A new noise study is underway to combat what’s being called “highway hunting.” The term has been coined since hunters often don’t have to leave or go far from their vehicles if they spot an animal, using industrial roads. There are also stretches of forests cleared power lines.
This is mostly being noticed in a hamlet located 150 kilometres south of Fort McMurray.
Conklin’s residents and local hunters are concerned by the noise from nearby oilsands operations, roads, construction sites and pipeline compressor stations. Other wildlife like wolves are known to wait in the same spots as hunters, while noise makes it harder for hunters to call moose.
An ongoing University of Alberta study into how an increasingly loud part of the municipality impacts moose hunting. The study is partnered with the province’s Oil Sands Monitoring Program, which offers grants for community-based monitoring.
Peter Fortna works with the Conklin Resource Development Advisory Committee. Fortna says many hunters from the largely Metis community have noticed it’s getting harder to hunt because of additional humans in the boreal forest from oilsands developments, highways and construction projects.
What happens is, hunters in the experiment perform moose calls at different distances in quiet settings and with speakers playing real recordings of industrial sounds. Five recording devices record how sound travels. Recordings of real moose calls are also played to see how moose respond with background noise.
Roughly 80 per cent of the area is within 500 metres of some kind of human disturbance. Fortna said this is called fragmentation.
Between 2013 and 2014, researchers at the University of Alberta tracking 10 wolf packs in the oilsands region found they were killing more moose and caribou than usual. The researchers found the wolves stayed close to cutlines near industrial sites and waited for prey to cross the clearings.
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