Let's protect our wildlife!

If you've traveled on the Trans-Canada Highway in Banff National Park, you've seen these huge wooded wildlife overpasses that are said to have decreased collisions with animals by some 80 percent.

The Interstate 80 that connects New York to San Francisco, runs by Park City and, according to what I've recently read, has seen some 106 fatal accidents in the area, over a two-year period, that included 98 deer, 3 moose, 2 elk, 2 raccoon, and 1 cougar, all struck and killed by cars and trucks.

This continued slaughter has caused a public call for improvements — and the Utah Department of Transportation responded by building its first-ever bridge just for wildlife at the top of Parley Summit, (elevation 7,129 feet).

Now, since wildlife can't read road signs, how will they use that bridge? Apparently, the animals won’t have much choice, as 8-foot-tall wildlife fences have been placed on both sides of the bridge and the freeway on a stretch of about 3.5 miles, on both sides of the freeway.

This fencing will funnel the animals to the other side of the road over the bridge, keeping up with their specific migration patterns.

The new $5 million bridge is 330 feet long and 48 feet wide. This might seem expensive, but based on the above numbers, it should pay for itself in less than 12 years in terms of vehicle damage; I know what I'm talking about as I have hit 3 deer over a 20 year period.

The job will be completed before winter, so expect to see far less roadkill littering the interstate starting in 2019!

Why is wildlife invading Park City?

Gradually and over the past ten years we’ve seen a notable increase of wildlife around our Park City home. When we first came in 1985, the entire place was both barren and treeless and there was no way for us to observe much wildlife, except for ground-squirrels in the spring, magpies year-round and robins in the summer.

In the meantime, the small trees began their growth and in the last decade, they’ve created a true urban forest, producing its own life-sustaining environment and encouraging the settlement of pigeons, regular squirrels and occasionally, inviting a visit from the local coyote.

At the same time, in addition to aspen and fir trees, more decorative trees were planted, bushes of all kinds began to populate most gardens and with automatic irrigation, our town turned into an irresistible oasis of fresh, edible vegetation for deer, moose and elk.

And this abundance of fresh food and forest-like environment worked like a magnet on attracting all this wildlife, huge and small. The lack of natural predators (except for motorized vehicles) played also a huge role in this wildlife population explosion. But the idea that the poor creatures have been forced out of their habitat by our sprawling town just doesn’t wash.

Call it an urban legend if you will...

Where are the animals?

Yesterday morning, on my way to ski Snowbird, I drove under the $5 million wildlife bridge that was open to wildlife traffic last December.

I almost go through the area two or three times a month and have yet to see some activity involving any deer or elk crossing. I was told there were cameras installed to observe the animal traffic that seems to be few and far between.

Well, by my book it’s quite simple: The first large animal that crossed that path (if it ever did) would have cost $5 million to us, the taxpayers and our cost would decrease as traffic volume picks up. One thousand beasts crossing it would bring the cost per critter down to $5,000 a passage, which still seems quite expensive to me.

John Gleason, a spokesman with the Utah Department of Transportation, said that it took a few years for animals to begin using a similar crossing in Southern Utah, but, he asserts that now it’s second nature to them. “It will probably take some relearning,” he said. “There is a good chance we won’t know how effective this crossing is for a while. It will really be about determining if it’s cutting down on those collisions between vehicle and animal.”

I still think that the decor leaves to be desired when compared to the huge realistic-looking, wildlife overpasses near Banff, Canada, and if it were more wooded and vegetated, it would attract more animals, but who am I to judge. I’m not a moose !

Our wildlife's existential quandary

This winter our local wildlife has a very tough time with feeding itself, as snow keeps on accumulating. On Monday, my wife counted 12 deer in our neighbor's yard, over the 3 foot wooden fence, and these guys seem to have established their winter quarters between our two homes munching on pine tree branches, the only “edible” stuff left for them. 

It’s not that as a community, Park City disregards the welfare of our four-legged friends. In late 2018, a $5 million overpass was completed, crossing over the Interstate 80 at Parleys summit, about 10 miles from our home, to let wildlife through the busy highway and limit vehicle collisions. 

Its camera went viral in 2020 when footage from the bridge was viewed over 3 million times. The clip below highlights just some of the animals that crossed in front of the cameras including moose, pumas, bobcats, bears, porcupines, mule deer, and coyotes. 

This of course is more variety than we see from our window that’s limited to moose, deer, squirrels, rabbit and the occasional grouse, but who know really which critter roams there? 

Wildlife scourge

Progressively, a lot of deer have found refuge and settled inside our block that enjoy calm, little vehicular traffic and silence. 

It also have a lot of things to eat that not only have attracted these animals, but sustained them, especially during this very snowy winter. Days in, day out we count no less that 10 of them loitering in that protected space and showing absolutely no desire to move out of that area.

This wildlife is eating all the tree they can reach and are likely to stick around the rest of the year, feeding themselves on nice bushes, grass and whatever looks edible to them. 

I’ve called the Division of Wildlife Resources but it expressed no intention to relocated the animals. 

I have also discussed my concern with the City and asked them to take action about it, but as always, they have no idea and can’t see that it’s a problem for their constituents...

The champion, the hunter and his fans

Luc Alphand is a former World Cup alpine ski racer from France; he specialized in speed events like Downhill and Super G and later became a very successful race car driver. He has a great following in France and because of his wonderful talents and widespread popularity, he's been able to attract sponsors and made a great life for himself.

As we all know, reaching celebrity status has an impact on one's private life and freedom of movement; it also creates certain obligations. Among others, there's is a certain degree of “political correctness” expected from public figures that will restrict taking radical positions or actions that might displease a certain portion of the individual's supporters.

Sure, there are high-level actions such as charitable drives, environmental positions that are considered noble and worthwhile, but anything like supporting tyrants (Killy supporting Putin), favoring controversial causes or being pro highly “radio-active” issues should be altogether avoided. At the very least, such actions, if they are taken, should remain totally private.

Now, let me bring today's subject in full light. Mr. Alphand goes hunting in the Kamtchatka region of Russia with a guided outfit (Ovini Expeditions) to kill bears, mountain sheep and other wildlife. In the process, he finds nothing better than posting photos parading his trophies on Facebook.

I'm not a hunter, I'm not against hunting and I eat mean every now and then, but I have little respect for someone who needs to go away from his natural stomping grounds, spend a lot of money for it, in order to shoot wildlife in a place where rules are few and far between. This sounds a bit degenerate to me.

Of course, this kind of reckless personal promotion should not come as a surprise in this age of selfies and narcissist indulgence, but Luc Alphand should have been smarter in staying away from the limelight under these circumstances. He's now pissed off half of his fans, must feel pretty bad and can't put the toothpaste back inside the tube.

When wildlife eats out...

Too much snow doesn't make wildlife survival easier and this winter, Park City has seen a lot of wild animals venturing in town in search of food.

Yesterday, as we were walking we spotted that calf moose kneeling and eating some chipped bark in a front of a house.

The animal saw us, kept on feeding and one house further down the street, the huge mom ambled towards us, paid scan attention to the two nervous pedestrians and rejoined her offspring.

 Okay, that's another day in Park City!

Lake Louise, gem of the Canadian Rockies

Nothing is more iconic than the view of the Lake Louise Chateau cradled into the montains and surrounding glaciers. 

Just like Banff, the place is overcrowded and an Asian tourists' favorite, just like Interlaken in Switzerland or Paris in France. It truly is a picture-perfect tourist spot which explain the fleet of tourist buses beating a path to it.

We loved it too and our only regret is that we didn't meet much wildlife while in the Banff National Park. We'd thought we'd see some bears, but no luck; they all were on vacation! The only animal we saw was a panicky deer stuck in traffic in the center of Banff.

In fact we see much more wildlife passing through our own backyard at home that we've seen this time in a place they're supposed to congregate. Go figure!

How many wildlife have we seen?

Our first day traveling through Yellowstone has been rather disappointing. We saw no single bison, not even one wolf and just one raven, but we run into thousands of Chinese tourists. Sign of the times?

Squirrel story

Our little property witnesses an incessant wildlife traffic, from “big guys” like moose, elks and deer to smaller creatures like birds of all kinds, including humming birds, but also cottontail hares and squirrels.

If you didn't know it, our small Park City tree squirrels live, you've guessed it, in trees. This is where they build their nest, called drey, that's usually built of twigs, dry leaves, and grass, and squeezed inside the forks of a tree about 30 to 45 feet (9.1 to 13.7 m) above the ground.

Squirrels may also nest in attics or exterior walls of buildings, where a drey could be considered a fire hazard, as these critters love to chew on electrical cables. In our mountains, smarter or luckier squirrels sometime inhabit a permanent tree den in the hollow of a trunk.

The squirrel you see on that video is one of many we observe everyday, that carries pine-cones to its drey, and this time, we saw one being systematic about harvesting them from our next neighbor's tree by first pulling out as many pine-cones as possible, before collecting them later on the ground and bringing them home for storage...

Tackling overpopulation

This topic follows yesterday’s discussion about the search for a new economic model. Overpopulation is closely entwined with any economic or social models that has to work for society and at this point, too many folks consider it a given and are accepting that from 6.6 billion today we’re likely to break the 10 billion mark before 2050. So, one way to approach that topic is to try to understand how overpopulated the earth really is. According to both David Pimentel, from Cornell University, and Mario Giampietro senior researcher at the National Research Institute on Food and Nutrition (INRAN), the world population would have to be reduced by two-thirds, that is get down to 2.2 billion. This is correlated by the 2006 World Wildlife Fund’s "Living Planet" report stating that if the entire world were to live with a high degree of luxury (say like Western Europe,) we’d be spending three times more resources than what the planet can supply. Other reports mention that we already consume five times more than that the planet can supply. Finally, Steve Jones, head of the biology department at University College London, has said, that "humans are 10,000 times more common than they should be, according to the rules of the animal kingdom; without farming, the world population would probably have reached only half a million today… So based on these statements, and although there’s no real consensus, it’s fair to say that we’re currently three times too many on the planet. Next time, we’ll explore what could be done about that…

Dear Deer

In Ridgeview, the first neighborhood we moved to when we arrived in Park City, more than 35 years ago, there’s a house that recently errected a chain-link fence around its yard. 

We noticed it when we walked there, earlier this week, and I told my wife that such fencing was illegal within our City limits. 

Then our attention went to a two-page notice that explained why such a “diversion” had been built. I leave you with the story as it was told on the signs… 

Dear Deer, 

The buffet line is closed. Your bedroom and bathroom privileges are revoked. Enough is enough! For over 30 years we have shared this space. It was great to have one or two of you stop by every few weeks for a surprise visit. But times have changed. It is no longer a surprise. 

Now you are a herd, often numbering over a dozen, and in the winter you are here everyday. The annual cost of repairing your damage to the yard now exceeds our summer water bills. In the winter our driveway is covered in your excrement. In the spring , hundred of pounds of your waste must be racked from the yard before we can use it. 

You have eaten our Mugos to nubs, damaged more of the juniper and broken the lower branches of the spruce. It took 30 year to grow these plants. You destroyed decades of growth in days last winter. We suspect your numbers swelled when a few neighbors put out food to encourage you to visit their yards. 

They may have started modestly, but one neighbor tells me his efforts grow until he was putting out a hundred ponds of food a day for you. As the food supply grew, so did your numbers. As the food through appeared bottomless you stopped roaming and took up permanent residence. 

If the neighbors who feed you want a herd of deer in their yards, and accept the accompanying damage, that is their choice. We no longer accept the costs their actions have imposed upon us. This diversion is to help you break your habits and protect our vegetation. 

When you need to sleep, defecate, wrestle, or just want to taste a real plant again instead of food from a bag, go down the street and indulge yourself in someone else’s yard. 

P.S. We had a similar challenge with ducks a few years ago and put up a diversion from them. The ducks learned very quickly. Within a few weeks, they stopped coming through our yard. You deer have much bigger brains than ducks. You figure this out. Show us how fast you can learn! 

P.P.S. We would rather not have this diversion, but it has become necessary to protect the vegetation from ravenous, artiodactyl ungulates. The low junipers were eaten to nubs two years ago. Extensive watering brought some of them back, but is expensive and laborious. The Mugo pine you see was stripped to a height of over seven feet. It is never going to recover. Another Mugo ten feet to the east was completely denuded and had to be cut down. We replaced the Mugos with Arborvitae this spring as supposedly deer do not like to eat Arborvitae. Well they did not eat them, but the deer destroyed several of them two weeks ago rubbing the velvet of their antlers. We have had enough. We are protecting the vegetation. 

P.P.P.S. We have spoken to our neighbors about their compulsion to feed wildlife. Several people tell us they have called the DWR. After a few weeks or months, the neighbors seem to start putting out food again. This diversion seemed both more polite and more expeditious that filing another report with the DWR.

An almost perfect course

Over the years and especially during the ones we’ve been running as a couple in Park City, our daily running route has not changed drastically, but has been evolved as we’ve moved around from house to house and as we’ve become bored with the original itinerary. Today, our morning run has a lot to offer; it starts with a flat one-mile section that warms us up, then there’s a grueling climb for another good mile, about the same distance is all downhill and then comes the best part of our daily routine, the path that follows McLeod Creek in a mild ascent, one of the very few creeks that flow through Park City. There’s lots of greenery, wildlife, and only a handful of people walking, running or cycling along this path. When it comes to running, this last stretch of effort truly is the icing on the cake!

The impact of man-made snow

As our local resorts are now taking advantage of very cold weather to make snow, it’s a good time to ponder the ecological impact of snow-making on our environment. Since snow guns work best at night, folks living near the slopes must put up with relentless noise that also negatively affects wildlife! 

Then, there’s the question of water availability, particularly in winter, when mountain streams are low, making it often necessary to transport the water or have it stored on site through man-made ponds. While adjuvants (ice nucleation-active proteins from bacteria) are no longer added in Europe they still are in America. These serve as nuclei to induce the formation of ice crystals at relatively high temperatures. 

Once produced, artificial snow is 50 times harder and 4 times denser than its natural version; it also tends to waterproof the soil it covers and contributes to gullying and erosion. Slower to disappear, it tends to extend the seasonality of melting. Snow guns generally require between 3,000 and 4,000 cubic meters of water per hectare of slope covered, which suggests a thickness of one foot or 30 cm. 

Accordingly, it takes approximately 106 gallons (400 litres) of water to produce one cubic meter of snow, a significant amount of this water is lost due to evaporation, and thus is not returned to the water table. Furthermore, since it takes approximately 3.5 to 4.3 kWh of energy to produce one cubic meter of snow it would represent around 17,500 kWh of electricity. Power costs vary wildly and are half in the US of they are in Europe. 

In France, producing one cubic meter of snow costs $2,5 which includes water, power, investment amortization and labor costs but not grooming expenses. As a country, France also uses around fifteen million cubic meters of water per season to make snow, and this activity cost the largest ski areas in America and Europe around 1 to 2 million dollars per season depending on their infrastructure, not counting labor, infrastructure cost and grooming expenses. 

Obviously, the high cost of man-made snow is passed on to the end-user under the form of more expensive lift tickets. Without making snow, US ski resorts would lose over $1 billion annually and skiing would quickly lose its attraction, especially in view of an accelerating climate change!

Ski Industry thoughts about Trump

Ski Area Management (SAM) is a magazine targeting the mid and top management at American ski resorts. Unless it has been living under a rock, its entire audience should be very extremely sensitive to the issue of global warming.

In a tongue-and-check survey it asked its readership to express their opinion about a Trump presidency. I voted along with 472 other readers, and I posted the results next to this blog.

For those of my readers who have not quite followed or understood some of the key points in Trump's program, just remember that he doesn't believe in climate change, that he will go full tilt to extract more fossil fuels every where he can, that he will renege on the recent Paris Accords, abolish the EPA and that Sarah Palin is likely to be his Interior Secretary (Nation Public Lands and wildlife)!

Enough to make a legitimate member of the ski industry commit suicide, but apparently not in the instance of our ski lift owners, operators and managers. More than 40% are okay with his program while the rest (less than 60% of smart folks) is praying hard that none of it comes to pass, so go figure...

Feeding deer and birds...

This is the 9th summer season that we have tended to a veggie garden, and until this year we had no complaints about wildlife checking on it, until recently.

Sure in our new home there is no protecting fencing so deer, moose, rabbits and even dogs can roam in at their leisure. We've tried dog and deer repellents but these product don't seem effective at all. This year the deer have sampled the salads but didn't find them quite to their taste.

So far, the rabbits have abstained and the moose just amble by. But the American Robbins have been very, very naughty. They have binged on our ample harvest of strawberries, eating them while they were still white.

I installed a net and setup certain sanctions that have proven to be extremely dissuasive!

Who’s trampling our veggie garden?

We’ve kept a veggie garden since my retirement in 2006. For that many years, we’ve grown herbs, lettuces and strawberries with pretty good success. 

This actually was until the trees around our house kept on growing, inviting much more wildlife than ever before (birds, squirrels, rabbits, deer, elk and moose, among other critters). 

Three to four summers ago, our strawberries were the first to be targeted. We tried everything available to chase magpies and American robins away, but with little success. The deer also like the strawberry, preferring the leaves and pulled some of our lettuce to munch on them. 

We could have used a machine gun, but we relented. This year we finally put an end to the culture of strawberry. To almost paraphrase the Beatles, our “strawberry fields aren’t forever”. Yet, in spite of this kind of adversity, we’ve prepared the ground and sowed lettuces that have just begun showing up.

Except that two days ago, I discovers the big footprints left by a wandering moose, and I took it as a dire warning that were candidate for having moose, elk or deer using our yard as a self-service food-stop. 

We’ll keep you informed how this potential war might develop and which, between the human and the animal specie, is likely to win it!

Where's your bear spray?

Since we got to Jackson, everyone has been spooking us about the danger of bears in the wild. Enough I should say so we were ready to consider buying some bear spray, touted to be a powerful weapon against menacing bears that we might meet at some corner of a trail. This bear spray is not your pocket mace, but the most powerful disabling agent allowed by the EPA. It's in fact as big as a small fire extinguisher and can neutralize a big, bad bear, some 30 feet away.

Since we didn't want to carry any superfluous weight while hiking, we passed on the opportunity to disable such mean bears and simply took a chance. We were well advised; these couple of days might have been when the worst bears took their vacation. We saw herds of marmots, some pronged antelopes, a couple of elks a bald eagle and a friendly, huge crow. That was all for our dose of wildlife, but alas, no bear ready to be sprayed...

Bark City!

Last night, we attended a meeting initiated by a lady runner who recently got attacked by an out-of-control dog. Park City and its surrounding county has a leash law that is obviously hard to enforce, but that nonetheless is a law. Representatives from law enforcement, animal control, friends of animals, wildlife protection and trail system management, along with trail users and a very small number of dog owners attended the event.

What was clear is that a large number of people are scared by dogs on the loose and that some dog owners are jerks who think their animals is above the law. The problem of course is with owners, not animals that can't vote or can't drive vehicles, for example, they're just dogs. A few solutions were suggested, like creating specific trails where dogs could roam free, or set one-way trails that might mitigate the problem; there's also the fear of fine including those set up for harassing wild life.

In my opinion however, and more practically, users that don't like to be harassed by stray dogs ought to protect themselves (sticks, poles, mace) and most importantly take pictures of the offending pet, their owners and their vehicles license plates, so they can be reported to law enforcement and be identified as perpetrators. Education might also work, but most importantly attitudes have to change.

The bottom line is that we, the users, that don't want to be bitten by out-of-control animals, should act to bring a lasting change in attitude and shame these righteous bad dog owners into being better citizens.

An almost perfect “kill”

Major Snelson from the 4th Fighting Squadron was about to conclude his mission over Duschene County and was now ready to head back towards Hill Air Force Base. As he was flying over Route 40 on this Sunday afternoon he noticed very little traffic; everything below looked brown and dark and the highway just an undulating grey ribbon. He barely could see it at first, but now he could discern a lone silver car moving westbound on that gray line of asphalt. Just for fun, he aimed at the vehicle, locked it in with his laser and could have fired one of its Maverick missiles into the target. Problem was, these rockets are expensive, it would have dug a huge crater into the road and there would have been a lot of explaining to do for the smashed car. Had that happened over Iraq or even Kuwait, that wouldn’t have been a cinch, but not here, in Utah.I was driving back home in that late afternoon. The weather was perfect, nature ready to take its white winter coat and I was just wary to make it back before dusk. You see, the unique and big danger on these rural roadways is always wildlife; I’ve already hit three deer with my car and don’t like it one bit. For some reasons I happened to be just a bit apprehensive for a moment. A fraction of second later, I heard a huge roar, saw two F-16 passing me overhead and veering suddenly to the right, over the hill. God, I love these flying machines!