

We hunted ruffed and spruce grouse as well as ducks during fall months in the ‘50s. With proceeds from my work with Roy Barker, I purchased a small used motorcycle (a Czechoslovakian Jawa); I could sling the shotgun over one shoulder and get quickly in grouse country. I was often a long way from home searching for this species that has played such an important role in the education of young Canadian hunters. Many of us cut our hunting teeth on these partridges and there is a good probability they will be the focus of our last hunt as well. If you stick to shooting them in the air, you will come to admire their ability to escape; they can outwit the hunter with explosive power and aerial acrobatics. I have to admit that I usually cheated and took them on the ground so my mother had something to cook. I can’t forget the male ruffie that ignored my bike and strutted off the road at his own pace or the nervous hen in spring snapping back and forth while shepherding her chicks to safety. The drumming of the male in spring was always interesting and the sudden explosive exit from a snow bed in winter or at your feet during a silent stalk of bigger game in autumn was, for a second, alarming and unforgettable.

Paddling a canoe is special; the sound of the canoe belly cutting through the lake water, feeling the weight of the water with each stroke, adjusting the angle of the squared-stern paddle blade to steer, keeping your knees on the bottom and as close to the sides of the canoe as possible to balance it, occasionally switching sides with the paddle to rest one arm and shoulder, and moving almost silently and effortlessly through the wilderness to view nature’s wonders is relaxing, unique and memorable. On one occasion, Errol and I paddled right by an adult river otter swimming peacefully through the surface waters; because of the quiet approach of the canoe we were able to make the close-up observation; I still remember his whiskers! Another time, I cautiously approached a bull moose busy feeding under water in a small lake. When his head and antlers broke the surface, the water poured off past his mouth full of aquatic vegetation. He seemed to dare me to come closer, but I didn’t.

I made the mistake of lending the canoe to Reg and Raimo to do some fishing. They brought it back with a 3-inch hole right through the canvas and one of the ribs; instead of fishing, they were running fast water. They fixed it up, but it never seemed the same. Another mistake — at the age of nineteen, I lent the two of them my just-acquired ‘52 Pontiac and they burned out the rear differential. They fixed that too. Then Reg borrowed my 303 Lee Enfield British war rifle and shot a moose. Boy, the pain of having an older brother!

During my first years in the west, the canoe sat at home in northern Ontario where both tips rotted out. On a trip back in the late ‘60s I replaced the tips and gunwales, repainted it and brought it to my home in the west. I used the ageing canoe for various biological surveys in Alberta in 1971 (more details of these surveys later); we accessed several lakes in the parkland to view heronries and to examine cormorant and pelican colonies. Among other journeys, I took the canoe to the Yukon in 1972 and paddled it on famous Kluane Lake. Eventually, the canvas rotted off and the super-structure of cedar plates sat in my yard for many years; I just couldn’t work up the emotion to throw it away. In a later time, I learned that the first such cedar-plate canoe in Canada was made by fur trader and surveyor David Thompson who wanted a stronger-bodied canoe than those of birch bark (Jenish 2004).

Of course, by then I had used many other canoes of every description, especially during the years in northern Saskatchewan. These included metal Grumman canoes with double keels and an Airboy above-water engine with aircraft-like propeller blades for travelling back and forth over ice and water in the melting spring muskrat marshes, a 17-foot canvas Prospector canoe for travel on the Saskatchewan River to Cumberland House, a huge 22-foot freighter canoe on Little Bear Lake in the Cub Hills for moving our supplies into the experimental beaver trapline, a 12-foot aluminum canoe for accessing small creeks and lakes and to hold and transport the heavy metal livetraps for beaver, an 18-foot motor canoe in the Peace-Athabasca delta and, finally, a 16-foot fibreglass canoe with electric motor for fishing in Alberta. I was never much interested in boats; never owned one, and never will!

When my original canoe was fifty-four years old, I finally took it to the county transfer (waste) site west of Stony Plain, Alberta with a heavy heart. But, I left it where people could take it home, and sure enough the very next day on another trip there, someone had taken it away. The new owners may have replaced some rotting ribs, re-canvased it and made it into a serviceable canoe again. Now, just a few years later, I learn that there is great demand for old Peterborough canoes!

The University Years

After completing my first year at Lakehead College in Port Arthur (now Thunder Bay) I was hired to record the catches of fish by commercial fishermen on Lake Nipigon (the sixth of the great lakes to us northern Ontarians — 4,848 km² — the largest lake entirely within the boundaries of the province). This lake, over 100 kilometers north to south and 80 kilometers east to west is studded with islands, small and large. The fishermen operated out of Macdiarmid, a hamlet clustered along the southern shore; some were Native Ojibwe, some were whites. The species of interest were lake trout and walleye. I spent the entire summer of 1960 travelling out on the lake in their 35-foot fishing boats (see photo), measuring, weighing and scale-sampling their catches. The scales would later be read for lines of growth, indicating the age of the fish.

After a day’s work, we would pull into one of the green-black (pyroxene) sandy bays for the night. The water of the lake was clear and pristine. We tried angling for 4- to 5-pound speckled (brook) trout known to be in the lake, but with little success. I learned how to set nets and helped bring them in with lake trout up to 40 pounds and walleye occasionally over 10 pounds. I was working for Geraldton-District biologist John Goddard whose job it was to determine the number of the take of each species, analyze sex and age data, and ultimately partition the fish resource among commercial and sport fishermen. After returning to Macdiarmid from a trip on the lake I would scramble up a rocky hill, access the railway track, walk through a long rock tunnel and return to the Lands and Forest ranger station nearby. We had our own enforcement boat to visit fishermen and check their catches, but I liked to travel with the fishermen themselves and preferred it that way. They were a hardy, independent bunch, but tolerated this young government biologist-to-be. Each trip lasted from three to seven days; because we were on the large lake, we could forget about the bugs of summer.

The following summer (1961), I was hired by Robin Hepburn of the Wildlife Research Branch of Lands and Forests (at Maple, Ontario) to count pellet (poop) piles of white-tailed deer in the hardwood forests of southeastern Ontario, just west of the Ottawa Valley (North and South Canonto townships) and in the Pakesley area near Georgian Bay. These were completely different forest types than in boreal northern Ontario and I had to learn to recognize the various new tree species such as ash (Fraxinus), basswood (Tilia), beech (Fagus), hemlock (Tsuga), red oak (Quercus), sugar maple (Acer), white pine and yellow birch among others on the hillsides and cedar in the low-lying areas (of course, I knew cedar which grew along the shores of lakes in the north). Bill Goodson (photo) and I dragged a metal chain, 66 feet (21m) long, along a permanent, but unmarked transect, navigated by compass, and at appropriate distances we counted the left-over signs of deer within 2 feet (60 centimeters) on each side of the chain. After a few weeks of this repetitive work, we were in good shape, but pretty bored. I collected several of what looked like wolf scats and the lab people at Maple (the southern wildlife research centre) had a look at them; they were judged not to be timber wolf, but some unknown canid (the dog family, Canidae). Could these have been some of the signs of the invading eastern coyote or a coyote-wolf hybrid (coy-wolf)? Robin had a complicated formula that would estimate the number of deer using the area and thus determine any increases or decreases and relate that to measured hunting pressure.

Robin provided me with 243 stomach samples of deer collected by hunters in 1960- and 1961-November seasons and I spent a lot of my spare time during the next two school seasons identifying the remains using a dissecting scope and samples of the vegetation from the areas. I summarized the results in my first-ever technical, but unpublished paper — Some Fall Foods of the White-tailed Deer in Ontario (1963). Alex Cringan, one of our wildlife professors, gave me a good mark for the report (although he somewhat humorously suggested not to refer to the stomach contents as coming from Robin Hepburn) and the government research branch got a lot of work done for free! The importance of red oak during a year of acorn production was noted; in 1960, none of seventy-six stomachs from the two Canonto townships contained acorns, but in 1961, 99 percent of 143 stomachs did. Eastern white cedar, well known as a winter food of deer, occurred in 85 percent of the Canonto stomachs in 1960, but only 45 percent in 1961. Perhaps winter started earlier in 1960 or cedar was used earlier that year because of the lack of acorns. Bract or ledge fungi were utilized in all areas each year; some stomachs contained large amounts of this fungus. The most common ground plants utilized by the deer of the Canonto areas were the leaves of barren strawberry (Waldstenia) and wintergreen (Gaultheria). In the more-western and northern area, Pakesley, where red oak was not abundant, bunchberry (Cornus), wintergreen and ferns were the most common foods. If you want more details concerning the food habits of deer in the southern hardwood forests more than fifty years ago, let me know.

During a special meeting of Ontario hunters at the northern wildlife research center in Algonquin Park that summer and at twenty years of age, I was given the job of explaining aerial winter surveys of moose at various locations in the province. Why they asked someone, who had never completed such a survey, is still a mystery. I made a small mistake in attempting to explain that there were twenty-five moose/mi² instead of the correct on-average twenty-five moose in twenty-five 1-mi² quadrats, or in other words, an average of one moose/mi². A friendly older biologist explained my mistake to me and we talked for a while. He introduced himself as Doug Clarke. Of course, he was C. H. D. Clarke, then the Chief Wildlife Biologist in Ontario, but with much well-known experiences in northern and western wildlife studies. He eventually (1971) authored a review of wolf attacks on people in Europe called The Beast of Gevaudan. He retired soon after, and I remember him with warmth. I also met so many other respected biologists that summer including Doug Pimlott, Bruce Stephenson, and Rod Standfield; it helped to talk to and watch those with more experience. In those days students, like me, seemed to have respect for the older cohort of biologists; today, in the main, students seem to lack that respect.

In between the interesting summers, I had to attend classes at the college in Guelph. In those years, we had no problem in finding jobs for the summer and classes generally started on the first day back from the field work. Study in winter; work in summer.

I needed something more to animate the sometimes-boring educational process, so I decided to play hockey for the intercollegiate (varsity) hockey team. Unfortunately, I soon experienced a bit of a setback. Ray German, a 235-pound star football player (later to play for two teams in the Canadian Football League) decided to see how tough I was during one of the practises; he was on my team. He had gotten a little tired of me continually skating around his defensive position with the puck and so he tried a new tactic. He tackled me like they do in football and because I was without pads and weighed in at about 135 pounds, my hockey career got delayed somewhat. After lying and sitting on the ice for one-half hour, an ambulance ride to the local hospital and two days on my back in a hospital bed, I was released with taped-up shoulders (the result of a broken collarbone, a dislocated shoulder, torn shoulder ligaments and other bruises). I finished the next two years playing for the class team instead. Now, I hear Ray is still playing hockey in his seventies; he was a better football player than hockey player!

Not to make a big-deal of this; but over the long-play of years, I withstood several more physical setbacks; after five major surgeries, five minor surgeries and a bunch of other genetic-related problems (no doubt some from my wild, war-like Scandinavian-Viking ancestors), I carried on (there was without doubt some Celtic, Pictic, Roman and other genes as well). For example, I had several appendicitis attacks over a twenty-two-year period. After hitting the floor on a couple of these attacks and without getting much sympathy or good instructions from the various doctors, I finally had it surgically removed in 1987. The surgeon admitted there were several rupture sites on the bloated organ. I was lucky, again!

The third summer of work in 1962 was more interesting than that of previous years. I had applied for a job with Eugene Bossenmaier (Manitoba Wildlife Branch) to work on woodland caribou and with the typical arrogance of youth thought I would get the job and so did not bother to make any other applications. I did not get the job; Dave Neave, later to be the Director of Wildlife in Alberta, did. I was in a panic with no job, but Don Simkin, who had recently transferred from the Sioux Lookout region to the Research Branch at Maple (later to be Ontario’s Director of Wildlife) hired Fred Gilbert and I to continue studies of woodland caribou in far northwestern Ontario (west of Red Lake and near Fort Severn on Hudson Bay).

I was so glad to be back in my own familiar boreal habitat and travelled by aircraft and canoe that whole summer. Near the border with Manitoba in the Irregular Lake study area, we worked over islands to push cow and calf caribou into the lake waters so they could be tagged. That was fun, but the caribou, already in low numbers perhaps from wolf predation after moose had colonized the area, were hard to find. Fred and I classified fifty-four caribou as to calves, yearlings, cows and bulls; the calf ratio was 35 percent. Eighty-six percent of adult cows had calves with them. Ten of twelve cow-calf groups were on islands rather than the mainland; this, no doubt, was an anti-predator strategy. The study area was thought to have from 100 to 150 caribou. We identified plants eaten by the caribou; this included ground and tree lichens and many species of herbs and shrubs. Most of their summer feeding seemed to be on highland areas and not in the lowland muskegs.

The work near the shores of Hudson Bay, the Coastal Tundra Belt, was even better. I’ll describe some of the exciting experiences later, but for now, just a few words on the caribou work. Jack Stoney, a Mushkego (Swampy) Cree from Fort Severn (photo), was our guide, a man in his thirties, and familiar with travelling along the coast of the Bay. The first several kilometers of the land back from the salt water are tundra. In this open habitat we had good visibility, but again the caribou were infrequently encountered. In total that summer in this far-northern habitat, 104 caribou were classified with a 23 percent calf ratio and this level of productivity stayed about the same in surveys in following years. We collected male caribou antlers and also caribou droppings for parasite analysis. The few caribou we saw were soon gone; always on the move.

The numbers of shore birds and waterfowl in this coastal area of Hudson Bay were astonishing and I thought then that this area should someday be a protected park just because of the abundant bird life on important nesting habitats. Their life during summer results from the extensive productivity of the warm shallow salt, brackish and fresh waters and the associated plant and invertebrate life, and the many linear marshes behind each raised-tundra beach (the former beaches of the Bay) for several kilometers inland. The flowering low-tundra plants of the coastal-raised beaches have intense colouration (apparently one of the adaptations to the short growing season) and add a lot of beauty to the landscape. I made a collection of the plants of the coastal area, and after collection, cleaning, drying, and pressing, and finally transport via canoe to Fort Severn, via float plane to Sioux Lookout, via train to Toronto, and via highway to Guelph, they became a part of the then botany department’s collection at the college (now the University of Guelph); that is, after considerable effort to key out and identify each species for a course in plant taxonomy.

Simkin summarized this woodland caribou project in 1965. He commented on how abundant this species had been in Ontario before the coming of modern European man and how they had declined to about 13,000 head, down from a rough estimate from aerial surveys of 37,000 to 45,000 caribou in 1955 (that was a possible decline of some 20,000 caribou over seven years). He thought contributing factors to this decline were logging (lumber and pulp operations) of the climax forest during the mid-years of the twentieth century, extensive forest fires, some of them set intentionally, hunting for meat for various kinds of development camps and predation by wolves and bears. No evidence of a disease problem was found. Kills by treaty Indians were poorly understood. A survey of caribou range was conducted by Teuvo Ahti, a Finnish lichenologist, with the result that available range was plentiful and not responsible for the low numbers of caribou. He estimated potential carrying capacity at 71,500 caribou for all of northern Ontario.

So, why were there so few caribou? This situation was to be repeated in other woodland caribou habitats right across the country in later years. One interesting observation that Simkin made was that all known incidents of mortality among calves were attributable to wolf predation. He thought hunting by aboriginal groups, predation, fires, and logging all could be important to local herds.

Muskrats of the Cumberland Marshes

In my final year at Guelph, I applied for a job in Saskatchewan. The work would center on fur-bearing mammals in the northern woods; it was a job where, in part, I would be working with trappers. That was exactly what I wanted. Tom Harper, a supervisory wildlife biologist from the Regina-based provincial Wildlife Branch interviewed me in Guelph. I must have responded positively, because a month or so later, I was on my way to Prince Albert. The job paid $414/month — not even $5,000 per year! I couldn’t wait to get started.

A few weeks later, Virden Palmer, a fur-management supervisor in Saskatchewan, and I were surrounded by 7-feet tall reed-cane grass (Phragmites) in the middle of a tremendously large marsh (Cut Beaver Lake), a part of the Saskatchewan River delta and marsh, the largest such habitat in North America. We could not see over the plants and there was no obvious trail for our canoe to follow. At times, I could see the faint shadow of the Pasquia Hills to the south some 80 kilometers away and that was about all we had to go on (in addition to the location of the sun) to find our way to our destination, a small lake in the marsh, Highbank Lake, which would become the focus of our muskrat studies for the next five years. Virden had travelled this route before, and as I wondered what I was going to do for the rest of my life in this jungle-like marsh, he finally managed to navigate successfully through the floating clumps of cane grass to find our way to the next creek. This followed an approximate 150-kilometer canoe trip down the remote Saskatchewan River to access the marshes because, in these years, there was no summer road. On the canoe trips, one had to be extremely cautious as the new Squaw Rapids Dam near Nipawin occasionally produced very low water and we had to be ever alert for sandbars and sweepers (floating, but anchored trees). We followed the fast water. Occasionally, we were able to fly in and on these flights moose were observed. On one return trip, I counted fifty-eight moose on the way in (one observer) and 158 on the way back (two observers). Big-game animals were abundant during those years, a period when wolves were being controlled.

Muskrats were an important species to the trapper of that period; in fact, eight years previously, in one season (1954-‘55), about two million pelts had made their way from the province to the world’s fur markets. The people of nearby Cumberland House, a village with mostly-Cree people started by Hudson’s Bay Company trader Samuel Hearne in 1774, depended heavily on the spring muskrat trapping to support their families. In fact this area, along with a slightly-smaller-sized marsh along the river across the border in Manitoba, was the most famous muskrat population in all of the Company’s territory which covered a good part of western Canada. Following the very dry years of most of the 1930s, when resulting harvests were erratic, the Hudson’s Bay Company was granted a lease of 303,000 acres in 1938 to manage the muskrat population and the trapping. The December count in 1939, on the entire lease, was only a little over 9,000 houses. The Company’s employees placed trappers in spring throughout the marsh and each family of trappers soon came to know their own trapping area. By 1940-‘42, the Company attempted to increase water levels by ditching to bring in water from the Saskatchewan River, built a crude dam at the lower end, and conducted some ditching between marshes. According to D. Denmark, a Company official, harvests were low and after another drought year, trapping was prohibited during 1943 following a low house count of 1,519 in December, 1942. A biologist, Leonard Butler of the University of Toronto, studied the marsh vegetation and made some biological observations of the muskrats of the area, but no marking was conducted.

By the mid-‘40s, the muskrat population responded to the water-control work and in spring 1946, the harvest had increased to 94,111 muskrats following a house count of 28,532 the previous early-winter. But, by 1950, the December house count was down again, to 3,950. Denmark had reported extensive frost penetration during the previous winter of 1949-‘50 and that major muskrat die-off sites could be found by watching the scavenging by ravens. The famous Iowa-muskrat biologist, Paul Errington, visited part of the area in 1948, and accompanied by Russell Robertson, the new marsh manager, and Denmark, reported that muskrats had died in great numbers from probably hemorrhagic disease and possibly tularemia (Denmark had contracted tularemia). Were the muskrats naturally cyclic with disease as one component of the cycle? Could spring trapping be of such intensity to eliminate or reduce such population fluctuations and occurrence of disease?

The Bay’s management continued to 1960-‘62, when a local trapper’s management group, the Cumberland Fur Cooperative Limited, was formed with the help of the provincial government, to manage the muskrat populations and trappers’ harvests. Local trappers formed a committee with Walter Fiddler its first president. Walter (descendent of the Canadian fur trader and surveyor, Peter Fidler, despite the different spelling) and his sons trapped on our Highbank Lake research area. In his mapping, the senior Fidler had produced 373 segmental sketches and eighty-eight maps of remote Canadian fur trade areas (Jenish 2004), a great accomplishment. The provincial government helped buy the Company out; as far as I know, they paid $30,000 for the buildings and equipment.

One of the biggest problems was maintaining water levels so the muskrats had several feet of water to find their food and survive the cold winters with thick ice. Along came Ducks Unlimited, a hunter-based organization supported primarily by American waterfowl hunters; who, starting in the early 1960s, built an inlet structure and canal from the Saskatchewan River to bring in more river water, established or improved water-control structures between the various marshes, and constructed a concrete outlet dam on the Birch River. This resulted in much more stable conditions for both muskrats and waterfowl.

Virden got our research started during the spring trapping season in 1963. Working with the trappers on Highbank Lake from March 10 to May 8, he encouraged a heavy harvest to see what effect this would have on the population the next year. From an early-winter count of eighty-six houses, they took 695 muskrats (most in excellent condition) — an average of eight muskrats per house. He also examined twenty-three adult females for fetuses and recorded an average of eight per female.

Brother of a more-famous Manitoba wildlife manager Joe Robertson (more on Joe later), Russell Robertson (who had been lease manager since at least 1948) and his faithful helper Simeon Bloomfield were keen on this research and helped to get our work started. One of our objectives was to determine what proportion of the fall population going into freeze-up was actually trapped during the following traditional spring season. Russell and his helpers counted muskrat houses on the various marshes using dog teams, and later, power-snowmachines, soon after freeze-up and sufficient ice thickness each year, and then with this information placed the appropriate number of trappers in each marsh the following spring. Eventually, we initiated mid-winter (late-November-December) harvests during 1966-‘67 and 1967-‘68, in part, to limit over-winter losses, and to see how the people would adapt to this earlier season. For this mid-winter season in much colder weather, we experimented with trapping techniques and trap types so that trappers would not open houses and promote freezing and subsequent poorer trapping in spring (details later).

In the beginning of our studies, our major job was to capture and tag muskrats in fall as close to freeze-up as possible and then to work with the trappers the following spring to see how many of these tagged rats made it through the winter. We double-ear-tagged 656 rats during four seasons in fall, 1964-‘67, and another 152 kits in two summers (1966 and 1967), all on Highbank Lake. An additional 559 muskrats were tagged on surrounding marshes in July-September, 1964 (n=261) and September, 1965 (n=298) to help determine inter-marsh movements. In 1965, I left the tagging program on Highbank a little late; when Peter Crane of Cumberland House and I started tagging, it was the fifteenth of October and there was a good half-inch or more of ice on Junction Creek, our route to Highbank. Each morning we had to smash our way through the ice to get to the lake (a distance of about 1 kilometer) which, thankfully, was still not frozen (winds kept the lake ice-free while the water in the protected tree-lined creeks froze). We tagged and released 218 rats of 234 handled that fall. During the fall of 1966, a season of mild weather, I left the tagging to October 21-28 and everything went well (twenty-nine houses trapped, 219 total captures).

In total (1964-‘67) of the four late-fall periods, we captured 747 muskrats at 110 houses, an average of 6.8 muskrats per house. Numbers of days trapped varied from three in 1964, seven in both 1965 and 1966 and eight in 1967, but the ratio of captures/house/day were very similar; 1964-0.7, 1965-0.8, 1966-1.0 and 1967-0.8. These results suggested that the numbers of muskrats on average living in each house at freeze-up were similar in the four years.

Whole body weights of muskrats allowed me to separate adults and juveniles and to differentiate litters in fall; the average difference between weights of juvenile muskrats in successive litters was 6 to 7 ounces. This seemed a reasonable figure because Paul Errington (1963), working in Iowa, found average weights of one-month-old rats to be 6.4 ounces, and gestation period for the muskrat is about one month. Most of our adult female rats were having either two or three litters each summer; a few with one. For example, at