What’s New with the WBRA
Stewarding Trumpeter Swans Through the Seasons
in Waterton Biosphere Reserve
Peak spring swan migration is upon us
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| Wanted: Swan Seekers in WBR 📢
You can support the Stewarding Trumpeter Swans Through the Seasons project by reporting your swan sightings during our final spring migration monitoring season |
1: Find a waterbody
Keep your eyes to the skies, or rather, to a local pond, lake, or wetland in WBR this March and April.
Trumpeter swans will be seeking waterbodies which support their voracious appetite for emergent plants, or plants that are rooted in the sediment below the water with their stems, flowers, and leaves rising above the surface.
2: Look for swans
Migration also brings tundra swans to the area. The key differences between the species are their vocalizations, bill/head features, and overall size. Learn about the differences between these two swans over on our website here.
Are you curious to hear the deep and beautiful bugling’s of a trumpeter swan? Look no further, for we have you covered. Visit Earbirding here to listen to and differentiate between a trumpeter and tundra swan call.
Don’t forget your binoculars!
3: Notify us
What we would love to know about the swans you see in WBR:
🦢 Species of swan
📋 Number of birds
📍 Location
📅 Date and time
Another critical role we can play this spring is to ensure trumpeter swans have healthy and supportive stopover habitat. The network of stopover sites in WBR appear to host a significant portion of the Rocky Mountain breeding population on their journey north.
Are you a landowner in WBR with wetland habitat that hosts trumpeter swans and have an interest in learning more about financial support for your habitat stewardship projects (such as off-site waterers, fencing around wetlands, hardened access sites)?
If so, give us a call at 403-563-0058 or email at swans@watertonbiosphere.com. The goal of our work is to raise awareness of the importance of healthy wetlands for species such as trumpeter swans and to assist landowners who wish to improve their valuable wetland areas for wildlife habitat and water retention alike.
We would love to chat about your habitat project ideas!
Carnivores and Communities Program
Spring has sprung in WBR
At the very least, the first false spring of the year has sprung and with it the opportunity for new Carnivore and Communities Program (CACP) project collaborations.
Restricting carnivore access to attractants can significantly reduce carnivore-human conflict.
A variety of cost shared attractant management projects are available through the CACP program.
Projects include:
- Electric fencing
- Bear-resistant grain bin doors
- Grain bin retrofits or upgrades (e.g., cement floors, hopper-bottom bins, and metal shipping containers).
To date, WBR has collaborated with producers on more than 140 attractant management projects in southwestern Alberta. Please click on the map to view these completed projects.
If you are interested in learning more about the effectiveness of electric fencing as an option to restrict carnivore attractants on your property, please check out ‘Zapped! Managing Bear Conflict in Southern Alberta’. This film by Jay Honeyman (formerly) with Alberta Environment and Parks, WBRA, and others showcases the use of electric fences in large carnivore conflict prevention in the Province of Alberta.
Dead livestock (deadstock) has been shown to be a significant large carnivore attractant. Managing this attractant is an important way to reduce conflict with large carnivores. Some producers are able to effectively compost deadstock on farm, employing electric fence to exclude bears, wolves, cougars etc. An alternative to composting is carcass removal.
The WBR’s Deadstock Removal Program was designed to completely remove livestock carcasses from the landscape.
There are two components to this program:
- Deadstock bins
- On-farm pickup
Building on the efforts of local landowner groups, the program has grown to include free deadstock pickup for producers (Intensive Livestock Operations are not eligible) on over 572,000 hectares (1.41 million acres) in the municipalities of Cardston, Pincher Creek, Ranchland, and Willow Creek.
Since the program began in 2009, over 6,500 carcasses have been removed from the landscape. The deadstock program operates in each of the four municipalities with funds from CACP supporters ensuring that there is no cost to producers for carcass pickup within the deadstock pickup zone by West Coast Reduction Ltd. Please click on the map to view the deadstock pickup zone and locations of deadstock bins.
Finally, sharing the landscape with bears means there is potential for encounters between bears and people, and it is important to understand how to act in such situations.
WBR offers Bear Safety Workshops which provide information on:
- Bear and other carnivore behaviour and safety
- Human safety precautions to take when living and working on the landscape shared by carnivores
- The effective use of bear spray
If you have concerns about the potential for carnivore-human conflict on your land this year, or would like to learn how to keep yourself and your family well prepared with effective bear safety behaviour’s, feel free to reach out to Jeff Bectell, our CACP Coordinator, at jbectell@watertonbiosphere.com to discuss.
Please don’t hesitate to reach out to discuss a potential project.
