Coyotes swarm dog walker in central Edmonton park
Stephanie MacIntyre and her dog Luna were out for a routine walk in the Forest Heights neighbourhood when she says they were suddenly surrounded by a snarling pack of coyotes around 9:30 pm.
MacIntyre said she channeled her past experiences in mosh pits at metal concerts and reacted aggressively, instead of being scared. “I put on a heavy metal yell, and I started growling back at them. As they were coming at me, I was charging at them, until they finally started to skedaddle. Then we got outta there.”
MacIntyre said neither her, nor Luna, a border collie-sized dog, were hurt. But they were shaken up. Professor Colleen Cassady St. Clair says this is the worst time of year for encounters with coyotes.
“It’s pup-rearing season for coyotes and that’s when they are maximally defensive of the whole area around their den site. Dogs definitely attract coyotes as potential threats to their pups,” she said. See more at https://globalnews.ca/news/7911817/edmonton-park-dog-coyotes/
BiodiverCity Challenge Edmonton is June 10-13
Participate in the Edmonton region’s annual photo BioBlitz. A bioblitz is a communal citizen-science effort to record as many species within a designated location and time as possible.
Between June 10–13, join our region’s naturalists, species experts, and environmental groups in documenting as many species as you can! Simply upload your photos of birds, plants, mammals, moss, lichen, mushrooms, and insects to iNaturalist or NatureLynx. Your contributions will be used to help understand more about the species that call our region home.
Inspired by the City Nature Challenge, a global urban biodiversity contest, where cities compete against one another to monitor biodiversity within their cities, the Edmonton BiodiverCity Challenge invites residents from Leduc to St. Albert to take part in a photo BioBlitz using iNaturalist or NatureLynx, a citizen science app brought to you by the Alberta Biodiversity Monitoring Institute.
The first-ever Edmonton BiodiverCity Challenge in 2020 had 150 participants, who shared 2,608 biodiversity sightings of 466 species. More information at https://biodivercity.ca/
How did Hawrelak and Fort Edmonton become parks
In 1912, the area that is now Hawrelak Park was named Windsor Terrace and was slated for development as a residential subdivision with 500 small lots. The city obtained title to the land in 1922 after the Strathcona Land Syndicate forfeited on their taxes. The land lay unused until after the Second World War when Edmonton began a gravel extraction and crushing operation on the flats where the lower lake is today.
After a 1954 proposal, it was Mayor William Hawrelak who first started raising money for a 350 acres riverside park in the area. Originally called Mayfair Park, construction of the man-made lakes began in 1959; they were opened in 1964 with minimal amenities available. The official opening of Mayfair Park was on Canada’s centennial, Canada Day 1967. The design of Mayfair won the Vincent Massey award for park planning in 1973.
In 1912 the Women’s Canadian Club proposed to the province that they preserve and restore Fort Edmonton and maintain it as a museum. The Fort was still standing, as it had since 1830, in its final location on south side of the Provincial Legislature Building which had been under construction for five years by then. The plea by the Women’s Canadian Club was unsuccessful and the Fort was torn down in 1915.
For the next fifty years, various groups of citizens advocated for the resurrection of the Fort in part or in whole. Finally, in 1966, the Edmonton Journal reported that City Council “approved development of a historical park project on a site of not less than 100 acres.”
Along with other preparations for Fort Edmonton Park, the city wheeled Peter Erasmus’ house from Pakan, Alberta; and transplanted the MacDonald Residence, “the only remaining dwelling of six first built outside the original Fort Edmonton”. Fort Edmonton Park opened on October 14, 1970. More at https://www.edmontonsarchitecturalheritage.ca/index.cfm/neighbourhoods/river-valley-west-central/
Biodiversity and climate change impact on Edmonton
Alberta’s climate is changing, and Alberta’s biodiversity is changing right along with it. By the end of this century, the average temperature of our province will likely increase at least 2C. People living in Edmonton will experience temperatures that are currently experienced by Calgarians 300 km to the south.
We can already observe some impacts on our landscape due to climate change: The timing of plant flowering, has shifted in response to warmer spring temperatures so we now see the first spring blooms of wildflowers like the Prairie Crocus up to two weeks earlier than previously expected.
One of the largest changes we may see is a reduction in the size of the boreal forest in the north as it slowly succumbs to disturbances like fire and is replaced by species more commonly found in parkland ecosystems further south. White Spruce forests will likely transition to Trembling Aspen forests as climate warms. Learn more at https://www.abmi.ca/home/biodiversity/biodiversity-climate-change.html
Photo by Lewis Cardinal and taken at kihciy askiy (Sacred Earth) cultural grounds near the Whitemud Park trailhead.
River valley concern or contribution
If you have a river valley concern or question, contact us at nsrivervalley@gmail.com
Your friends and neighbours can sign up for this newsletter on our web site.
If you have a photo, information, or event about Edmonton’s river valley and think it should be in this newsletter, email it to us.
Sincerely yours,
Harvey Voogd
North Saskatchewan River Valley Conservation Society
780.691.1712