The Alberta government has removed furbearer trapping limits for the 2024-25 season in most zones, including for at-risk wolverines.
The new regulations for this trapping season, approved by Alberta Forestry and Parks Minister Todd Loewen, remove limits in areas where open season currently exists, including for wolverine, lynx, fisher and river otter. A zero harvest remains in only a couple of trapping zones, but for lynx and wolverines in zones where they don’t actually live.
“It’s the Wild West out there … Alberta continues to go backwards in wildlife management,” said John Marriott, co-founder of Exposed Wildlife Conservancy and prominent Canmore wildlife photographer.
“They’re just going to be doing open trapping all over the place and what effect is this going to have on biodiversity? It’s just open season on all these furbearers, which is just astonishing.”
Wolverines are considered data deficient in Alberta, meaning they may be at risk and should be managed accordingly.
The province’s most recent population estimate – now more than 20 years old – was fewer than 1,000 breeding animals.
Up until now, barring a couple of zones, only one wolverine could be trapped per trapper per registered fur trapping management area, a limit that has been in place for approximately 25 years.
The other species – lynx, fisher and river otter – have had higher limits, as much as 10 or 12 in some trapping units.
According to provincial statistics, the five-year average for wolverines killed in traps from 2019-24 was 66 – 53 in 2019-20; 115 in 2020-21; 46 in 2021-22; 51 in 2022-23; and 64 in 2023-24.
Loewen’s office did not get back to the Outlook by deadline and a spokesperson for the Alberta Trappers Association was not immediately available.
Sarah Elmeligi, Banff-Kananaskis MLA and NDP Shadow Minister for Environment and Protected Areas, said she was shocked when she heard the news of the regulation changes, questioning the justification behind the move to remove limits.
“I have pretty big concerns over the lack of transparency from this government when it comes to changes to hunting and trapping regulations over the last year,” she said.
“This is the first I’ve heard about it. We’re not hearing about it from the government, so the lack of transparency for this kind of stuff just drives me batty.”
Elmeligi said she was disturbed to hear the one limit per management unit for wolverine had been removed given the species is listed as data deficient in Alberta.
“Data deficient basically means there’s so few of them spread out over a large landscape that we don’t have enough information about wolverine to decide if they’re at risk or not,” she said.
“We don’t actually know enough about the species to know what the impact of that will be … and now there’s no limit. That’s obviously hugely concerning.”
Much like changes to grizzly bear management in Alberta earlier this year, Elmeligi said Loewen is not operating with wildlife management science in mind, nor is Environment and Protected Areas Minister Rebecca Schulz, who is charged with overseeing species-at-risk.
“They are not using science to inform decision-making and we keep seeing that again and again and again and it is a significant gap in how Alberta wildlife is being managed,” she said.
“So if the Minister of Forestry and Parks is not protecting species-at-risk and the Minister of Environment and Protected Areas is also not protecting species-at-risk, who is?”
Elmeligi said one of the solutions to better wildlife management is to more effectively engage experts and use current and robust wildlife science to inform decision-making, particularly around hunting and trapping limits.
“When we’re talking about hunting and trapping regulations, it’s really important that we have an understanding of population distribution and density at a provincial level because that’s how we understand what is happening for a species,” she said.
“That’s the information that feeds into truly defining sustainable hunting and we can’t define sustainable hunting levels through conversations with people at a town hall in one community because they do not understand the broader landscape picture, right?
“This is why we have wildlife science, like it’s the whole reason this whole field of knowledge exists.”
The Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife in Canada consider wolverines a species of concern.
A 2019 study published in the Journal of Wildlife Management, The Sustainability of Wolverine Trapping Mortality in Southern Canada, concluded wolverine trapping in Alberta and British Columbia is not sustainable.
The study found wolverine density averaged two wolverines per 1,000 square kilometres and was positively related to spring snow cover and negatively related to road density. Observed annual trapping mortality was more than 8.4 per cent a year.
“This level of mortality is unlikely to be sustainable except in rare cases where movement rates are high among sub-populations and sizeable un-trapped refuges exist,” states the study.
“Our results suggest wolverine trapping is not sustainable because our study area was fragmented by human and natural barriers and few large refuges existed. We recommend future wolverine trapping mortality be reduced by 50 per cent throughout southern British Columbia and Alberta to promote population recovery.”
Another study, Protection status, human disturbance, snow cover and trapping drive density of a declining wolverine population in the Canadian Rocky Mountains, published in Scientific Reports in 2022 also raised alarm bells for wolverines.
That study looked at wolverine population trends from 2011-20 in a 14,000 square kilometre area in protected and non-protected lands in Alberta and B.C., determining wolverine density and occupancy declined by 39 per cent, with an annual population growth rate of 0.925.
Density within protected areas was three times higher than outside and declined between 2011 (3.6 wolverines/1000 km2) and 2020 (2.1 wolverines/1000 km2).
“The annual harvest rate of ≥ 13 per cent was above the maximum sustainable rate,” states the study.
Gilbert Proulx, a wildlife biologist and former head of the Humane Trapping Research Program who continues to do wildlife field research in Alberta, raised concerns about the recent changes to the province’s trapping regulations to “free for all trapping.”
He said when quotas are not applied to species like wolverine, which is listed as data deficient in Alberta, a void can be created, particularly if there is no close surveillance of the animals, including those accidentally trapped.
“When you remove an animal, you create a void and when you remove several of them, you can end up extirpating a local population,” he said, noting removal of a wolverine with a 400-square-kilometre home range can impact biodiversity.
“Removing the guards, removing the checks on any species is not very smart because if there is a crash or a provincial crash, then they have to see what happened, and then it’s too late, like we have seen in the past.”
Proulx said some parts of the trapping regulations also promote “false conservation”, noting trappers cannot take lynx and wolverine from zones 7 and 8 in the eastern parts of the province.
“But they don’t even live in those areas. When you apply the conservation regulations to areas where the species is not present, you’re not accomplishing a whole lot,” he said.
“It’s like saying you’re not allowed to shoot elephants near Edmonton, but there are no elephants living near Edmonton.”
Meanwhile, Marriott said the changes to furbearer limits, including wolverine, is a “throwback to the past.”
“There are fewer and fewer wolverines than we thought and we know they’re in trouble,” he said.
“And yet, here we go, they’re just going to be doing open trapping all over the place on them.”
Marriott said Minister Loewen, who had been an avid trapper since he was a young boy, continues to defy what wildlife science says.
“It just goes against absolutely everything that we have done in wildlife management to this date,” he said.
“We should be much more restrictive on what we’re allowing to be trapped until we actually know what effect it’s having on the ecosystems. Right now, we know there's a biodiversity crisis.”
Marriott referred to the decision as a “sneaky, underhanded way of management” by the provincial government.
“They’re not advertising any of this stuff because they know the public is going to be upset about it and they know there’s going to be a backlash,” he said.
“And so it’s just like ‘we’re just going to slip it in the back door as usual and then nobody will be able to do anything about it because we already did it’.”
