Parks Canada has released their 2009 Jasper National Park (JNP) mortality statistics to date, along with the last 30 years of railway and highway mortality numbers.

Ungulates (Whitetail deer, sheep and goats) and large carnivores (grizzly bears, black bears, wolves and cougars) have been recorded, providing insight to the effectiveness of speed zone signage, numbers of trains per day traveling through the park and animal populations in the park.

Protection/Operations Coordinator Steve Malcolm, said most of the stats were gathered by retired JNP warden Wes Bradford.

“These are all his (stats). It’s a lot of animals when you look at it over the long term. But the interesting thing is to see the increase in the whitetail (deer). In the first ten-year period there were only five white tail (mortalities on the railway). In the second ten-year period there was 15, in the third ten-year there was 23,” Malcolm said.

Bradford, who started at the park in 1975, said he thinks the statistics are very important to look at over time, but he says they have to be considered with known populations of an animal, along with traffic volumes over time, and then the amount of related deaths, compared over time. If an elk population goes down, he said, even if the traffic volumes go up, you might not get as many animals hit.

Commenting on the large increase in white tailed deer mortalities (which are even greater on the highway than the railway), Bradford said that in 1975, whitetail deer were rare to see in the mountain area in Western Canada. It’s the same in British Columbia, he said, such as in Valemount, when in the past, only mule deer were seen before the whitetail population increased.

“They are increasing their range, and white tailed deer are doing that all across North America. They are a deer that really, really survives, and most does have two fawns... So they have a pretty high survivorship, and they have a higher recruitment,” Bradford said.

Whitetail deer are very dominant and will chase mule deer off, so picking prime habitat, and also being adaptable to living in marginal urban environments and don’t mind coming out along roadsides for food, Bradford said, the whitetail deer are pushing the mule deer back into the back country and more remote areas.

This can help explain why mule deer mortalities were higher from the 10-year mark to the 20-year mark, but have gone down again at the 30-year mark; the lower populations of mule deer near roadways and railways have resulted in an overall lower number of mortalities.

Highway and railroad mortality rates of all ungulates and carnivores, with the exception of black bears, have gone down at the 30-year mark, compared to the 20-year mark on the railway.

Bradford said he doesn’t think it is because of less grain on the tracks, as he said he thinks there is a direct tie between bear deaths and grain on the tracks as a food source. (Consequently, black bears are the only animal that mortality rates are still increasing on the railways after the 30 years).

Fewer trains with more cars are what he accredits the fewer mortalities.

“We have longer trains now out on the track, and we’ve actually got less trains out there,” he said. “So again, you can look at it and say, let’s say we had 60 trains a day that went through Jasper. So that was 60 opportunities for something to get killed, right? Because they always get killed by the front of the train. And now lets say that’s cut down to 40 trains per day, because they’ve increased the length of the trains, well that’s really reduced the chance of an animal being hit, you know, it’s reduced to almost 25 per cent.”

An overall decrease in sheep highway mortalities is something Bradford suggests is due to mitigation efforts, mostly the slower 70km/hr speed zones in high sheep collision areas. He also said there were way to mitigate railway deaths, including putting up a series of short fencing and cattle guards in between the fencing in high collision areas which wouldn’t have as much of an environmental impact.

In the last 10 years, there have been no grizzly mortalities on the railway in JNP and one grizzly mortality on the highway.