Caribou conservation is a current hot topic in wildlife management. The central mountain caribou population is currently ranked as endangered by COSEWIC due to a combination of factors including predation, habitat loss, and disturbance from forest harvesting and fossil fuel development.(COSEWIC, 2014). There is much debate about the most effective method to sustain these dwindling populations. Different methods have been proposed such as maternity penning, predator management, translocations, habitat protection, supplemental feeding, and many others (Boutin & Merrill, 2016). This study focuses on supplemental feeding in comparison to predator control as a means of increasing caribou viability in the central mountain herds. Supplemental feeding involves providing the caribou with nutritional pellets usually containing barely or wheat in order to boost caribou nutrition. The reasoning behind supplemental feeding is that habitat loss and predation may be restricting the habitat use for caribou. Restricted habitat use can cause lower food intake which could result in undernourishment. (Boutin & Merrill, 2016).
Another way to reduce this predation pressure on caribou is to directly control the predators through sterilization or lethal control measures. This method could be more effective because it can potentially reduce direct predation on caribou, and not only the indirect predation effects. However, it is estimated that wolf populations would have to be reduced by up to 80% in order for this to be effective (Hayes et al., 2003).
Objectives
Both supplemental feeding and wolf control were implemented in the Kennedy Siding herd and they found increased population growth (Seip and Jones, 2018). Some have suggested that predator control was the more important factor in the resulting population growth and that supplemental feeding was only effective at increasing nutrition but not increasing population (Heard and Zimmerman, 2018). This is the idea that our study intends to address. The objective of our study is to determine the effects of wolf control and supplemental feeding on caribou population growth, body weight growth, number of births, and calf survival. These variables were considered for males and females to determine if the sex had any impact on the results. We used eight small central mountain herds to conduct our study, with each herd receiving one of four management treatments.
Expected Results
We expect that combining predator control with supplemental feeding will result in the greatest increase in both body weight and population growth. As pregnancy rates are very sensitive to food availability (COSEWIC, 2014), we expect that the herd receiving supplemental feeding will have higher birth rates. However, we also expect that there will be more calf survival in the herds receiving predator control. The results of this project could have important implications for caribou management by providing information as to the effectiveness of these two management methods.