For the Welland Tribune: by Adam Shoalts

It was a deathly cold night; a fresh snowfall blanketed the ground while pale moonlight eerily illuminated the rolling fields and surrounding deciduous forests. Immediately in front of me lay a grisly sight: the mangled remains of a half-devoured deer carcass.

After nights spent wandering, I felt I was at last close to the object of my search: Pelham’s elusive cougar.

This evidently was a fresh kill. The cougar, so I hoped, was still somewhere nearby. Perhaps right behind me, in the thick bushes.

But to start from the beginning.

Cougars, also variously known as panthers, mountain lions or pumas, once inhabited virtually the whole of this continent, save for the Arctic. However, increasing human populations, expanding farmlands, and above all rampant hunting of these big cats resulted in the general belief that they had been extirpated from not only Ontario, but the whole of the northeastern portion of North America.

An adult male cougar can weigh up to 90 kilograms (200 pounds), and in western North America where cougars remain relatively wide-spread, cougar attacks on humans occur periodically, sometimes resulting in death.

The last known shooting of an indigenous cougar in Ontario took place in 1884. Some 24 years later in 1908 naturalist C.W. Nash asserted in his Manual of Vertebrates in Ontario that the cougar had been extirpated from the province.

That has remained the Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources official position on cougars to date. For decades many experts even believed the eastern cougar (a subspecies of cougar) was extinct. In recent years though, reports have emerged that cougars still exist in the wilds of Ontario.

The evidence to support this belief is quite compelling. In 1995 scat discovered in northwestern Ontario was identified by a DNA analysis as cougar scat, and earlier this year the MNR confirmed that scat discovered in the Wainfleet bog was positively identified as cougar scat.

Recently, residents have reported cougar sightings in north Pelham, which coincides with a province-wide trend—since 2002 more than 500 people have reported cougar sightings in Ontario.

The Niagara Peninsula, while hardly a wilderness, is surprisingly a hotspot for these sightings. The cougar’s primary prey is whitetail deer, and the explosion of the deer population in southern Ontario, including Niagara, might be responsible for the cougar’s resurgence.

Some skeptics have argued that recent cougar sightings in eastern North America are not of wild, indigenous cougars, but in fact are only escaped or released animals from private owners or zoos.

This conjecture though, seems rather dubious. Firstly, cougar sightings are scattered all across the province, and are quite numerous, which casts considerable doubt on the notion that all of these pumas are merely escaped pets.

What is far more probable is that the cougars of eastern North America were never fully extirpated, only severely endangered, and are now staging something of a comeback.

The eastern cougar is in fact listed as an endangered species in Canada, and local lore as related by old-timers holds that remnant cougar populations have always existed in the remote interior regions of New Brunswick, as well as the Appalachian Mountains.

Bruce S. Wright argued in his 1972 book, The Eastern Panther: A Question of Survival, that the elusive cat had not been entirely extirpated. Wright detailed extensive eyewitness accounts of cougars tracks, and found other evidence of wild cougars, such as dens.

More recently, a story by Bob Reguly in the sportsman magazine Outdoor Canada discussed the discovery of cougars’ tracks and dens in Ontario (one such sight was in Niagara), and quoted several MNR officials as saying they believe some wild cougars still exist in Ontario.

Finally, this past summer a column by myself appeared in The Tribune detailing my own ongoing quest to find cougars in the Wainfleet bog.

When the recent reports of a cougar emerged in Pelham, it created a rather hysterical reaction. The Niagara Regional Police sent a detective to investigate, the MNR set up cameras on a property where sightings occured, and the town even hired a “professional” trapper to find the beast.

I thought I might take some nocturnal excursions of my own in a location I suspected was prime cougar habitat.

And sure enough, sometime past midnight, with my whole body trembling (from the cold of course) I seemingly at last crossed paths with a cougar. In the darkness, I could not see it: but evidently, I had startled it from a fresh kill.

Not one to disturb a cougar on the prowl, after a brief investigation, I decided to leave and let the cougar be.

Hopefully, all of Niagara’s residents will leave these magnificent animals unharmed and allow this wildlife success story to continue. After all, it is against the law to kill an endangered species.

For the Welland Tribune: by Adam Shoalts

Deep in the Canadian wilderness, some 400 kilometres north of Lake Superior, I paddled along a wild, majestic river with my friend Wesley Crowe in the summer of 2004. We were awed by the river’s remoteness its ancient forests, the abundance of wildlife, and the intensity of the white water rapids.

As a lover of wilderness travel, I knew I had found a gem in terms of pristine, unspoiled wilderness—something that is increasingly difficult to find these days.

Unfortunately, in the twenty-first century the world’s once vast reaches of unsettled wilderness are by and large a thing of the past. The population explosion of the twentieth combined with industrialization left the previously green spaces of the earth ravaged, depleted, and in many cases, altogether vanished.

Humans have trampled over every last corner of the earth’s land surface, and roads, human habitation, and pollution of one sort or another can be found even in the deepest pockets of remaining wilderness.

Yet this river we were travelling, the Otoskwin-Attawapiskat, seemed to be a miraculous exception to all this. Here in Canada, successive provincial and federal governments have been guilty of taking the country’s wilderness for granted; erroneously believing it was sufficiently vast to endure forever.

As a result of this major misconception, comparatively little of Canada’s great stretches of wild were protected, and hence the reason it is hard to find much pure wilderness remaining today.

It therefore came as welcomed news when the federal government recently announced that the fame Nahanni River in the North-West Territories would be further protected by the expansion of the existing Nahanni National Park Reserve.

The Nahanni River is a sublime place of towering limestone canyons, raging white water rapids, and spectacular waterfalls.

While I personally have not as of yet canoed the Nahanni River, I have canoed a river that surpasses the Nahanni in remoteness and nearly equals it in majesty, but has nothing of the Nahanni’s renown.

After graduating from high school, my friend and I wanted to attempt to canoe the remotest, most untouched river that we could find.  Naturally then, we focused our attention on one of the largest intact areas of wilderness left on earth, the vast stretch of boreal forest and muskeg that covers the far northern part of Ontario.

We selected for our trip the almost unheard of Otoskwin-Attawapiskat River system, a 750-kilometre waterway that slices through the heart of this last great wilderness before emptying into James Bay.

I was awe-struck by the beauty of this wild river, and afterwards recounted the tale of our journey in my book, Sense of Adventure, published last year by Cedar Tree Press.

While the upper section of the Otoskwin-Attawapiskat is partially protected by a provincial park, the lower section is Crown land and thus remains unprotected from industrial projects.

As a result of poor, short-term polices, or rather a lack of polices by the provincial and federal governments, Ontario’s far north is now under ever-increasing threat from industrial development projects, especially mining and logging. This includes the Otoskwin-Attawapiskat River.

De Beers, a South African diamond conglomerate, has plans to establish what would be Ontario’s first diamond mine, on the Otoskwin-Attawapiskat River, approximately 90 kilometres inland from the James Bay coast.

Despite calls from numerous conservation and environmental groups to halt this ecologically destructive project, De Beers has been granted the go-ahead and construction is expected to commence in 2008.

If built, the mine will necessitate the construction of roads and hydro corridors penetrating into the depths of this wilderness, a giant open-pit mine over two kilometres in width, as well as an industrial complex.

The muskeg surrounding the proposed site of the mine must be drained, which will irrevocably destroy the area’s natural environment. A massive amount of water, 100,000 cubic metres or roughly 40 Olympic-sized swimming pools, is expected to be daily pumped out of the diamond pit and into the nearby river.

It is believed that at least 5,000 sqaure hectares will be affected by the mine, thus forever runing this magnificent land. The river itself is almost certain to become contaiminated, and numerous animal species, including the threatened woodland caribou, will lose a huge portion of their habitat.

With the Ontario provincial election looming, now may be the last chance for concerned citizens to make their voices heard on this urgent issue.

I for one think it is high time to make our politicians realize that wantonly destroying the last great wilderness of the world in order to satisfy the greed of foreign mineral companies is little short of madness.

Pristine, unspoiled wilderness is rarer than diamonds these days, hence the reason I believe we should save this river—the real gem—from suffering the same fate of all too many other wild places.

For the Welland Tribune: by Adam Shoalts

With my sturdy walking stick in hand, I wandered alone through a labyrinth of lush foliage, inhabited by venomous snakes, prowling panthers, and blood-sucking insects.
The heat and humidity felt suffocating.

Was I in the South American jungle? No, that trip of mine, alas, lies further down the road.

I was in fact, still right here in the Niagara Peninsula, somewhere deep in the Wainfleet bog: the largest protected area in the peninsula. It consists of 801 hectares of land owned by the Niagara Peninsula Conservation Auhtority, as well as a smaller tract belonging to the Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources (MNR).

I am familiar with the Wainfleet Bog, having worked one summer for the MNR during which I spent several weeks conducting soil sampling in the bog.

The Wainfleet Bog is the largest remaining bog in all of southern Ontario and constitutes the greatest stretch of unbroken greenery within the confines of Niagara. It contains an astonishing diversity of flora, including 350 different species of bog plants.

The bog is home to the eastern Massassuga rattlesnake, an endangered species and the only venomous snake native to Ontario.

However, rattlesnakes, while fascinating in their own right, were not the object of my visit to the bog on this occasion.

I ventured into the deciduous forests of the bog to seek out evidence of the elusive eastern cougar, which officially has been extirpated from this province for nearly a century. Cougars, also variously known as panthers, mountain lions or pumas, once inhabited virtually the whole of this continent, save for the far north.

An adult male cougar can weigh up to 90 kilograms (200 pounds), and in western North America, where cougars remain relatively widespread, cougar attacks on humans occur periodically, sometimes resulting in death.

Increasing human populations, expanding farmlands, and above all rampant hunting of these big cats resulted in the general belief that they had been extirpated from not only Ontario, but the whole of the northeastern portion of North America.

The last known shooting of an indigenous cougar in Ontario took place in 1884, in Creemore. In 1908, the naturalist C.W. Nash’s book, Manual of Vertebrates in Ontario, was published, in which he asserted that the cougar had been extirpated from Ontario.

That has remained the MNR’s official position on cougars. For decades many experts even believed the eastern cougar was extinct.

However, today some MNR biologists and many others firmly believe cougars still exist in the wilds of Ontario.

The evidence to support this belief is quite convincing and manifold. In 1995 scat discovered in northwestern Ontario was identified by a DNA analysis as cougar scat, and only a few weeks ago the MNR confirmed that scat discovered in the Wainfleet Bog was positively identified as cougar scat.

Hence the reason I set out alone into the bog, hoping to uncover further evidence of these magnificent predators, or perhaps even catch a glimpse of one.

While I was unsuccessful in my quest on this particular day, in Ontario more than 500 people have reported cougar sightings since 2002.

The Niagara Peninsula, while hardly a wilderness, is surprisingly a hotspot for these sightings. The cougar’s primary prey is whitetail deer and the explosion of the deer population in southern Ontario, including Niagara, might be responsible for the resurgence of the cougar.

Some sceptics have argued that recent cougar sightings in eastern North America are not of wild, indigenous cougars, but in fact are only escaped or released animals from private owners or zoos.

This conjecture though seems rather dubious. Firstly, cougar sightings are scattered all across the province and are quite numerous, which casts considerable doubt on the notion that all of these pumas are merely escaped pets.

What is far more probable is that the cougars of eastern North America were never fully extirpated, only severely endangered, and are now staging something of a comeback.

The eastern cougar is in fact listed as an endangered species in Canada, and local lore as related by old timers holds that remnant cougar populations have long existed in the remote interior regions of New Brunswick, as well as the Appalachian Mountains.

Bruce S. Cartwright, a naturalist and conservationist, argued in his 1972 book, The Eastern Panther: A Question of Survival, that the elusive cat had not been entirely extirpated. right detailed extensive eyewitness accounts of cougars, photogaphed cougar tracks and found other evidence of wild cougars, such as dens.

More recently, a story by Bob Reguly in the sportsman magazine Outdoor Canada discussed the discovery of cougar’s tracks and dens in southern Ontario (one such site was in Niagara), and quoted several MNR officials as saying they believe some wild cougars still exist in Ontario.

As for myself, I want to believe in this wildlife success story, and intend to continue my solitary wanderings through the woods until I see one of these magnificent animals with my own eyes.

For the Welland Tribune: by Adam Shoalts

For the past six years there has been talk of inflicting another scar upon Niagara’s landscape in the form of a major new highway.

This proposed highway, known variously as the mid-peninsula corridor or the Niagara to GTA transportation corridor, has from the start faced stiff opposition from environmentalists.

Indisputably, a four-lane highway along the lines of the current Queen Elizabeth Way would be detrimental to Niagara’s natural environment.

Wildlife movements would be severely restricted, woodlots would be sliced in two, and of course air quality would deteriorate as a result of the increase in fossil fuels via vehicles.

More specifically, environmentalists have rasied concerns that a new highway would further endanger the already beleaguered Niagara Escarpment.

The fact that in 1990 UNESCO designated the escarpment a World Biosphere Reserve in recognition of its ecological uniqueness is no guarantee that a four-lane highway will not cross it.

To permit a major highway to cut across this ridge of greenery would be a terrible shame. The escarpment’s current role as a wildlife corridor would be put in serious jeopardy, not to mention the ruinous effects on the natural beauty of the area.

Additionally, any creation of a mega-highway through Niagara’s countryside would shatter rural peace and quiet, and radically transform the surrounding area.

As of yet, no definite route for a highway has been determined. However, it is believed any route would traverse southern Niagara, including Wainfleet and Lincoln.

It is hard to conceive that anyone currently living in these rural areas could desire a noisy mega-highway running through their backyards. And of course, a major highway would cause neighbouring residential property values to plunge.

Nor is it at all logical, in light of a little problem called global warming, to be contemplating the construction of another highway.

After all, shouldn’t the provincial government (and all other levels of government for that matter) be doing everything possible to encourage people to drive less and instead rely more on public transport?

Certainly, constructing four-lane highways would seem like a major step backwards in the fight against climate change.

Even if one were to cast aside all environmental, aesthetic, and human concerns, there are still strong economic grounds to oppose the idea of constructing a highway.

The whole basis for establishing another highway linking the Greater Toronto Area to Niagara and Buffalo revolves around the rather dubious assumption that highway traffic is going to increase or at least remain at current levels.

However, for this to happen a steady supply of affordable oil is required, and with inexorably rising gas prices it appears the era of cheap oil is over.

High gas prices are a result of increasing demand in developing nations, particularly China and India. As such, it is not something that is likely to change.

Even more importantly, world oil production is inevitably going to peak, which will probably occur within the next couple of decades at the latest. (See Robert L. Hirsch et al., “Peaking Oil Production: Sooner Rather Than Later?, Issues in Science and Technology 21(3) [1991].)

Accordingly, as the world’s oil reserves are depleted, gas prices will skyrocket to a point where the average Canadian can no longer afford to fuel up regularly.

It is therefore apparent that people will be driving vehicles less, not more, in the not-too-distant future.

Claims that biofuels can supply the solution to the world’s oil supply crisis are pure fantasy.

Repeated studies have proven that the production of biofuels actually necessitates the expenditure of more energy than is worth the effort. (See Marcelo E. Dias de Oliveria et al., “Ethanol as Fuel: Energy, Carbon Dioxide Balances, and Ecological Footprint.” Bioscience 55, July 2005.)

Furthermore, with oil prices rising transport-trucking will rapidly become uneconomical, resulting in a greater reliance upon shipping by rail and canal.

Without transport trucks on the roads, and with fewer vehicles in general, the construction of new mega-highways becomes utterly unnecessary.

So why should we invest millions in the construction of a major new highway, and burden future generations with something that in all probability won’t be needed?

Fortunately, the provincial government has proceeded at a snail’s pace on this issue, and has thankfully not yet ruled out constructing rail services as an alternative to a highway.
If the reader, like me, does not want to see this highway built, I urge you to visit www.niagara-gta.com and submit your concerns to the Niagara-GTA Corridor environmental assessment committee, or write to your member of provincial parliament.

For the Welland Tribune: by Adam Shoalts

A recent walk in the woods confirmed to me what the calendar confidently asserts: spring has indeed returned to Niagara.

The birds were singing, the frogs were croaking, the pike were running, the swamps were brimming, and best of all, the hordes of mosquitoes were still absent.

I think it’s only natural that such beautiful spring weather should breed optimism for the future—optimism about real change being implemented in conservation issues here in Niagara.

Specifically, that this upcoming summer, the good folks who constitute the upper echelons of the Niagara Peninsula Conservation Authority will finally experience a long overdue conversion to environmentalism.

Readers can be forgiven if they mistakenly believed that environmentalists already run this organization. The name after all, certainly seems to suggest it.

As a matter of fact, the NPCA does contribute positively in some respects to conservation. However, in other respects, this organization falls dramatically short of its own mandate.

The NPCA includes 36 conservation areas across the Niagara Peninsula, which combined encompass roughly 2,800 hectares. Unfortunately, the NPCA fails to preserve significant portions of some of these sites.

Indeed, strange as it may sound to someone not acquainted with these sites, the NPCA in fact engages in ecologically destructive practices at many of them.

For example, the NPCA irrationally and irresponsibly maintains artificial habitat, namely mown lawns, which has nothing to do with the conservation of Niagara’s natural habitat. Obviously, short-mown grass cannot provide needed habitat for wildlife.

The mown lawns of the NPCA occupy space that should and could be used to plant trees. This would restore at least some of Niagara’s natural habitat, which has been regrettably destroyed over the years.

Indeed, when one simply considers that fewer than three centuries ago, Niagara was entirely blanketed by virgin forests, it should reinforce the immense scale of deforestation that has since occured. The peninsula underwent a dramatic transformation from virtually 100 percent forest cover to perhaps five percent today.

Reforesting the entire peninsula is of course a fantasy. However, what can be restored should be without delay. The NPCA, unfortunately, seems not to share this view.

With a population in excess of 400,000 people, the Niagara Peninsula is one of the most densely populated areas in the whole of Canada. As such, we cannot afford to persist with hopelessly outdated approaches to conservation.

Furthermore, the NPCA’s construction of a multimillion-dollar complex at Ball’s Falls is quite frankly outrageous.

The construction of such a large building will not only degrade the natural environment on site, but also severely diminish the historic atmosphere of the place.

Claims the new visitors centre will be environmentally friendly are meaningless; any construction of a large modern building on a conservation and heritage site is not an improvement. Moreover, it does not take a genius to perceive that those funds could be put to infinitely better use elsewhere.

Such as, for example, the purchasing of tree saplings to be planted at Chippawa Creek and Long Beach conservation areas, to name but two of many sites in need of reforestation.

These two conservation areas, Chippawa Creek and Long Beach, are abominations: far from preserving a natural environment and providing habitat to wildlife, these sites have become virtual trailer parks. In contrast to maintaining the natural ecosystem, the parks contain vast stretches of mown lawns and motor homes, as well as basketball and volleyball courts.

The NPCA would do well to reforest these sites, as far as feasible, and to limit camping to strictly tents, not trailers. This would perhaps scare off a few of the surbanites who currently spend their summers there in all the comforts of their trailer-homes.

However, by signifying that the NPCA is at last becoming serious about conservation and reforestation, new visitors and campers would surely fill the void.

With opinion polls indicating that environmental issues are at long last taking centre stage in the minds of Canadians, what better time could there be for the NPCA to truly go green?

And once the NPCA converts to true environmentalism and ceases the mowing of lawns at conservation sites, perhaps other organizations, such as the Niagara Parks Commission, can be presuaded to follow suit.

Adam Shoalts for the Welland Tribune.