Birds, Gas, and People
 Map of area Dr. Jeff Wells is visiting |
On Sunday (8/14), I leave for a five-day fact-finding exploration of the Northwest Territory’s Mackenzie Valley. The Mackenzie River, Canada’s longest, flows 1,800 kilometers from Great Slave Lake north to the Beaufort Sea. Its watershed, which covers 20% of Canada, is located in the heart of the Boreal and encompasses more than 10% of the total North American breeding range of more than 100 bird species including birds as varied as Lesser Scaup, Short-billed Dowitcher, Northern Shrike, and Cape May Warbler.
The Mackenzie Watershed is home to six officially recognized Important Bird Areas. The region regularly hosts 1% or more of many waterfowl and shorebird species including up to 10% of the global population of Lesser Snow Goose and 20% of Black Brant. Thousands of Tundra Swans stage in the watershed many of which have been found, through satellite tracking, to migrate through and winter in the mid-Atlantic state of the eastern U.S.
Like all of the Boreal, the Mackenzie Valley is at a crossroads. Still largely unspoiled, a plan is now under consideration to build an 800-mile gas pipeline through the Valley and across lands under the control of several indigenous First Nations groups. The pipeline will undoubtedly change the social and ecological framework of the area forever. The peoples of Canada and the Northwest Territories must decide how best to maintain the lives and natural heritage that they cherish within the context of industrial development like the pipeline.
We will be visiting many of the areas that will be impacted by the proposed pipeline including Deline, Tulita and Norman Wells from our jumping off point of Yellowknife and will be meeting with leaders of First Nations groups, biologists, and others to learn more about the issue and the process.
Of course, I will be surveying the birds at all of our locations to get a better understanding of the species that frequent the region as they begin their journey south towards the U.S. I will write more about the trip and what we found over the next few weeks.
Jeff Wells
Senior Scientist
Boreal Songbird Initiative
August 12th, 2005 at 11:32 am
Enjoy the Deh Cho (big river). The MacKenzie is wonderful place, I lived in Fort Providence for two years and loved my time there. If your trip allows, make a stop in Fort Providence. There are a number of important areas for birds there, including Mills Lake. Very much worth protecting.
January 24th, 2006 at 1:00 pm
To say the north is largely unspoiled is so very wrong. During the trip to Deline did you happen to learn about the uranium mine that the canadian government secretly opened (in 1945) to supply the states with uranium for the bombs they dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki? (The Manhattan Project)
The people of Deline have lost many people to cancer because they were not told about the dangers or the purpose for which they were hired. The area around the Great Bear Lake is radioactive and it has poisoned the people and the entire environment in the area. The wild meat, the fish, most of the food they rely on, is tainted with radioactivity.
That is what happens when the government goes into the north and extracts what they see as valuable. They have not answered the dene people regarding this matter…. and here they are asking these same people to trust them and allow them to build pipelines?
The dene people need to live. They do not need to be radiated and die of cancer. They do not need the government to push through a pipeline that will further effect them and thier culture negatively.
If you are studying birds that migrate you may want to educate yourself about this matter, especially if any of those birds may be consumed.