Pandemic heli-ski shutdown doubled range of some B.C. caribou, study says

A pause in B.C. heli-skiing operations during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic led some endangered caribou populations to more than double their home-ranges, a new study has found.

Southern mountain caribou once ranged as far south as Idaho, but today they hold the tragic title as the latest large mammal to be wiped off the face of the contiguous United States. Today, however, that same winter range overlaps with heli-skiing operations, a primary human disturbance in late winter stretching across 40,000 square kilometres of mountain, according to the study's authors.

“Humans leave the landscape for one year — is anything really going to happen?” said Gill, who works between UBCO’s Quantitative Ecology Lab and Biodiversity Pathways, a independent research group focused on caribou.To find out, Gill and five other biologists from UBCO and Environment and Climate Change Canada used collars fitted with GPS trackers to trace the movement of 120 female caribou between 2018 and 2022.

What changed was how far they could travel to track down food. During the 2020 “anthropause,” the mean home-range of the three caribou groups grew 80 to 120 per cent larger compared to years when normal ski operations dominated. Heli-ski group says it hasn't given up on expired agreement The research comes six years after the expiration of a memorandum of understanding between the heli-ski industry and the B.C. government. The agreement said that operators must remain 500 metres away from caribou while in flight, and if the animals were seen, skiers should avoid the area for 48 hours.

“We are in continual discussions with the government related to wildlife management and we are very supportive of caribou recovery efforts. I have no information as to when, or if, wildlife policies will be renegotiated,” he said. “There's still a lot of unknowns,” Gill said. “I mean, we don't know where the heli-ski industry fly and how they fly and where they are relative to those animals. That's a big piece of the equation that we don't understand.”

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