By Briony Penn (award-winning environmental educator)

Species at risk are close to my heart, home and work. I’ve come to accept that the institutional framework in place to protect them is incomprehensible and operationally useless. To date, under the federal Species at Risk Act (SARA) only one species—of the over one thousand species at risk nationally—has received the full implementation of the act with an action plan that has teeth. The recipient of this honour is the tiny Banff springs snail for the simple reason that its habitat is restricted to a small hotspring in a national park. By contrast, take the Canadian sandhill crane. Provincially it is listed as a species of concern. For the last three years, I have helped document the nest sites of a unique population of this secretive coastal nesting bird. Unlike the Banff springs snail, the sandhill cranes have a vast breeding range—all the way up the coast where they nest on isolated, windswept islands capped in bogs and fringed with forest.

Unlike the snail, the crane’s habitat is neither federal land nor under existing protected status. That puts the cranes at the mercy of the province, where no species at risk act has been enacted. Yes, BC is one of two provinces (other is Alberta) without its own legislation to protect endangered species, a fact that has led to a campaign called: “The Last Place on Earth.” to enact a species-at-risk law, initiated by major environment non-governmental organizations (ENGOs), including the David Suzuki Foundation. Challenged in the courts over the last few years by these groups, the province finally agreed in 2005 to provide “equivalent” protection for species at risk on provincial lands as those on federal—albeit weak. This “equivalent” protection means that when the cranes arrive with great fanfare to the bogs in the spring to lay two eggs on the mossy lichen islets, a critical area of land around the nest should remain undisturbed. But wait. There are a few conditions on this protection. It requires that all critical habitat identified (called a Wildlife Habitat Area) doesn’t amount to more than one percent of the allowable cut of timber if those lands are forested. One percent doesn’t go very far when you are dealing with saving the habitat of grizzly bears, marbled murrelets and other endangered species in forested areas, so there goes another bunch of nests. Also only forestry activities in the area can be curtailed; all other land uses are permitted. That means if someone wants to build a wind farm, road or mining claim on the crane’s rocky islets, there isn’t a hope in hell of protecting them. So there goes those nests. Another requirement says that critical habitat must be identified and included in recovery strategies with correct geographic information— the latitudes and longitudes. This, in the cranes’ case, requires either hovering over the nest site in a helicopter at great expense and disturbance to the birds or slogging into the bogs after long boat trips of several days in dangerous waters with GPS units. Neither option is a picnic for researchers, volunteer pilots, or birds, but we’ve been doing it because we believed it would save the birds.

But now—thanks to UVic’s Environment Law Centre (ELC)—we discover that the province has been ordering its scientists to exclude this very information from the maps and recovery strategies drawn up under the federal Species at Risk Act. Since this is what triggers the teeth of the act—the action plans—it’s effectively a
knockout punch to protecting critical habitat for species.