At one time is was fashionable to introduce alien species into Canada. That's why we have european hares, starlings, carp and English sparrows.

Then doing so became unfashionable. Allegedly it upsets the balance of nature. We now have gobis and other alien species in the Great Lakes.

But the fact is in Canada what really upset the balance of nature was the ice age. As recemntly as 10,000 years ago most of Canada was covered by an ice sheet 10,000 feet thick. It scoured away most of the topsoil and all of the animals that lived in Canada at this time.

There simply hasn't been enough time for any so called delicate balance to develop. That being the case why not try to identify all the empty niches and fill them with imports.

For example why not introduce Capercaillie, wild boar and wood pigeons among other species. Why not put dall sheep in the Torngat Mountains.


VBR,


Ted Gorsline

Tahr and Chamois would do O.K in the rockies with your sheep and goats.

the only thing i would introduce would be wild boar and here in ontario alot have gotten loose from game farms and are starting to reproduce.

Yes, Tahr,Chamios, Red deer, those stags they got in New Zealand would be a good starter.

Wild boar would be a riot if they could survive the winters here. If anyone knows, let me know.

We now have a good population of mule deer that are heavy antlered but not wide. A few Sask. mulie bucks mixed in should make for some good mule deer hunting down the road.

I can hear our governments and greenies crying allready.


Daryl

Hello;
Well we're allready introducing wild boars on an unofficial way and it's creating enough head aches. Game farms can't seem to keep them confined, and we've got sizable populations in several places in Alberta, making a pain of themselves. Once these things get really established, we'll have a bitch of a time controlling them, especially with the tree hugger mentality that seems so prevalent nowadays.
Then there's the question if any introduced species will displace a native one as many allready have. Do we really need more Starlings?
Grizz

Being a Texan, and having only hunted in Canada twice, I go along with the concept that you really don't want European Wild Hogs, aka Russian boars, in the wild in Canada. Yes, they can survive Canadian winters, DUH, if they have survived in Russia, most of Canada will suit them. In my opinion they are about the last species, a person would want.

Once you have a good population of large Siberian wild boar in B.C. the next step would be to plant some Siberian tigers.

VBR,

Ted Gorsline

Why the heck would be bring in wild boar? You don't know what you are getting yourself in to. Talk to some farmers over in Europe what they think about wild boar!

I never understood this desire to move animals around. Why would be want to bring in red stags, when we already have it's cousin? Why tahr and chammies, where we already have goat, and sheep? What will the presence of those goat-like species do to our native goat?

Most planned or accidental transplants of animals have caused havoc on one native species or other. Forget about this foolishness.

Frans

You would have to be careful about what you introduced but the fact is eastern Canada is a pretty sterile environment that could use greater biodiversity. There were grizzly bears around Lake Simcoe 10,000 years ago. They do not seem to do well on the Canadian Shield but European brown bears (ursos arctos-same species as a grizzly) inhabit similar habitat in Norway. Why not try a few in Newfoundland.

The passeneger pigeon is gone and it was an acorn eater. Why not try some band tailed pigeons from BC or wood pigeons from Europe in southern Ontario.

Capercaillie were introduced into Algonquin park inthe 30's, did very well, and then disappered. No one know why but it might be possible to find out.

If they utilize a niche no other species uses why not?

Nobody complains about transplanted rainbow trout, brown trout, pheasants and Hungarian partridge.

VBR,


Ted Gorsline

I would think there aren't too many niches that are not being used. Wood pigeons can do very well in agricultural areas, as e.g. they do in The Netherlands. They love peas and grains! Don't know if they eat many acorns.

Why introduce pheasants and huns when you already have several species of grouse and ptarmigan? Why introduce rainbows, when you have similar fish present already. What would be the reason for introducing European bear in Newfoundland? Just because you can?

Frans

1) To increase the diversity of huntable species.

Wood pigeons would be intertesting in southern Ontario. They shoot 10 million a year in Europe. I could be wrong about their food.

2) The greater variety of species the more likelyhood of overlapping or longer hunting seasons.

3)To use unused niches and create new ones.

B.C. is alot more interesting to hunt than Ontario for those reasons alone.

4) And once you have a larger food base you can increase the large predators. For example there are not many wild Siberian tigers in the world. If you could develop a wild population in northern BC it would help the tiger, make the country much more interesting and the hunting much more valuable.

The grizzly bear (and that is what the European brown bear is - Ursus arctos) is a much more interesting game animal than the black bear and the two species can co-exist anywhere there are trees which there are in Newfoundland.

Eastern Canada is extremely sterile. The soil, trees and all the animals were carried away by a two mile thick sheet of ice just 10,000 years ago.

Its going to take thousands of years for natural animal migration and evolution to fill those niches. You can do it in a day with an air plane.

The reason huns do well in Alberta is because the prairie has been changed into farm land. They are not native but nobody complains about them.

Personally I would leave red deer out of it because they will interbreed with wapiti and the other sheep and goats for the same reason.

VBR,


Ted Gorsline

What about Roe Deer?

They should fit nicely in Ontario and Quebec.

In my opinion it is fooly (meant to type folly but fooly fits as well)to introduce exotic spiecies. In most cases it has been found to be a mistake.

I am now in Australia and they have introduced a lot of critters here that were an expensive mistake.

oganisms that evolve together fit together with each other and the habitat. Those brought in do not.

Robin down under

Dear duffy4,

In a place like the Amazon rainforest which has remained undisturbed for millions of years species evolve interdependant relationships.

In northern Canada the glaciers have wiped all those relationships out three times in a row, the most recent being just 10,000 years ago. They take millions of years to rebuild by themselöves but man can do it in a day.

This is a hunters forum and not a single hunter on Pele Island complains about pheasants. Nobody along the Ganaraska River bitches because there are too many rainbow trout in the river.

People do complain about carp (not Europeans or Asians) and starlings but its a matter of pick and choose what you want. Just about all the food we eat, such as potatoes comes from somewhere else. It was all shifted around the world during colonization.

Science is 90 % axe grinding and fashion. It is a mistake to take people like David Suzuki seriously. A hundred years ago it was popular to introduce just about anything everywhere. Then it became unfashionable. Now its getting fashionable again. Some scientists now want to introduce elephants and lions and cheetahs on the great Plains in North America. They have already been doing that kind of thing in Texas for decades.

On the positive side. There are just about no addax and scimitar horned oryx in the Sahara desert. There are now thousands of both in Texas.


VBR,


Ted Gorsline

Dear Peter Pan,

Roe deer likely would not compete with white tails. They seem to graze instead of browse. Maybe they do both. Not a bad idea. They ought to do well where there is little snow as in Elgin county or on Pelee Island.

VBR,


Ted Gorsline

Ted,

Roe deer is not really affected by low temperatures. I used to hunt in cold climates of Poland and we have always had abundant number of roe deer. White tail can be the problem, however Finland introduced white tail and somehow they get along well with other domestic species.

Roe deer is fun to hunt. Small but not easy to kill, and like wild boar is not a nuisance for farmers.

I got to run is almost 5:00am and need to be 5:30am at my location for Wild Turkey :-)

Greetings,

Peter

Dear Peter Pan,

You are right. The Finns would know how whitetails and roe get along as they have them both.

Snow depth and not the cold is what kills whitetails.

I imgaine if you plunked some big Siberian roe on pelee island yopu would soon have another small hunting industry there. The pheasant hunt income there already pays the township taxes.

VBR,

Ted Gorsline

Well, when I was a kid growing up the only turkeys we saw were on TV. Now we have sightings every other day. NB is kinda slow to move though as we still have no pheasant season and some days you have to push them out of the way. Same for mourning doves. When I was in school you never saw them hardly in this area. Now they out number the robins 2-1. Still no season.

Dear NBHunter,

Its the Canadian way. We take the moral high road and save our mourning doves (the bird of peace) so the Americans can shoot them when they go south for the winter.

VBR,


Ted Gorsline

The grain farmers wouldn't thankyou for the pigeons.

quote:

Originally posted by Frans Diepstraten:
Why the heck would be bring in wild boar? You don't know what you are getting yourself in to. Talk to some farmers over in Europe what they think about wild boar!

I never understood this desire to move animals around. Why would be want to bring in red stags, when we already have it's cousin? Why tahr and chammies, where we already have goat, and sheep? What will the presence of those goat-like species do to our native goat?

Most planned or accidental transplants of animals have caused havoc on one native species or other. Forget about this foolishness.

Frans

Wood Bison in N. B.C, the Yukon, NWT, ALTA.

Along with pheasants, Huns, turkeys etc.


Daryl

THINK BIG!

I wan't mammoth's cloned and reintroduced in the Northern Yukon. I tend to agree with Frans otherwise.

JMHO,

John

I once spent almost six months researching all the wild pigeons of the world. The reason was I knew the passenger pigeon had to come from somewhere becasue 10,000 years ago its whole range was covered with ice.

I thought there might be the same acorn eating bird someplace in Siberia or southern Asia. All our moose, elk,black bears, wolves ets etc came from Asia not long ago. I never found the right bird. But it might astill be there.


VBR,


Ted Gorsline

There's a difference between reintroducing a species into its former range (bison) and randomly transplanting species from other continents. The argument that most of our species originate from Asia is not a valid one. Much moons have since passed, and for all intents and purposes these animals are 'native'.

I too have hunted roe deer in Poland, and they can survive the cold. It's snow depth and the accessibility of food that does them in. By the way, they are browsers, as much as they are grazers. They eat a wee bit of everything. Just ask the forestry people. Those nice and juicy buds on freshly planted saplings are very attractive to roe deer.

Frans

The late Randolph Peterson who was the curator of mammalogy at the Royal Ontario Museum once showed me the skull of a grizzly bear dug up in a gravel pit near Lake Simcoe in Ontario. It was from before the last ice age.

There are old references to what might have been grizzly bears in the barrens of northern Quebec.

The justification to re-introduce them into eastern Canada is there. They have had the time to move east since the last ice age but they haven't. The bears just don't seem to be able to survive on the Precambrain Shield.

It may be a cultural problem as it was with the wild turkey. There were many attempts to introduce domesticated wild turkey into Ontario and they all failed. The birds didn't know how to find food and avoid predators. The moment wild birds were re-introduced from the USA they took off.

All the grizzly and brown bears in the world are one species - Ursus arctos. But it seesm the western bears never learned how to colonize the woodlands of eastern Canada. The Scandinavian Ursus actos inhabit a similar forest.

It may be Finnish grizzly bears would survive in Quebec wheras Alberta bears might not.

VBR,


Ted Gorsline

Just an example:

A large part of the Netherlands is basically a river delta. Well-groomed, and water kept in check, but still a river delta. We used to have beaver, but they were exterminated. They were reintroduced a while ago, and sofar without any trouble. The muskrat was not deliberately introduced, as far as I know, but an escapee from fur farms, or released by some distorted individual. They cause major problems to our waterways, or rather the infrastructure that is supposed to keep the water out. One reintroduction goes without problems, one introduction of a non-native species is costing millions a year to fight them and the result of their activities.

(That said, we will have to see what happens whe the beavers have colonized completey the Biesbosch Park, and they start to venture outside looking for new grounds. The highly cultivated Dutch landscape doesn't go very well with the destructive/constructive ways of the beaver).

Frans

The people who have done the most damage to Canada by introducing unwanted exotics are Quebec separatists. Their line has always been if we don't get more we are going to leave. The resulkt has been a series of make work projects to keep giving them money. The most disastrous was the building of the St. Lawrence Seaway. It was a make work project. It has never made a nickle and it has let all kinds of noxious fish into the Great Lakes beginning with the sea lamprey.


VBR,


Ted Gorsline

If one has the view that the world is just a big "rock garden" for man's enjoyment, then man can move what he wants to where ever he wants.

However if one feels that there is any value in "wilderness" and "natural ecological systems" (mostly not greatly influenced by man) Then man moving organisms around is not a good thing.

I know we have screwed up a lot of things already but there is no need to continue doing it.

Ice ages are part of the proccess and I don't think we should "play God" and move organisums about to where we figure they should be.

Reintroducing animals back into habitats where man has been responsible for their absence is another story. I agree with that. (It is often a very hard proccess)

Robin down under.

You have great fishing and hunting in Canada. Don't screw it up with exotics just enhance what you have.

But until you get rid of some of the politicians you have up there; well good luck.
Maybe you could offer some of them up as game. Catch and no release.

If mother nature wanted them there or not it's her decision.Lets just try to make the best of whats left.

There is no balance of nature. Ask any dinosaur.

VBR,

Ted Gorsline

Ted,

You are, probably deliberately, for the sake of argument, ignoring the time aspect in your reasoning. Yes, over a loooong time nature evolves, changes, sometimes abruptly (relatively speaking), but usually gradually.

At no point in time has there been sudden cross-continental introductions of new species, that were not man-induced. We are not talking about evolution, we are talking about sudden introduction of NEW (not reintroduced) species into a habitat that didn't have this species before. I challenge you to give us examples where this worked out for the better.

"Better" I would like to define as "without negative influence on existing species" and that includes flora.

I could easily come up with a dozen negative examples if I spent the time. Maybe even an indifferent one (camels in the aussie outback, except for wrecking the odd water hole they seem to do just fine, correct me if I'm wrong). But give me some positive ones.

Frans

Dear Frans,

There are hundreds and hundrens of examples all over the world. The elk, the grizzly, the moose, the wolf, the black bear, and likely the wild sheep at one time all marched across the Asian land bridge to North America and the original animals, when they entered North America, were coming to a new continent for the very first time. North America was as new to them and just as odd as Australia was to camels.

There was a single day in history when all of these already developed species left Asia and entered North America for the first time ever.

They did not get to North America by osmosis or evolve to any great extent in North America. The Turkish grizzly is the same bear as the Alberta grizzly but his back fur is a little coarser.

And they have all done well. As have pheasants, chukar partridge, hungarian partidge, brown trout, and now even scimiter horned oryx - but at a more recent date and at the hand of man.

VBR,


Ted Gorsline

Ted,

I'm going to disregard the examples of the Bering landbridge. Yes, one animal showed up on a particular day for the first time, but it took much longer for them to inhabit all of the continent. Are there any studies done on what the influence was on existing wildlife at the time? Not trying to be argumentative here, just interested. Was there any wildlife of significance on this continent before the Asian clan arrived?

I'm not arguing that these species did well, they do not qualify as being suddenly introduced. They found land similar to theirs on the other side and migrated into that.

Introduced species have done well, for themselves, no doubt. A desert is a desert and camels in Oz are enjoying the sand as they would in the Sahara. Escaped pigs found paradise in the tropical North of Australia, and spread all over the place. My concern is not for the well-being of the introduced species, but for the well-being of those already there. What is the influence of pheasants and hun on native grouse species? What is the influence of brown trout on native trout species? What did the pigs do to bottom breeding gird species? How do introduced goats, and donkeys wreck native vegetation and soil. And so on.

But we could discuss this ad nauseum. What is your agenda, Ted? Why are you so keen on schlepping animals across the globe to inhabit areas that apparently they didn't move into on their own?

Frans

i have no idea what effect the animals now in North America had on what was in North America at the time they came.

There does seem to be very strong evidence that when native people, that is first nations arrived, they wiped out a great many native species. The last mastaton died off in California about the time Columbus discovered America.

I guess I have two agendas.

1) I like biodiversity. The effect of glaciation on eastern Canada really reduced the variety of life there. I would like to see dall sheep and barren land grizzly bears introduced into the Torngat mountains in Labrador. That is a slow start at rebuilding biodiversity.

2) There are a number of really fantastic animals out there like the Siberian tiger that could eaily disappear in their home range but that could be established in places like northern B.C. if there was enough of a food base and they depend mainly on wild boar. Boar first and tigers second.

I once toyed with the idea of trying to establish a population of wild Siberian tigers off the coast of Chile. An old American guy from Brazil named Blinstrom came to our office and tried to sell us wild bull hunts. He said there were big islands off the south coast of Chile with large populations of feral cattle, sheep and horses.

We didn't figure anyone would want to hunt cattle but wild tiger is a difffrenet story so we thought about planting them there to establish a wild tiger population there and to hunt them.

According to Blinstrom these islands are huge, miles off the coast and are uninhabited. Ideal place to have wild tigers. I located sources of Siberian tigers both in Russia and from America zoo but Blinstrom died and the project fell through.


VBR,


Ted Gorsline

quote:

The last mastaton died off in California about the time Columbus discovered America.

Hi Ted,

This is interesting in that I just today read that Mammoths were eradicated approximately 500 years after humans entered the North American continent (roughly 12,000 years ago). I wonder why the Mastadons were so much more able to resist eradication?

Fascinating ideas about tiger and grizzly introductions. Most enjoyable discussion.

This is in reference to my posting above. This is from the MSN news site (under Science)...


Already charged with eradicating mammoths, the first North Americans might also have wiped out wild horses in Alaska, a new study suggests.

The end of the Pleistocene era, around 12,000 years ago, was coupled with a global cooling event and the extinction of many large mammals, particularly in North America.

This was also when humans first made their way into Alaska from Asia, leading some researchers to believe that extensive over-hunting helped drive the extinction of the massive beasts. Mammoths, for example, were a prime target of early hunters and were driven to extinction within roughly 500 years of humans' arrival on the continent.

Dear Don in Colorado,

When I was a young man I worked on a cattle ranch in South America. We had captive jaguars as half tame pets. They are massively built animals for the small prey they live on now.

One theory is they evolved their heavy fangs and jaws to kill giant sloths, giant armadillos and other now extinct animals killed off when the first Indians invaded South America.

The other theory is they are now reptile eaters and their heavy fangs help them kill big hard shelled turtles and armour backed caiman.


VBR,


Ted Gorsline



VBR,


Ted Gorsline

There is a lot of evidence that the natives wiped out a North American horse population. Seems kind of ironic doesn't it? I can just imagine 10,000 yrs ago one indian says to the other "let's eat em!!" the other indian says "no we can ride em" the first indian says "fuck it let's eat them now-we can walk for the next 10,000 yrs".

the chef

Hi Ted,

The jaguars I have seen in zoos sure looked way too massive for the present prey species. There was the American Lion that weighed 900 pounds in North America that preyed on the megafauna that existed (and the sabertooth cat) along with a bunch more megapredators that I can no longer remember.

Calgary,

I sure agree with you.....A few years ago I read a book entitled "Guns, Germs, and Steel" that related advancement of different civilizations relative to each other. The presense of and the taming of horses was one of the major milestones leading to great advancement. If native Americans had domesticated horses instead of killing them all off they would have seemed to have had an easier life.