028 Franklin Artifacts, Bear 148's Wanderings and B.C.'s Interior Rainforest

Story 1 - Banff Officials Launch New Campaign

This summer, Parks Canada is launching a new public education campaign to try to educate visitors about the dangers of feeding animals in the park. Large images of a wolf with a plastic bottle in its mouth with the caption 'human food kills wildlife' are beginning to appear in and around Banff. The other key message that will appear on posters is 'Give Wildlife Space'.

Fines for feeding or harassing wildlife can be as high as $25,000 but the cost to wildlife can be even higher.

Over the past few decades, front-line staff has been gradually reduced in the parks and it has really begun to hurt the ability of parks to keep tabs on visitor behaviour. For a number of years, we have had the wildlife guardian programs with staff driving park roads looking for wildlife jams and educating visitors on safe behaviour around animals. It is a very successful program and it would be a great program to keep expanding.

Recently I had the opportunity to teach several this year's new guardians a course in park interpretation and from what I could see, we've got some great new guardians ready to hit the roads this summer.

Story 2 - Who owns the Franklin Artifacts

After years of searching, Parks Canada solved the second part of a 160-year mystery last summer with the discovery of the final ship of the ill-fated Franklin Expedition which disappeared without a trace in 1845 while searching for the fabled Northwest Passage.

They discovered the HMS Terror in, of all places, Terror Bay, off the coast of King William Island. This lonely outpost sits in a narrow channel to the west of Baffin Bay in Canada's Nunavut Territory.

Two years earlier, they discovered the HMS Erebus, believed to be the ship that Franklin died on.

Before Parks Canada discovered the Erebus in 2014, while the ships were the property of England, the U.K. agreed to transfer ownership of all the artifacts except for those significant to the royal navy…oh yah and gold. They want the gold (PS, so far, no gold).

Despite this agreement, so far talks to determine ownership keep stalling out. Obviously, Canada would like to have this settled before we continue to sink more money into additional archaeological work on the two sites.

According to a recent article in the Calgary Herald, Parks Canada Spokeswoman Meaghan Bradley said: "Discussions with the government of the United Kingdom on the transfer of the Franklin artifacts are ongoing".

Story 3 - Bear 148 gets Cranky

There have been several stories about bear 148 recently in the press. They have been blown out of proportion in many ways and now is the time to bring in some calmness to the discussion.

Bear 148 took over her mother's turf, which includes the town of Banff when her mother passed away a few years ago. If a bear can take advantage of a territory close to people, but still walk the tightrope of wildness, it can be a pretty good place to live.

We're just heading into the calving season and so she'll be hanging around the townsite looking to find an unattended calf. Grizzlies normally take around 45% of newborn elk and moose calves. She won't be alone; cougars and wolves will also patrol the periphery looking for an opportunity for some elk veal.

In April, she trotted behind a Canmore woman that was kick-sledding along the Spray River Fireroad in Banff. Kick-sledding is a type of dog sledding and while dogs are not allowed on this trail in the winter, they are allowed after mid-April.

In a second incident bear 148 followed a hiking party, also with a dog, for 20 minutes. They were hiking on Mount Norquay when they encountered the bear. They were not carrying bear spray at the time.

And just this past week, 148 made headlines by walking through Banff's high school girl's rugby match on the playing fields in Banff. Needless to say, it was an exciting few minutes for the girls whose team is coincidentally called the bears.

Story 4 - Interior Rainforest

The Columbia Mountains represent a landscape often referred to as the Interior Wet Belt. In most cases, when we talk about rainforests, we're talking about a coastal landscape. In fact, this is true for 98% of the world’s rainforests. What makes Canada's rainforest unique is that we also have continental rainforests. What the heck is a continental rainforest you ask?

While rainforests are ALMOST exclusively a coastal phenomenon, in rare situations, rainforest-like conditions can occur far inland from the coast. We refer to these as continental rainforests.

Summers in the Columbia Mountains are similar in temperature to the coastal rainforest, yet winters are quite a bit colder. While summer rains drop 320 to 452 mm of rain on the Columbia Mountains, it represents only a fraction of the rainfall soaking the coastal rainforests every year.

You might wonder then, why is this considered a rainforest if it doesn't get enough, well, rain? The simplest reason is that precipitation has two forms…rain and snow. Winter snowfall in the Columbia's can be dramatic, with higher elevations buried under 10 or more metres of snow.

This massive accumulation of snow means a long and prolonged summer melt, helping to ensure that soils never dry out. So, while it doesn't technically get enough overall moisture to really be considered a rainforest, the seemingly endless summer melt allows it to essentially simulate one. Soils that would dry out in other landscapes are constantly soaked by a seemingly endless runoff from melting winter snowfalls.

These interior temperate rainforests are not only fascinating, but they are significant on a global scale. Only 2% of rainforests worldwide occur far enough away from coastal areas to be considered continental rainforests. In future episodes, we'll take a deeper look into some of the incredible natural and human history of these forests