Conservationists are trying to preserve the natural heritage of Eastern Ontario

I stand in my canoe, the better to see over the reeds and marsh grass. From somewhere nearby, a duck makes a chortling sound. The sun begins to creep across the marsh and a heron rises laboriously to move to a more favoured spot. From inland, an owl gives one last hoot. Another day begins. The dragonflies are already combing the marsh grass for insects, and near the shore I can see, just barely, the ears of a deer above the grasses as it travels the shoreline. A distance away, there's a quick half-howl. It's so short, I can't tell if it is a dog, a wolf or a coyote. Of course, I imagine a wolf, and smile.

This is where the vision of A2A begins. Here in the wild. This is the habitat that A2A, the Algonquin to Adirondack Conservation Association, wants to see connected, all the way from Algonquin Park in Ontario to Adirondack Park in New York state, an area, including the two parks, that's the size of New Brunswick.

In the formal wording of its vision, A2A says it sees the connected habitat as "a home place that provides for the well-being of both its wild and its human inhabitants." Forever.

This duality, this way of looking at humans as part of nature — just like squirrels and loons and snakes and moose, like trees and trout lilies, ferns and fish, salamanders, spiders, and red-shouldered hawks — has Hans Herrmann excited. He is NAFTA's top official for nature, the head of the conservation and biodiversity program for the Commission for Environmental Co-operation under the North American Free Trade Agreement.

"They're changing the paradigm," he says. They're changing the way humans see themselves. They're talking about humans in nature instead of seeing humans as somehow divorced and separate, somehow incontestably superior in every way.

"If A2A succeeds, people will begin to appreciate nature in ways they can't even imagine now." It will change profoundly the way they make decisions and the way they do things, he says.

In its membership, A2A tries to mirror the community at large. On its board are farmers, urbanites, environmental organizations, trappers, First Nations, cottagers, hunters, business people, park officials, county officials, provincial officials, hobby farmers and conservation authority officials — representatives so diverse that you might expect co-operation to be difficult. But that doesn't seem to be the case.

One board member says it's because respect is central to the organization — respect among members and respect for landowners. Another explanation may be that A2A operates on consensus, which creates no winners and losers in decision-making, unlike situations where decisions are made by majority vote.

Members view themselves as a grassroots organization that is aimed at encouraging landowners to see their properties as parts of a broader whole.

A2A talks of filling in gaps and of maintaining links. It speaks in terms of watersheds, and connected habitat, and broad landscapes. And it works with landowners to identify what will enhance habitat and, at the same time, advance each landowner's personal objectives.

There's an example of how A2A operates near the town of Toledo, northwest of Brockville. It's what A2A calls the Irish Lake to Bellamy Lake connection, an effort to restore habitat between the two lakes in a 100-square-kilometre area. There are 50 property owners in the area.

Through the Leeds County Stewardship Council, which is represented on A2A's board, satellite photos of the area were obtained and ideas were developed on paper to show how the habitat could be improved.

Consultants were then hired to visit landowners and, as Gary Nielsen, co-ordinator for the stewardship council says, "to sit down at the kitchen table with landowners" to see if there would be a way to help them achieve their goals and, at the same time, restore habitat.

Of the 50 landowners, 21 have been contacted so far, and only two have opted not to participate. The total cost to A2A has been $24,000.

Elsewhere, there are property owners who are placing protective easements on their lands. Others are donating land to parks or land trusts. Still others are simply determined to take good care of their properties. One farmer is planting trees, another person has asked Ministry of Natural Resources (MNR) officials to help him protect wild ginseng, an endangered plant, on his land. Yet another, who doesn't hunt, is working with Ducks Unlimited to restore a wetland, and there are groups working to rehabilitate shorelines along rivers and lakes.

This is not to say that there is an A2A fever sweeping the land. A2A is a young organization still in the building stage. A strategic plan has not been approved, although drafting is nearly completed, and the website at http://www.a2alink.org is primitive and unfinished.

I'm told that the strategic plan will call for developing a fundraising capacity, hiring administrative staff and establishing branch organizations through the huge A2A region. But the fact is that A2A still moves at the slower pace characteristic of volunteer organizations.

Nevertheless, things are happening, and if I'm taking the pulse of the area correctly, inspiration is astir.

Conroy Marsh is on the York River, which flows out of the southern tip of Algonquin Park. The river meanders south from the park, passes through Bancroft, eventually turns northeast into the marsh where it is joined by the Little Mississippi River, and then empties into what then becomes the mighty Madawaska River.

Following the York offers a snapshot of the northern part of the Frontenac Arch. The Arch is the most southerly finger of the Canadian Shield that runs from Algonquin Park down to the St. Lawrence River where it forms the Thousand Islands. The snapshot shows cottages, farms, urban development, homes spreading along rural roads, lumbering, trapping and the wild. Not wilderness, mind you, but the wild and, back from the roads, lots of it.

To the south, there are progressively more roads, more development and less wildness. But there still are lands that are wild all the way to the St. Lawrence River. When we talk about saving for future generations what we have enjoyed in our lifetimes, these are the lands we are talking about.

This is where wildlife travels, and it is lush with life. Along the York River, time and again I stopped paddling to stare at the tumult of plant life on the shoreline. Different varieties of ferns and grasses and vines and leafy plants, more than I could identify, pushing and shoving and demanding a place to grow.

These lands, south to the St. Lawrence, also are home to 21 species at risk, including peregrine falcons, black rat snakes, blue ash trees, broad beech ferns, stinkpot turtles, wild ginseng and five-lined skinks.

However, "home," in the sense of a place to stay rooted from birth to death, is not the right word to use when talking about animals. They're born to travel. Even small animals such as field mice have been tracked covering several kilometres over a two-week period. All have a deep genetic urge to wander. It's nature's way of protecting against inbreeding. It's also a way of promoting evolution, as the adventurous explore the limits of a range where survival means adapting.

There are examples of single animals travelling between the two parks. A moose collared in Adirondack Park, and nicknamed Alice, eventually died in Algonquin Park. A lynx, on a similar journey, ended up in Ottawa.

But the first scientific evidence of large-scale movement by a species is now being assembled in Peterborough by MNR and Trent University. The species being studied is the fisher, a member of the marten family. It weighs anywhere from 2 kilograms to 5.5 kilograms and can grow to a length of 1.2 metres, with its tail being a third of its length.

Its fur is highly prized by trappers, and by 1950 trapping and habitat destruction had eliminated it everywhere in southern Ontario south of the French River, except for Algonquin Park. Now, they're back, and everyone assumed they had expanded out of the park. But no. They came from Adirondack Park.

"If A2A succeeds, people will begin to appreciate nature in ways they can't even imagine now"
Hans Herrmann, NAFTA official

"We were really surprised finding that they came from Adirondack," says Jeff Bowman, research scientist with MNR's wildlife research and development section in Peterborough and an adjunct professor at Trent. "It totally threw everything on its head."

Through DNA testing of fishers that have been trapped, it's possible to trace their origin, he says. Radio collars are also being attached to track movements. Enough work has been done to confirm that fishers all the way from the Bruce Peninsula to the Quebec border originated in Adirondack Park.

In addition, the radio collars give an idea of how quickly and how far they can travel. Last year in January, a juvenile trapped in Algonquin Park was found to have been born the previous April in the Bruce Peninsula. And an adult female, also trapped in the park, had come from Manitoulin Island.

So, you may ask, why is it important that fishers have surged out of Adirondack Park to repopulate southern Ontario? Well, let me tell you a personal story.

We live on a farm on the Canadian Shield northeast of Gananoque. Six years ago, we were suffering from a plague of porcupines. On any given day, I could spot at least a dozen in a short walk near the house. With unbridled appetite, they were girdling trees of every description, and once a porcupine does that, stripping the bark all the way around the trunk, the tree dies.

My partner, Emily Conger, and I sat down to discuss what we should do. We ended up deciding that I would have to borrow a rifle and start shooting them. They were like clear-cutters gone berserk.

In fact, we had many such discussions, all reaching the same conclusion, but somehow I never was able to drag myself to the neighbour's and borrow that damned rifle.

Then, the fishers came back, and overnight they brought the porcupines under control. Fishers, like their cousins the weasel, are awesome hunters, and they are the main predator of porcupines.

A favourite tactic of fishers is to chase a porcupine up a tree and onto a branch. The fisher then climbs out on the branch above the porcupine, and drops down to face it on the same branch. The porcupine, now nose to nose with the fisher, is defenceless, with all its quills facing the wrong way, and the fisher makes short work of it.

The point of all this is that predators are indicators of the health of an ecosystem. In our case, the forest surrounding our farm was suffering badly because a specific predator had vanished, and there was nothing to control porcupines. The ecosystem was out of balance. Thank God for the habitat connection to Adirondack Park.

What has surprised me in the course of interviewing people for this series of columns, is the desire of landowners to participate. Some don't articulate their reasons very well. It may be only, "It feels like the right thing to do." Or, "I remember what it was like when I was a boy, and I want my grandchildren to have what I did." Or, "I just like the environment."

Or, as one person, who owns 245 hectares between two lakes with 1.5 kilometres of shoreline on each lake, says, "I don't want to see everything developed until it looks like Coney Island."

There have always been people such as these, of course, but based on observations from almost nine years of writing this column, the number seems to be increasing rapidly. Maybe it's because so much is going wrong, such as global warming, bad air and ozone depletion, that people want to create their own good news for a change.

Maybe it's because, as Norm Ruttan says, A2A gives people the opportunity to look beyond the borders of their own lands.

Ruttan is a retired park superintendent with Parks Canada. He is executive director of the Frontenac Arch-Thousand Islands Biosphere Reserve, created under the United Nations two years ago. The reserve extends in a rough triangle from Gananoque in the west, to Westport in the north and Brockville in the east. There's an interlocking relationship between A2A and the biosphere reserve, with A2A being a member of the reserve, and Ruttan being a member of A2A's board.

A2A invites people to take a broader perspective, Ruttan says. It asks them to take personal responsibility. For a long time, he says, landowners relinquished the responsibility for looking after landscapes to governments. But, he says, lapsing into the language of a park naturalist, "A queen ant can never accomplish what worker ants can do."

Think of it as neighbours helping neighbours, Ruttan says, as a return to acknowledging that nothing lives in isolation, including people. Clean water, and adequate water, depend on property owners throughout a watershed protecting trees and wetlands and shorelines, he says. Clean air depends on healthy forests.

When I look back to the history of settlement in this country, and the awesome obstacles that climate and landscape posed, what I see as the main tool for survival was a spirit of co-operation. I wonder if his phrase "neighbours helping neighbours" is hitting a resonant chord with the people with whom I've been talking — even now, so long after we've passed the days of wilderness living.

For me, the St. Lawrence River seems an enormous barrier, as something to cross. It took a long time to twig to the fact that this isn't how wildlife sees it. To an animal, the river must look like any number of lakes where it has gone wandering.

The difference in viewpoint is important. If you see the river as a barrier and something to get across, you tend to look for a path or a corridor. Something to run through to get to the other side.

Imagine what wildlife see from the shore by the Thousand Islands. They can't see how wide the river is. All they can see are some islands not very far away, not much different from what they would see on Charleston Lake, Baptiste Lake, Big Rideau Lake, or any number of lakes on the Canadian Shield. They can walk to the islands over the ice in winter, or swim there in summer. They can wander from one to the other, and before they know it, they're on the American side of the river.

The same goes for the land north of the river. The animals don't head south with the thought of getting to the St. Lawrence and crossing the river. They simply wander and they tend to follow ridges and ravines that run northeast to southwest, almost parallel to the river. They'll meander over a ridge, or follow a creek or wetland that cuts across. They'll gradually drift north or south; they don't head in those directions as if on a mission.

What this means is that it can take a long time for wildlife to travel between parks. Sometimes it can take generations of meandering. They can be born, breed and die while still making their way north or south.

It's for this reason that A2A is focusing on such a wide swath of land between the parks. It wants to persuade landowners that wildlife needs the full breadth of habitat. It needs breeding room as well as wandering room.

The real barrier to movement is Highway 401 with its four lanes of constant traffic, and its concrete wall down the middle. That poses an enormous challenge to wildlife.