"Like A Deathwatch" - Canadian Species Crash, But Legally Protected Status Hard To Come By

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In a scientific paper recently published in the journal Conservation Biology, for example, Scott Findlay, a University of Ottawa biologist, and his colleagues showed that species such as the Atlantic cod, which has declined by as much as 99 per cent in some regions, were less likely to be listed if they had commercial or subsistence harvesting value. In a separate study done for the same journal, Jeff Hutchings and Marco Festa-Bianchet, the current and past chairmen of COSEWIC, found there was also a significant bias against listing any fish or mammal that dwells in the Canadian North. None of the 10 Nunavut species on COSEWIC's list, for example, are on the SARA registry.

It's not as if this was all dropped on the government's shoulders in 2003 when the Species at Risk Act went into force. Even before legislation came into effect, hundreds of studies had raised the red flag, warning the government that wildlife from all across the country were threatened or on the brink of extinction. In the 1960s, for example, there were an estimated 26,000 Peary caribou inhabiting the islands of the High Arctic. The animal is found only in Canada.

A series of catastrophic freeze-ups in the 1970s and 1990s, however, resulted in most of the animals starving to death because they could no longer crater through the hard snow and ice on land to get food. In response to this precipitous decline, COSEWIC classified the Peary caribou as threatened way back in 1979. Then, as numbers continued to drop, it declared the animals on Banks Island and the Queen Elizabeth Islands as endangered in 1991. COSEWIC confirmed their sorry state when it reassessed the status of the animal in 2004.

Despite this 45-year decline, virtually nothing has been done to help the Peary caribou recover. There are now, at best, no more than 2,000 animals left. No one knows for sure because the Canadian Wildlife Service stopped monitoring the fate of the species back in the 1990s when the Edmonton-based scientist responsible retired and was not replaced. That left the cash-strapped Northwest Territories and Nunavut governments to pick up the slack.

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http://www.edmontonjournal.com/opinion/like%20death%20watch/2425928/story.html

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1. Sorry, dupe - Mods pls delete.

nt