On Sept. 23, the Wilderness Committee and the Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society co-hosted a press conference to share a new map provided by the Manitoba government that confirms that woodland caribou are living in an area of northwest Manitoba scheduled for intensive logging operations.

The Loonhead Lake area between Thompson and The Pas is a natural caribou habitat, but logging has been authorized in the area.

Ron Thiessen (above), Executive Director of CPAWS said that woodland caribou are already an endangered species. Under the Manitoba Endangered Species Act, the province has a duty to protect the caribou he said, or at least follow the prevention principle: "If we don't know, we don't want to take any chances until we do know." Woodland caribou are an iconic keystone species, Thiessen told reporters. Caribou are "a strong and living testament to the beauty and vastness of Manitoba's wilderness," he said, and the government is responsible to ensure caribou thrive in Manitoba's parks.

Eric Reder, Campaign Director for the Wilderness Committee, was next to speak, providing the specifics of the group's new findings. Anecdotal evidence from loggeers in the field indicated that the intact forest north of Grass River Provincial Park was one of the last undistrurbed caribou ranges in Northwest Manitoba. Unfortunately, in 2006, Tolko was granted logging access to the land with an amendmdent to their forest management plan. There have been major forest fires near the area recently, and logging and mining operations nearby even before 2006, Reder said. All of this has reduced available caribou habitat.

Reder said the Wilderness Committee submitted more than 60 requests for information about caribou herds in the area, starting in the spring of 2008. These requests were not answered until now, when the province provided a map clearly indicating the important caribou habitat in the area.

The map, published in March 2009 and finally released to the Wilderness Committee in September, shows the Wapimedi caribou herd living, breeding, and wintering in the Loonhead Lake/Weadon River area.
 

This herd is not counted as one of the 10 caribou ranges in the official federal and provincial data on caribou in Manitoba. Reder said that in August of 2009, Environmental Licensing released a 40-page summary document that included comments from Manitoba Conservation staff in charge of caribou monitoring in the Northwest region.

Instead of listing this area as a caribou range, the provincial government has authorized Tolko to log the region.

"At the very least we're looking at negligence on the part of consservation for not identifying this caribou range in management plans -- and it could be much worse than that," Reder said. He said that the 40-page summary document was clear: "in the absence of more data, logging will continue."

"However," Reder said, "it's very clear that they have data; they published in in this map, and this map was was made in March -- so something here isn't connected properly."