Harsh winter harming New Brunswick wildlife

COOKVILLE, N.B. – The repeated storms and high snow drifts that have hit New Brunswick this winter have been particularly hard on animals, according to a local wildlife centre.

Pam Novak, director of wildlife care at the Atlantic Wildlife Institute says they have been receiving a high number of calls to care for animals this year.

“When you have winters like this where there’s just one storm after another, extreme cold and just the amounts of snow, it definitely takes its toll on the wildlife we have here,” she said.

On Thursday, a Horned Grebe, a water bird, was brought into the centre. Novak said someone had found it in a snowbank in Scoudouc. The bird was not injured, but grounded itself and couldn’t take off again in the deep snow. Novak said Horned Grebes come east in the winter looking for open water. She suspects it was trying to fly west again and got disoriented in Wednesday’s storm.

It would not have been able to get out of the snowbank itself, and Novak said it probably would have been buried by a snowplow, if a concerned citizen hadn’t called.

Two bobcats were also brought into the centre in February. Novak said bobcats are common in New Brunswick, but it was unusual to care for two in the same month. The first one was found on Feb. 2 in the Richibucto area, showing signs of starvation.

The second one was found on Feb. 19 on somebody’s front porch in Brown’s Flat, 45 km north of Saint John. It had a large gash on its right hind leg and was emaciated.

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Novak explained that the deep snow has made it hard for bobcats to hunt their prey.

“Chasing after them, even in this deep cover, is going to be more difficult,” she said. “Especially with smaller rodents. They’re going to be burrowing further and further underneath layers of the snow and ice, which the bobcats can’t penetrate.”

Suzie Currie, head of the biology department at Mount Allison University agreed, saying it’s not only birds and small cats that have been affected.

“You also have problems in the extreme cold situations for animals that are engaging in these periods of torpor,” she said. “You’ve got many days of cold. You’ve got lots of snow so its hard for these animals too to maybe even find their cache of food.”

Currie explained that torpor is a period of mini-hibernation cycles that many animals engage in during the winter. She said most animals don’t truly hibernate, but instead will decrease their metabolic rate for days or weeks and then ramp up once in awhile to eat.

“However, that’s also energetically costly to actually ramp up your temperature and your metabolic rate,” she said. “So when you have extended periods of cold or extreme, this poses real challenges for these animals.”

She said when there are many days of cold in a row, they are at risk of freezing to death while in torpor.

The goal of the institute is to rehabilitate all of the animals brought in and then return them to the wild, as soon as possible. A snowy owl that was brought to them in January after it was found in a snowy ditch in Aulac, is ready to be released back but the weather hasn’t cooperated.

Novak said she doesn’t want to put the animals back in an environment where they could be injured again or won’t be able to hunt.

“So we have to see how the weather hopefully starts to improve over the next month or so, and we can release them back to where they came from,” she said.