Corridors are natural links for wildlife
By DENNIS APRILL. Outdoors Columnist
In 1979, as a college student, I worked with Wildlife Biologist Charles Willey in Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom doing a preliminary study of the Vermont moose herd.
Back then, there were an estimated 75 moose in that state, 50 of them in Essex County, the remainder in family groups in the Green Mountains. The Essex County moose were there because of the close proximity to New Hampshire and Maine; the Green Mountain moose were animals that had dispersed from the east along wooded corridors to the Green Mountains.
I knew then that it was just a matter of time before some of those Vermont moose would colonize northern New York.
A year later, in September 1980, the first migrants, roughly five moose, wandered into New York, and a natural corridor was the key for them getting here. At that time, such a passageway existed near Whitehall. As moose crossed into New York, if they went west or north, they were generally okay. If they traveled south, as one did to Hudson Falls, they had to be tranquilized and moved north. Today there are an estimated 4000 moose in Vermont and more than 100 in New York, the latter a self-sustaining herd. Just recently, Marilyn Cross e-mailed me that she saw four pass in front of her car as she drove near Ticonderoga. The key reason we are seeing more moose is the natural corridors between moose populated areas in both states.
To understand the concept better, imagine northern New York as an island, which it literally is since the construction of the Erie Canal. To the north, there is the barrier of the St. Lawrence Seaway and tens of miles of farmland and towns separating huge tracts of forestland. To the south, equally sprawling civilization creates a barrier for some wildlife. So it is from the east that species like moose must come to northern New York.
In the past decade, there has been talk of creating another natural corridor, this one between the Adirondacks and Algonquin Provincial Park, 150 miles to the northwest in Ontario. There are, of course, various motives behind such a link, not the least of which is that it would allow wolves from Algonquin to move into New York State, making wolf restoration proponents happy. A group of Clarkson University students recently researched the feasibility of an A2A, as it is called.
They found that while such a corridor could help biodiversity, it would be almost impossible to implement. One of the student researchers, Nathan Post, is quoted as saying, "The A2A initiative is important from an ecological viewpoint, but hard to realize as most of the land under consideration is privately held." Post goes on to add, "We had to consider how to weigh the rights of the landowners and dairy farmers against the public good." The bottom line is that an attempted government buy-up of potential corridor links, whether in Canada or the United States, was unfeasible, and the only way it could work is as a "public-based movement" using land trusts and tax benefits to achieve the goal.
Having traveled that proposed corridor a number of times, I find it hard to believe such a natural link could work anytime soon. One hundred and fifty miles is a lot of territory to put into a wildlife corridor, and there is still the obstacle of the St. Lawrence Seaway.
Every summer in recent years, I have taken a group wolf calling in the Papineau-Labelle Reserve of southern Quebec, roughly 75 miles as the crow flies from the Adirondacks. The wolves there are the closest packs to the New York border. After we cross to Canada at Chateaugay, I always ask the group to look at the countryside, the potential obstacles like farmland, hydro plants, a major river, cities and towns, and an interstate highway. I then ask the group, "What is the likelihood a corridor could be set up between Quebec and the Adirondacks and that a wolf, a species not protected in Quebec, could make it to New York State?" And, Papineau-Labelle is half the distance compared to Algonquin Park.
There have been exceptions. Alice, a cow moose radio-collared in New York, traveled all the way to Algonquin Park in 2000, only to perish there ( Her complete story is on the Outdoor Perspective website in the Archives section).
Where natural corridors do exist for animals to move back and forth, they can have a major impact on the diversity of the wildlife over a broad area. There are conditions, however, due to size and scope, where these links are not feasible. It is up to us to decide which ones we want.