n the 1980s, when North American newspaper headlines generally focused on far-off issues like the Cold War, a few wild animals edged their way onto the front pages: A wolf from Montana had traveled all the way to Mile Zero of the Alaska Highway. A lynx from Canada’s Yukon Territory turned up in a trap 800 miles south of its hunting grounds. The lengths of these journeys would never have been known if these animals hadn’t sported the faded jewelry of wildlife research projects such as ear tags and radio-collars, which allowed the hunters and trappers who found them to cobble together their incredible stories.
“Strange,” wrote reporters. “Such extraordinary movements are difficult to explain.” Some dismissed them as simple anomalies.
But then, in the 1990s, came satellite transmitters, which, as quickly as scientists could fit them onto animals, showed the world that such “extraordinary” movements were, in fact, quite the norm. A bull trout swam more than 1,500 miles from central British Columbia to the Northwest Territories. A pair of cougars migrated from the east slopes of the Rockies to the interior ranges and back again. A grizzly bear wandered across the province of British Columbia. A wolverine loped 700 miles through snow.
None of those journeys, however, compared to the incredible travels of Pluie the wolf. Trapped and collared with a satellite transmitter just outside Canada’s Banff National Park in summer 1991, the young female set off on a search for new territory and a mate, spanning two provinces, two states, two countries, and dozens of protected areas in the process, and covering an area equivalent to 15 Yellowstone National Parks (about 40,000 square miles).
By then enough evidence about inbreeding and other problems plaguing small, isolated populations had accumulated to the point that scientists couldn’t ignore the zigzag message Pluie had scribbled across their maps: No national park—not even Yellowstone, Glacier, Banff, or Jasper—was big enough to meet the needs of such wide-ranging wildlife. To conserve them and their important top-down role in the ecosystem, a new conservation paradigm was needed—one that looked beyond the old model of protecting islands of wildlife habitat and, instead, connected them. A new Yellowstone to Yukon Conservation Initiative, or “Y2Y,” aimed to engage the public, government, industry, and advocacy groups to work together to maintain wildlife movement between national parks in the Rockies.
Flash forward several years later to Banff National Park in Alberta, Canada, where I’m working as a ranger. I’m summoned to the office of my supervisor, who rifles through a stack of papers, signing multiple requisitions before pausing at a thick document, which he slides to the side of his desk.
“Lots of development proposals coming in,” he sighed. “A new parking lot at the ski area, another subdivision in the town site, a project to widen the highway.… The wildlife are running out of room.”
I nodded but held my tongue.
“We need a study on wildlife corridors,” he said. “Design one, run it, and come back with some results.”
Having graduated with a university degree in biology only a couple of years earlier, I was flattered by the assignment but overwhelmed. It was 1993—Pluie had just finished her remarkable journey, Y2Y had grown into a group of 100+ conservation groups and scientists who were mapping the region, and other alliterative corridor proposals were cropping up around the continent: Algonquin to Adirondack (A2A) Rainforest to the Rockies (R2R), and Bering to Baja (B2B). But the science of wildlife corridors was in its infancy. I knew the definition—a conduit for the movement of wild animals, seeds, and other organisms to insulate against the negative effects of inbreeding, food shortages, and calamities like wildfire, flood, and other large-scale disturbances—but not much more.
“Wildlife corridors?” I blurted back to my boss. “Where are they? What do they look like? What shape? How wide?”
“That’s what I want you to find out,” he replied.
Banff’s steep mountains, narrow valleys, and diverse human developments made it the perfect laboratory for such innovative research, for it provided a made-to-order combination of ha-bitat patches (wide, valley-bottom swaths of land where wildlife feed, rest, and reproduce unencumbered) linked by wildlife corridors of varying slope, length, width, and human impact. All we had to do was survey animal tracks at the entrances and exits to such natural and man-made squeeze points and, after a few winters, see what kinds of corridors did and didn’t get used.
In the 1980s, when North American newspaper headlines generally focused on far-off issues like the Cold War, a few wild animals edged their way onto the front pages: A wolf from Montana had traveled all the way to Mile Zero of the Alaska Highway. A lynx from Canada’s Yukon Territory turned up in a trap 800 miles south of its hunting grounds. The lengths of these journeys would never have been known if these animals hadn’t sported the faded jewelry of wildlife research projects such as ear tags and radio-collars, which allowed the hunters and trappers who found them to cobble together their incredible stories.
