How a familiar species of mammal changed Canadian wolves' behaviour

As humans become more urban, it is easy to lose touch with our natural environment and the effect we have on it
Wolves on Vargas Island, BC Photograph: Jacqueline Windh

For decades, Parks Canada's wildlife studies tended to target ecosystems that were pristine, where there was no interference or "noise" from humans in the signal of how the natural system behaved. But when wildlife-human conflict specialist Bob Hansen set out to study interactions between large carnivores and humans on Vancouver Island, he felt that this approach was not quite right: it ignored one significant species of large mammal.

Hansen works in the Pacific Rim National Park Reserve, a long but narrow national park that occupies approximately 100km of Vancouver Island's wild and rugged west coast. For decades, wolves and cougars were seldom seen here – a result of bounty hunting, trapping and culls undertaken from the late 1800s to the mid-1900s. But suddenly, in the winter of 1998-99, wolf sightings became common in and around the national park. Many of these encounters were aggressive, including 16 attacks on pet dogs. By 2003, aggressive cougar encounters also had started to become common.

Hansen recalls a moment in the spring of 2003, as he and his colleagues hunted for a cougar that had been stalking hikers in a predatory manner. "I remember standing on the beach, with this feeling that, after five years of reacting to wolf and cougar incidents here, the landscape had somehow changed in some fundamental way. And we didn't know why, or how."

He suspected that some of the changes in the carnivore behaviour might be driven by human behaviours: changes in habitat resulting from evolving logging practices; as well as increased human visitation to the Park. He proposed a research project, now known as the WildCoast project, which would study humans every bit as much as it studied animals.

Hansen and his co-workers found that changing human behaviour, on both the societal and individual scale, had indeed influenced predator behaviour. The beginning of industrial clearcut logging had created ideal feeding habitat for deer, just when predator populations were at their lowest, following the decades of bounty hunting; deer populations soared. When carnivores started to recolonise the region, they found abundant prey animals. But the environmental protests of the 1980s meant that clearcuts began to grow over. The deer, now being predated upon by a healthy carnivore population, were also losing their feeding habitat. By the late 1990s, with the deer disappearing, hungry wolves expanded their hunting territory out of remote areas and into habitat used by humans.


So far distanced, both physically and mentally, from our natural environment, it can be easy to lose any sense of connection to our ecosystem. As our species becomes increasingly urban (as of 2008, over half of the world's human population lives in areas classified as "urban"), this problem grows. We isolate ourselves in communities that are enclosed within cities, or, even worse, not rooted in any geographical place at all: communities that are online. We stop looking towards the real world, in spite of our being a part of it. The most obvious outcome of this tendency is human-induced climate change. As we lose touch with our natural environment, we also lose touch with the effects that we have upon it.


It is hard to imagine such forward-thinking actions happening any time soon in north America. But, as disconnected as we are from nature in our daily lives, we must remember that we are a part of it, no matter where we live. And our ecosystem affects us, regardless of whether we choose to think about it. Despite all of our technological successes, for the most part, we are a species no more special than any other. For some of us, this is a foundation of spirituality; for all of us, it is a scientific fact.

Two differences between ourselves and other species are our capacity to modify the ecosystem on a planetary scale and our ability to understand the consequences of what we are doing. The WildCoast project reminds us that we are but one species of many. Bolivia's declaration reminds us to respect all, and to be mindful of the future.