Journey to Churchill Exhibit Disappointing

During a recent visit to Winnipeg, Manitoba, I stopped in at the Assiniboine Park Zoo to have a look at their new Journey to Churchill exhibit. Reportedly constructed at a cost of $80 million, the exhibit complex is the first phase (along with a new zoo entranceway) of the zoo’s planned redevelopment.

As expected, Journey to Churchill has been big news in Winnipeg. It became an especially hot news item when some Arctic wolves dug under the wall separating their space from an adjacent polar bear paddock, and then again, when a polar bear chewed through some waterproofing sealant on the underwater visitor viewing tunnel forcing its closure. But, I expect that like most of the expensive, new attraction exhibits that populate zoos across the continent, there won’t be too many more of those kinds of incidents and the novelty factor that accompanies any new development will gradually wear off and in time Journey to Churchill will fade into the news background.

Before I made my visit I checked the zoo’s website to see what they were saying about Journey to Churchill. It said the exhibit brings the magic of the north to the heart of Manitoba and that it is the most comprehensive project ever undertaken in Canada aimed at issues related to climate change, polar bears and other northern species. So I entered the zoo with a glimmer of hope that the exhibit would, even in a small way, live up to its hype and, more importantly, that it would provide superior conditions for the animals, which include, not just polar bears, but Arctic wolves, Arctic foxes, ringed seals, caribou, musk ox and snowy owls. I also hoped that, if nothing else, it would have a strong conservation “call to action” component. How disappointed I was.

During the past 30 years I’ve visited Arctic displays (and polar bear exhibits), both good and bad, in zoos around the world. To me Journey to Churchill seemed like little more than a slightly more grandiose rehash of what already exists in other zoos in North America and elsewhere.

At a reported 10 acres in size, Journey to Churchill sounds large (and, for a zoo, it is a rather sizeable exhibit complex), but a substantial amount of space, perhaps the majority, isn’t allocated to the animals at all. Visitor pathways, viewing stations, galleries, washrooms, bleachers, concession areas, a movie theatre, children’s play areas, a facsimile of the Town of Churchill, with a gift store and 200 seat Tundra Grill restaurant, keeper service areas, gardens, planted buffer regions, and other such features and infrastructure, consume a substantial portion of that purported 10 acres. Looking at the exhibit map, it appeared the polar bears had been allocated approximately 1/3 of the exhibit complex’s space and even that was subdivided into three pens, as well as some off-exhibit pens in another part of the complex.

One of the most obvious features of Journey to Churchill, impossible for any visitor to overlook, was gunite (a mixture of cement, sand and water that is applied with a pressure hose). It was everywhere. Used to create fake rocks, rocky outcrops and cliffs, gunite is most often used to cover, and therefore hide, infrastructure. It’s also used to create cave-like alcoves for public viewing (a design strategy meant to “frame” animals so that when visitors see them they appear to be in a natural setting). But the gunite was excessive and didn’t look very real. I thought it made the entire complex look more like the set of a new Flintstones movie than anything actually found in nature.

There were also many expensive design features, such as the giant acrylic viewing windows and an underwater visitor viewing tunnel, dubbed the Sea Ice Passage, but, unfortunately, they had no real relevance to the animals. They were features meant to enhance the visitor experience, not to enrich the lives of the animals.

The Town of Churchill facsimile, with its rail car, helicopter and inukshuks seemed to be little more than a giant visitor photo prop and looked a lot like part of a movie-set. Inside the village’s Tundra Grill restaurant, I saw that the back wall of windows was actually part of the barrier separating restaurant patrons from the polar bear pen on the other side of the glass. I suppose it might be nice to sit inside munching a plate of French fries while watching polar bears, but I have to wonder how that might affect the bears. Most animals enjoy their privacy. Does this seemingly intrusive design feature rob the bears of their privacy or force them to move to other areas of the enclosure?

Certainly the actual living spaces of the current collection of animals is improved over the conditions experienced by the animals who preceded them. I remember just a few years ago seeing the zoo’s brown bears and polar bears in antiquated, grotto enclosures, consisting of little more than a slab of concrete, surrounding by gunite walls and a moat at the front. So things are better, but for wide-ranging Arctic animals, the new exhibits are still not particularly large and they’re rather bleak. I watched one ringed seal swimming the same repetitive, stereotypic pattern over and over again. Nothing in the tank was there to interrupt the pattern or to encourage the seal to engage in normal behaviours.

What was particularly alarming, given the zoo’s promotional claims, was the paucity of information about how to help polar bears, other arctic animals and the environment they inhabit. When I entered Journey to Churchill, a sign welcomed me to explore Manitoba’s Subarctic region and said I would “Learn how we can work together to protect it.” But I saw just two signs (and I believe I saw them all) that had a few throwaway suggestions on how I could help. They included inflate my car tires properly, wash my clothes in cold water, drive one day less per week and adjust my thermostat. Really! Is that it? No hard hitting messages or calls to action were evident.

There seemed to be no attempt anywhere, or at least none that I could find, to convey what is really going to be required to turn things around (assuming they can be), no direct connections to “real” conservation initiatives and, perhaps most importantly, nothing encouraging zoo visitors to voice their concerns to our government or to urge elected officials to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, support international efforts to battle climate change and to facilitate innovation in industry to reduce our national carbon footprint. I thought the environmental messaging was weak and easy to overlook or ignore. And even if every person who visited the exhibit, read the signs and followed what was suggested, it wouldn’t make a whit of difference. How sad.

I had hopes that the 9 minute film playing in the Borealis Theatre, a high domed room with a 360 degree screen, would contain some hard hitting environmental information and a strong call to action, but it was benign and soft-pedaled an environmental message. I came away thinking it was more like a travel promotion for Churchill than anything else.

I also searched for any mention I could find about the welfare of polar bears or even animal welfare generally, but not much there either. Other than a single mention of “well-being” on one sign in the zoo’s International Polar Bear Conservation Center, I didn’t see welfare mentioned anywhere. But I did find lots of information about how the zoo had set up a program to accept polar bears from the wild, so they could be “rehabilitated” to life in captivity. Given what we now know about the behavioural ecology and natural history of polar bears and their history of suffering in captivity, I found it remarkable the zoo would claim that wild polar bears could be “rehabilitated” for life in captivity. It's certainly not what most people think of when they think of wildlife rehabilitation.

Before plans for Journey to Churchill were finalized, Zoocheck met with zoo officials and proposed something profoundly different from what they eventually built. We suggested they construct a “northern bear rescue center” right in the zoo. It would have been a stand alone facility featuring large naturalistic pens for black, brown and polar bears who had been rescued from substandard zoos or that were being rehabilitated for release back into the wild. The facility would have controlled viewing that wasn’t intrusive to the animals and wouldn’t impact on their behaviour.

A range of interpretive displays would feature relevant, current information, challenge visitors to get involved politically, provide opportunities for them to directly support arctic wildlife and environmental campaigns and field initiatives that actually help bears, other northern animals or the places in which they live. Visitors would be slowed down, so instead of them moving rapidly from one viewing station or display to another, they would be engaged and able to take in far more. There would no gunite, no silly photo props, no fake inukshuks, no giant windows, no viewing tunnel, and no restaurant overlooking the bear pen. The northern bear rescue center would have been a low tech, naturalistic facility that focused on the biological, behavioural and social needs of bears and that served a productive and much-needed purpose. And it would have cost just a tiny fraction of what Journey to Churchill did.

I find it particularly sad that formerly wild bears now populate Journey to Churchill, brought into captivity under the guise of “rescue.” So far, they’ve been orphaned cubs that the Manitoba government has provided to the zoo. Certainly it’s a plus for the zoo because they can populate their exhibit and then claim they are saving bears that would otherwise face an uncertain fate in the wild. But what exactly are they being rescued to? They may be alive, but do they have much of a life being in a cage in Winnipeg? And doesn’t sending bears to the zoo relieve pressure on the Government of Manitoba to come up with better, alternative solutions for orphaned cubs or needy adults, or to actually solve the problems that put those bears into that situation in the first place?

Some people predict that the number of wild polar bear cubs in need is going to rise, so what happens when the zoo is full? The problems wild polar bears face will still be there because incarcerating bears in a zoo in Winnipeg does nothing to solve them. Perhaps sending bears to zoos just buys the Government time, allowing the problems that wild bears face to get worse in the process.

What is most sad is to me is that polar bears and the Arctic need help now, but as far as I can see Journey to Churchill won’t help very much at all. Sure, a few visitors might remember a factoid or two about polar bear feet or musk ox fur, but so what. That kind of information can obtained in a minute or two on the internet or in a children’s book about wildlife. Even fewer zoo visitors will be motivated to actually change their behaviour or get involved. We know there are grave threats, including climate change, that challenge wild animals and the environments in which they live. We also know what has to be done, and it’s not just wash your clothes in cold water and drive your car a bit less. If Journey to Churchill is the best the Assiniboine Park Zoo and the zoo community can do to help polar bears, I think we may as well start saying our goodbyes now.

Rob Laidlaw
Zoocheck Inc.

Shifting Baseline Syndrome and White Geese

How Questionable Wildlife Management Devours Tax Dollars

In Canada, we have a federal government infamously downloading or cutting off a myriad of valid environmental research programs—inconvenient facts being an impediment to what’s really important to the right-wing ideologues now in power—while ignoring one area of waste that is quite disposable, but oh, ever so convenient if you don’t mind a total, absurdly wasteful sham.

The Canadian Wildlife Service (CWS) has come out with its latest “Population Status of Migratory Birds in Canada” and is now vilifying a species that is, I’d guess, unknown to 99 percent plus of federal politicians, or other Canadians. The Ross’s goose is nearly identical to a somewhat better known species (although I suspect still unfamiliar to most Canadians): the snow goose. These are both white geese with black wing tips. The snow goose actually comes in two color patterns, called morphs. A minority are dark brownish-grey with white heads and light blue-grey wing patches, and are known colloquially as “blue geese.” They were once thought to be a separate species. The Ross’s shows this “blue” version only very rarely. Otherwise, the Ross’s resembles the snow but is smaller, with a much shorter, stubbier beak with a kind of blue-grey, warty-looking patch around the nostrils. Even the geese can get confused and hybrids occur.

The snow geese are also divided into “lesser snow geese” which breed in the central to western Arctic, and the wee bit larger “greater snow geese” of the eastern Arctic. The tendency is to “lump” them all as “white geese” for the sake of “management.”

The snow goose was already thoroughly vilified by employment of something called the “shifting baseline syndrome.” That phrase was coined by fishery biologist Daniel Pauly, who used it in 1995 in reference to fish management (another tax-funded wildlife management disaster; remember the northern cod?) but applicable to a wide range of wildlife management policies. “Essentially,” Pauly wrote, “this syndrome has arisen because each generation of fisheries scientists accepts as a baseline the stock and species composition that occurred at the beginning of their careers, and uses this to evaluate changes.”

Around the same time, I said the same thing, only about waterfowl biologists with regard to snow geese. A tight group of (mostly) men raised shrill alarm that the white goose population had increased startlingly—there being so many that they were damaging the environment by pulling out plants by the roots, thus altering salt levels in the soil of coastal areas, to the detriment of numerous other Arctic and subarctic species. The northern ecosystem was, they said, “in peril.”

In 1998, I visited the primary research site, near Churchill, Manitoba, in company with Dr. Vernon Thomas, Department of Zoology at the University of Guelph. True, there were mud-flats where geese had eaten the vegetation, but the subarctic ecosystem seemed in no way imperiled, and the desert-like conditions suggested by the lurid prose were restricted and rarely bigger than, say, a football field. We viewed the area from the air, and then landed, and on the ground found rhizomes under even the most barren patches of soil criss-crossed with goose footprints. The region is under something called “isostatic rebound,” whereby the ground is not-so-slowly rising, adding more land as Hudson Bay retreats, in a state of continued, natural change.

I found that the original 1997 report, used to justify a massive increase in hunters’ ability to kill large numbers of “lesser” snow geese, contained a glaring error by giving an incorrect publication date for a life history study that clearly showed something that was being ignored by these waterfowl “biologists,” as surely as the fishery biologists referenced by Dr. Pauly ignored historical data about the size of fisheries (with disastrous results).

There is nothing “scientific” about ignoring data that don’t fit your theory, and this cluster of waterfowl managers wanted us all to believe that the Arctic ecosystem was in peril, only to be relieved by culling (or “harvesting”) vastly more snow geese. Goose numbers were presented as being higher than ever. Classically displaying the avian version of the shifting base syndrome, they had assumed that the conditions they had seen on their first visits to the north as young men, when the white geese were at or close to all-time lowest numbers, were the “norm;” thus, the changes they had seen as white goose numbers increased were seen as abnormal. And, as has been said of a suite of other species, the change was attributed to anthropogenic (human-caused) changes—in this case, the planting of crops that provided wintering geese in the southern U.S. more food than they had ever had before. It was called an “agricultural subsidy.” So, how much food did geese have before, say, the industrial revolution? No one even asked.

This differs from the fisheries’ version of shifting base syndrome only because so many fish species never got a chance to recover, while the snow geese did. But, in both circumstances, management decisions are based on faulty estimates of what “should” be there based on the historic record—and would be, had they been left alone.

I know this is all sort of technical, thus boring, which is why it’s so easy to waste Canadian tax money… But stay with me on this, because it is also not very hard to understand.

If these “biologists,” on government payrolls and/or various government grants or funding from NGOs in the business of supporting the entire sham, flying about the Arctic and subarctic garnering “data” to prove their point, were right, then surely early records would show low numbers of white geese. The exact opposite was true.

Most of the killing off of snow geese occurred before there was much effort or ability to count them, and long before aerial photography and other technologies for producing accurate estimates were available. But, read this quote from pioneering ornithologist Herbert W. Brandt, describing an experience in Texas, where, on March 23, 1919, he and his companions visited a marsh on the plains. “As we approached it looked as if it was covered with snow, but it proved to be thousands upon thousands of snow geese and other wild geese. Here is their winter home, coming into the great pastures at night to feed on the abundant grass. Last year for the first time known a couple of large flocks remained the entire summer.” Indeed, like small numbers of other such first-hand accounts that survive from that era, it suggests abundance comparable to, and possibly greater than, what we experience today. Brandt continues that the owner of the ranch “told us that the geese we saw were just a few left from the great winter flocks, most of them having now departed for the northland. He has seen 500 acres of solid geese, he said, just one snow bank…”

There are other such accounts, even photographs, all dutifully ignored or dismissed as “anecdotal” by the CWS. It’s important, because assuming that the various accounts were right, huge numbers of snow geese have naturally occurred before, and left no permanent damage. Indeed, in a private moment at a waterfowl conference in Memphis some years ago, a CWS waterfowl manager said to me, “Barry, it will take a good fifty years for some of that vegetation to recover.” I just looked at him. He blinked, and then said, “But that’s your point, isn’t it?”

Exactly.

Politicians would far, far rather scapegoat wild animals than address serious and real environmental threats. I mean, yes, the Arctic is in peril, but from a wide range of anthropogenic forces culminating in rising temperatures on average—not from a native species who has been there since the retreat of the glaciers.

Which brings us back to Ross’s geese. When I was a young child in the 1950s, it was, to me, a mystery bird: a small version of the snow geese, whose nest had not been discovered until 1938. In one of my childhood reference books, it stated, “They winter entirely in the Sacramento and San Joaquin Valleys of California, where they are known to gunners by the name ‘China geese’ and now enjoy absolute protection under the game laws.”

No longer. They made the mistake of trying to recover to former numbers. Those stubby little beaks of theirs are now implicated in the increased “peril” we are supposed to believe the Arctic endures at the hands, or beaks, of the white geese—even the little, once endangered Ross’s goose. The CWS has issued its “notice of intent” to designate these small geese as “overabundant.” Well… They were rare back when I was ten years old, and now they aren’t… Wow… Maybe their current numbers are unprecedented.

Well, no, not according to the always easy-to-ignore historic record. It is a fragmented record because, apart from a handful of ornithologists, no one in the 19th and early 20th centuries could identify them as anything other than, at most, puny snow geese. And yet, a knowledgeable chronicler wrote in 1928, shortly before the bird became endangered, that on its wintering ground in central California, it was “often quite common. It seems to be tamer than other species of geese which visit that region; hence many are shot for the market…” Remember, we are talking about an era that saw the elimination “for the market” or otherwise, of vast herds of bison; the extinction of our most common bird, the passenger pigeon; the elimination of huge flocks of Eskimo curlews, now extinct; the elimination of our only native parrot, the Carolina parakeet; the extinction of our only flightless birds, the spectacled cormorant and the great auk; the extinction of the Labrador duck; the extinction of the Atlantic gray whale; the extinction of the heath hen; and on and on… It was an era of mass wildlife destruction, and a small white goose who came from a place where few or no humans lived—and we thus had not learned to fear them—wouldn’t have had a chance.

Based on what happened with the snow geese when they were designated as “over abundant,” what will be wanted when the designation is given (and it will be) is absurdly extended bag limits, use of recorded calls and baits, a spring hunting season, and anything else that replaces the concept of “fair chase” or “sport” with permission to slaughter. There is the added advantage that hunters who enjoy this sort of thing (and I emphasize that many don’t) will be able to bang away at any white birds with black wing tips (hoping they exclude whooping cranes and white pelicans) without the nuisance of having to tell the Ross’s goose from the snow goose. They will be able to kill large numbers of them using bait and electronic calls, all with federal blessings.

At the time this all began, we predicted it wouldn’t work. First, there was no way hunters would or could slaughter enough snow geese to reduce their continental population to a number satisfactory to the wildlife managers: a number where their feeding showed virtually no “impact” on vegetation. In fact, many hunters were quite disgusted with the idea, and with the inevitable waste of meat if one meets the bag limits. Snow geese are not generally tasty, and we taxpayers unwittingly funded a government cook book on how to make them more palatable. A guy who shoots twenty a day is hardly going to eat all twenty! Also, Arctic wildlife populations typically display “boom-bust” increases followed by population crashes; think lemmings, for example, and the predators who eat them. But, by knocking the top off the growth curve, one assures that the “bust” part does not happen… They don’t peak, there is no subsequent crash, and numbers stay high.

Two decades later, we have been proven to be right. As the CWS puts it, “Despite recent efforts to reduce the numbers of mid-continent Lesser Snow Geese, the population continues to grow.” But, paradoxically, that’s good news for wildlife biologists whose ineptitudes are so seldom challenged; their work, their grants, are assured into the future.

And, even if a government infamous for cutting funding to work that raises alarms about the environment figures it all out – which is highly unlikely – well, they will happily keep signing the cheques so they can say they are funding conservation. I mean, hey; you could address, say, climate change, but that might mean limiting, say, the Alberta oil sands, or proposed pipelines, or Arctic resource exploration… So, you can see the dilemma. It’s easier to kill geese.

Barry Kent MacKay
Born Free USA

Originally published http://www.bornfreeusa.org/weblog_canada.php?p=4063&more=1