A prescribed burn at Kootenay National Park uses drip torches/Parks Canada
Restoring Grassland Habitat In Kootenay National Park
By Carol Patterson
Mountains and oceans may be the most visible features of British Columbia’s national parks, but grasslands are some of its most important habitats. Home to 30 percent of the province’s species at risk, grasslands cover only one percent of the province’s land area and are endangered landscapes. Wildfires that renew grasslands were suppressed for decades as people protected forests and built structures.
In the short term, the policy helped human settlement, but it reduced grassland habitat and the plant and animal species found there, and in many regions there is now a fuel buildup of dense vegetation that exacerbates wildfires. Resource managers in Kootenay National Park are tackling the issue by reintroducing fire to the landscape and restoring grassland habitat along the park’s southern borders near Redstreak Mountain and campground and Sinclair Canyon.
Visitors to the park’s Redstreak Restoration Trail can see the “before” picture — a dark forest with few birds or low bushes — and the after effect of fire on a mountain environment. After two decades of restoration, bluebirds and tanagers flit over meadows of bunchberry grass and wildflowers, and dried scat hint of bighorn sheep herds.
The grasslands in Kootenay are critical to rubber boa, limber pine, American badgers, and native grass species, but perhaps the most visible beneficiaries are members of the Radium-Stoddart bighorn sheep herd. About 150 bighorn sheep migrate between summer and winter homes, grazing alpine meadows in warm weather, moving down to the benchlands of the Columbia River where they can forage through snow. For centuries the habitat was ideal for sheep, frequent fires thinning underbrush and forests, and providing clear sightlines for sheep worried about cougar attacks. As people suppressed fires, the forest crept into the grasslands, and a habitat less friendly to sheep emerged.
Bighorn sheep frequented the Village of Radium Hot Springs when fire suppression reduced grasslands habitat/Carol Patterson
Bighorn adapted by spending more time in nearby Village of Radium Hot Springs (often called simply Radium) where golf courses offered green space with a better view of predators, and yards and boulevards laced with mountain-ash trees provided tasty snacks. Human residents learned not to park under fruit-bearing trees lest bighorn sheep stand on their cars to reach a meal, and looked carefully before stepping outside during fall headbanging season as dueling males brought their battles to village backyards.
Tourists enjoyed watching bighorn sheep march down roadways, but playing in traffic is never a good idea. Parks Canada undertook a program to restore grasslands within the park boundaries with goals of restoring sheep and badger habitat, enhancing native grass species, and reducing threat of wildfire to park facilities and the Village of Radium Hot Springs.
Historically, this area saw low intensity fires every few years, some started by lightning, others by Indigenous people to green up areas and attract game. With few fires on the landscape over the last century, reintroducing fire required planning and preparation to keep burns to a low intensity and within designated areas.
A sign announced restoration in the Redstreak campground area/Carol Patterson
In Kootenay, the grasslands restoration involved three main steps — removing buildings in critical habitat, thinning the forest so controlled burns could be done safely, and setting controlled burns.
From 2000 to 2002, commercial cabins and a park warden residence were lifted from their foundations and moved down Highway 93, squeezing through the narrow walls of Sinclair Canyon and out of the park, removing a significant human presence from an important wildlife corridor. South of Redstreak campground, 114 acres were mechanically thinned to remove small trees and brush during the winter of 2002 to 2003. An area in a neighboring provincial park was thinned a year earlier.
In the spring of 2005, the first prescribed burn was started and plans made to set low-intensity fires every five to 10 years to keep the grasslands open. An interpretative trail now leads through the area.
In 2013 and 2014 work moved to nearby Sinclair Canyon. The Radium Hot Springs Lodge and an old superintendent’s house were demolished and removed. Thinning of nearby forest was done to make it safe to burn and natural rock fill — attractive to rubber boas — was added. Native grass species were reseeded. To restore limber pine populations, seeds were collected from existing trees in 2015 and 2016 and sprouted in a nursery. The seedlings were planted in 2017 on the slopes above Sinclair Canyon.
More hand thinning was done in 2016 on nearby Mount Berland and in 2017 the area was ready for the first controlled burn. A series of low-intensity fires was started and plans were made to burn the area every two to three decades to replicate natural fire patterns.
A "before" scene of a forest with wildfires suppressed/Carol Patterson
For people living or visiting western Canada, the summer of 2021 was one of the smokiest as wildfire tore across British Columbia’s forests. It might seem that adding fire to a national park would become risker with climate change causing drier summers and hotter wildfires, but Fire and Vegetation Specialist Charlie McLellan of Parks Canada’s Lake Louise, Yoho and Kootenay Field Unit, disagrees.
“The general consensus among scientific community is that the wildfire season is starting earlier and lasting later. So, it emphasizes the need to carry out those projects like this," he said. "If you have longer fire seasons it allows more time for fuels to really dry out, so if it (fire season) starts earlier it gives more drying days so by mid part of summer the fuels are drier than they would have been historically. Then when a fire comes through those areas it burns at a higher intensity and it will impact the ecosystem more than it would have historically."
McLellan and his coworkers’ biggest challenge is the fallout from years with too few fires. “Historically, fires in the Redstreak or Sinclair areas would have occurred every 20 to 30 years. In the last century because of fire suppression by both provincial and federal government, it has taken out those high frequency fires and that’s allowed the encroachment of trees into the grasslands and increased the fuel loads. It makes it difficult to go from an area that used to be a grassland that’s now more of a forested ecosystem,” McLellan explains.
The risk is they could create a fire that exceeds planned intensity or boundaries. “That initial fire can be difficult but once we achieve that — sometimes we go in and thin it first mechanically and then use prescribed fire — and then burn it more like historical frequency, it becomes easier because it’s lower intensity fires,” McLellan says of the challenges of grasslands restoration, “but once you’re there, it gets easier and easier because there’s less fuel.”
Climate change will influence planning for controlled burns in the future.
“It would change the timing a bit. We’d initiate some of these projects earlier (in the year),” says McLellan. “After a really busy season like this, when there’s a lot of smoke because of the wildfires, it can be difficult to carry out projects like this in the fall. There’s less appetite for smoke and we take that into consideration. Because of that it wasn’t an ideal year to do prescribed burns."
A birdwatcher enjoys the grasslands near Redstreak campground/Carol Patterson
Parks Canada staff has also consulted with First Nations that have been present in this part of British Columbia for thousands of years.
“Parks Canada recognizes the importance of collaborating with Indigenous people and we’ve engaged with them as well as Indigenous knowledge holders for their perspective for burns like this and fire management,” McLellan says. “It’s well recognized that Indigenous groups here and throughout B.C. and a large part of North America have long recognized the important role of fire as a process for maintaining resilient landscapes. It’s a good place for us to collaborate because often we have very similar objectives of trying to maintain naturally functioning ecosystems with high diversity of species.”
On a summer morning, a flash of blue can be seen streaking across the mountain meadow south of Redstreak Campground, the cerulean blue plumage of a mountain bluebird unmistakable. Stopped on a dead stump, it may be quickly joined by a paler version of itself, the youngster’s mouth wide open, wings aquiver to solicit food from the adult. With more native grasses, the birds will have more insects to catch and a higher chance of rearing junior to adulthood. And more birdwatchers are noticing the species returning to the grassland near Redstreak Campground.
Mountain bluebirds and other songbirds are nesting in the grasslands/Carol Patterson
Scientists are also noticing new flora and fauna.
“We have collected data (on plant and animal species) for nearly 20 years. We have done three successive burns,” McLellan notes. “We’ve seen an overall increase in important grass like bunchgrass. Each subsequent burn has reduced (invasive species) below the initial numbers. With sheep we know these fire-maintained ecosystems are really important especially for winter range. Badgers have low population densities (naturally) so they are infrequently seen but in the last several decades we haven’t had a lot of badger observations in the southern end of Kootenay. But just last summer there was an active badger burrow — a female with three young were observed in the Redstreak restoration area.”
Parks Canada is using a combination of GPS collars on bighorn sheep, remote cameras, and vegetation plots to monitor results of the Redstreak restoration. Data collected from bighorn sheep before the project was compared to data retrieved after.
“It confirmed that the collared sheep increased their use of the treated area from March through May and in October, suggesting the area is used as a transitional range between winter and summer ranges,” shared McLellan.
Bighorn sheep need open sight lines to watch for predators/Carol Patterson
Parks Canada is preparing to burn more land on Redstreak Mountain. The expanded restoration has become even more important with the major Kicking Horse Canyon construction near Golden diverting thousands of vehicles through Kootenay for weeks each spring and fall until 2024. Regular road users may know a bighorn can be licking salt off the road around a tight corner. Newcomers may not, making it critical to maintain sheep habitat and draw animals away from human activity.
Once the Redstreak Mountain burn is complete, Parks Canada will do more telemetry on the Radium-Stoddart herd to monitor sheep activity.
“We’re also conducting a study on how mountain goats change their habitat selection in relation to fire and specifically, prescribed fire, in Yoho (National Park),” McLellan says.
One thing is clear. Restoration of this ecosystem will require maintenance every few years with controlled burns. “Our general objective with prescribed fire is to return to 50 percent of what our natural fire regime would have been, which is still a lofty goal considering how much more frequent fire used to happen naturally prior to European settlement,” McLellan concludes.
Fortunately, Parks Canada is well on its way to meeting its objective.
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