Cougars

Bears

Wolves

Other Wildlife

In 2006, 25 children from the Town of Canmore’s Big Fun Summer Camp learned about bear ecology and how to be BearSmart. The children decided to share their new found knowledge on Bear safety with our community. In partnership with Mountain FM the children created and recorded BearSmart radio spots. The BearSmart radio spots aired on Mountain FM in September, each day for the first week of school. The following is a recording of the aired radio spots.

In 2007, 30 children from the Town of Canmore’s Big Fun Spring Break Camp learned all about cougars and how to coexist with them. The children decided to share what they learned about cougar safety with our community. In partnership with Mountain FM the children created and recorded CougarSmart radio spots. The following is a recording of the aired radio spots.

In 2007 WildSmart, the Friends of Kananaskis and Alberta Parks teamed up to start a volunteer Wildlife Ambassador program. The following is a radio interview on Mountain FM about why the program was started.

The following interview on Mountain FM addresses what the Wildlife Ambassador program is and the positive impacts it will have on the Bow Valley and Kananaskis Country.

Animal Communication Trees, The Facebook Of The Forest. For the past 15 years researchers have studied bear rubbing trees in seven different national parks. Through the use of remote cameras and intensive field tracking, Carnivore Biologist Cam McTavish and his research team discovered many animals leave signs and/or notes for other animals at these very special communication trees. Preliminary information suggests these sites may act as “Tree Mail,” where one animal can potentially determine the sex, species, breeding conditions, etc. of another.

In a presentation for Bow Valley WildSmart, Associate Professor in the Department of Geography at the University of Calgary Shelley Alexander Ph.D, shares the results of her recent research involving coyote food sources and human conflicts.

From a presentation for Bow Valley WildSmart, here is Nikita Ovsyanikov talking about Polar Bears in the Arctic.

Known as “The Land of Fire and Ice”, the Kamchatka Peninsula in Russia is home to some of the largest brown bears on the planet. Erupting volcanoes, hundreds of glaciers and thousands of lakes and rivers are where one quarter of the world’s Pacific Salmon come to spawn. Listen as John Paczkowski talks about Kamchatka and the work being done by the Wildlife Conservation Society to protect the Brown Bear.

Gordon Stenhouse of the Foothills Research Institute’s grizzly bear research project discusses ten years of results. He focuses on applied management and directly links grizzly research to management. He also discusses mapping habitat, developing predictive models to explain bear habitat use, provincial grizzly bear numbers and new technologies that his research team has developed to aid bear conservation.