u/mattTaylor67

Hey so little background. I’m from western Canada. I have experience working for national parks, environment canada, environmental consulting etc and I also have experience as a wrangler/hunting guide

I have long thought it’s sad that horses aren’t used as more as I’ve come across many situations where it would have been better then a quad.

As such I’ve been looking how to merge the 2 worlds I love (conservation and pack horses). I’ve looked a bit into using pack horses to replace helicopters for tree planting, and I think it would be viable for spring trees, so that’s one avenue. My sales pitch for conservation/research would be that a) can help you pack equipment for field work and camp into remote areas either too rough or not allowed to drive quads and vehicles into (willmore wilderness, Muskwa Kechika, Spatizi, etc.). With horses we could pack in a healthy amount of field gear and comforts for camp into super rough country that would not be possible without a helicopter.
B) outfitters already in the area are also an option but they make more money using those horses for hunters and often want to keep their horses fresh.
C) As someone with experience doing wildlife surveys for things ranging from birds to ungulates to amphibians etc I could also help as a field technician.
D) in my opinion you get a much better feel for the land on a horse then you do on a quad or flying. It’s a much more intimate experience and I feel for me I’ve been able to observe much more.

I should add too when I asked forestry folks about it I got a lot of good intentioned advice to do with horses. The horses are not the part I’m looking for tips on. I have a good handle on their capability. I am wondering specifically about how this would appeal to you, how would this affect your survey

Hey so just a few questions about the switch over.

For context when I applied for environmental biology I was given unconditional acceptance. I was suprised by this as I figured I’d have some upgrading to do, but figured would let sleeping dogs lay. I thought maybe it was because I had transfer credits from a technical diploma program or because I applied as a mature student. When I took the technical diploma program rather then upgrade I just had to write a few tests showing I had the base level of knowledge without having took the high school courses. All was well. Was able to register for all my courses no issue.

Thing is I only got 21 credits, and the technical diploma I have has a transfer agreement to give 60 credits if I take Renewable resource management. I applied to switch over but this program does want me to upgrade before I can switch over. After talking to some biologist a lot of them took similar programs rather than biology specific programs so it made sense to me to switch to a program I could do faster and cheaper.

Is there anyway around this? Given that I’m currently signed up to take the courses anyways it feels silly to make me do the high school courses, especially since the college of arts and science didn’t seem to care.

Whenver I talk to academic advisors I am constantly getting conflicting information based on what other advisors have said so seeing if anyone has had a similar situation.

Thanks in advance

Hey gang: wildlife guy here who worked in forestry last fall/winter. Was working in Alberta

We were told to watch out for things like stick nests, bear dens, etc. but there was something off about it in that the bar seemed lower than other industries. Having worked in oil/gas, and mining know the standards for wildlife sweeps pre disturbance it was hard for me to wrap my head around a forestry technician who is actively doing a different task (laying out boundary) and only going around the boundaries and where roads are going to go can count as due diligence for checking for wildlife.

Also a lot of our quality control is in the winter, which makes it much harder to classify water courses with as much confidence I found (I leaned towards over buffering when unsure).

When we were doing our training for the owner of the FMA, they said to watch out for rare plant species, and species at risk. Aside from grizzlies and caribou they didn’t know any of the species at risk or the rare plant surveys. Nor did they seem to have a plan to check for rare plants in blocks laid out during the winter.

Is this the same across most FMAs and companies in western Canada? I’m not some anti timber lunatic. We need wood but I feel like we can be doing better at protecting wildlife in the process if this is the standard.

Thanks in advance!