Back to the Beginning: The First Wildlife Coexistence Program On Vancouver Island

Roy L Hales/ Cortes Currents - Around 40 people turned out for the Wildlife Coexistence Gathering on Cortes Island. This was an opportunity for Cortesians to meet some of the extended community of advisors to the local program and learn more about our three top predators: grey wolf, black bear and cougar. The gathering was organized and hosted by Sabina Leader Mense and Georgina Silby from the Cortes Community Wolf Project. It began with a welcoming ceremony in the Klahoose All Purpose Building on Friday, April 5. There was an all day teaching series in the Linnaea Education Centre the following day. The gathering ended with a nature walk in Hank’s Beach Forest Conservation Park on Sunday, April 7. Sabina Leader Mense emailed, “We celebrated our cultural relationships to our wild kin with the Klahoose First Nations singers & drummers and our guests Grace SoftDeer from the Chickasaw First Nation and Dennis Hetu from the Toquaht First Nation. We then explored our social and ecological relationships with our wild kin in formal and informal presentations by our invited guests, Bob Hansen, Pacific Rim Coordinator for WildSafeBC and Todd Windle, Coordinator for the Wild About Wolves Project. Cortes Currents recorded most of the sessions at Linnaea and has arranged the material in a series of articles. This is an abridged version of the segment in which Bob Hansen talked about the origins of Vancouver Island’s first wildlife coexistence program. Years later it became the model for Cortes Island’s program and Hansen was one of Sabina Leader Mense’s mentors. Bob Hansen: ”What I'm going to talk about in this presentation is through a personal lens and it's going to  focus on my personal learning journey in time from Tofino in 1997 to here today, and a lot of points in between. The basic theme is a story of going from one person, feeling like they're working on things by themselves, to today, we are part of many communities that are working towards the same objectives." In 1997, the Pacific Rim National Park hired Hanson for a new program. His title is Human Wildlife Conflict Specialist and he was expected to find a solution to the park's ongoing bear problem.  
 Bob Hansen: "Our track record at that time was, we tended to be killing one to three bears every year.  At times we would have trails closed and occasionally even the Green Point Campground closed during bear season due to conflicts."  
 "How can we break this cycle of responding to bear calls and putting down bears?"