Wood Buffalo National Park, Alberta, Canada

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Wood Buffalo National Park was established in 1922 to protect the habitat of a small herd of wood bison whose declining population had dropped from an estimated 40 million in 1830 to less than 1000 by 1900. Today, the 44 807 square kilometres of northern boreal interior plains landscape, located in the extreme north of Alberta and overlapping into the Northwest Territories, encompasses not only the largest free- roaming and self-regulated bison herd in the world but the world’s only natural nesting site of the whooping crane. Now a UNESCO World Heritage Site, as well as Canada’s largest park, it has the longest-standing tradition of native subsistence use by the people who continue to live, hunt, trap and fish within the park’s boundaries. Wood Buffalo National Park protects representative examples of the northern boreal plains, southern boreal plains and northwestern boreal uplands.

Getting there

Wood Buffalo National Park straddles the Northwest Territories - Alberta border. Park headquarters are in Fort Smith, NT. All-weather road access is available year-round via the MacKenzie Highway. The MacKenzie Highway links to Highway 5 near Hay River, NT, providing access to the park and Fort Smith. Like many highways in the NT, Highway 5 is mostly hard-packed gravel. There is no all-weather road access to Fort Chipewyan.

Geography

The landscape can be divided into four primary sections, each with its own unique geological features and wildlife habitats and vegetation. At the southern and western boundaries, the Caribou and Birch Uplands rise over 500 metres, sedimentary rock of the Cretaceous age, covered in spruce and lichen tundra. The eroding slopes have in some areas yielded a great density of fossils.

The Alberta plateau, the largest section of the park, is a vast wild plain spread with countless bogs, forests, meandering streams, spongy muskeg and huge silty rivers. Known as the karstland, the caves and sinkholes across the landscape dramatically demonstrate the effects of groundwater dissolving pockets of soluble gypsum bedrock. When the roof of a cave, carved out by water action on bedrock collapses, a bowl-shaped sinkhole appears, sometimes with a pond at its base. Another type, the solution sinkhole, is created when surface water seeps into cracks to dissolve underlying bedrock. Fish in the sinkholes have traveled there from streams in an underground waterway. The Slave River Lowlands along the eastern border mark the end of the boreal plains at the edge of the Canadian Shield. Springs that seep out of the surface here carry mineral salt deposits which are strewn in sheets and piles of salt across the 250 square kilometre salt plain unique to Canada. Several plant species that require a saline environment grow here far from marine shorelines. The fourth section, the Peace-Athabasca Delta, one of the largest fresh-water deltas in the world, is located in the park's southeast corner where the Peace, Athabasca, Slave and Birch Rivers flow toward the Great Slave Lake. The silt carried by these rivers remains in the delta creating a wetland of over 4800 square kilometres of biologically productive shallow lakes, marshes, grasslands and forests, a nesting and staging area for waterfowl, a spawning ground for fish and home to many animal species.

Fauna

The salt plains are one of the few places where you may see the whooping crane feeding far from its only breeding grounds in the far northeast corner of the park. The tallest North American bird (1.5 metres), it is an impressive all white with black wing tips, face and legs. Officially classified as an endangered species, the tiny population of 15 in 1941 increased to 133 by 1994. To reduce the danger of extinction, attempts to use sandhill cranes as foster parents and to introduce whooping cranes raised in captivity into a Florida habitat are a measure of the concern felt by conservationists for their survival. Risks include dry weather that destroys their habitat, wolves, and the hazards, man-made and natural, encountered on the 3900 kilometre migration to the Texas coast. In late December 1999, 16 of the rare birds failed to reach their wintering ground, a serious setback to a species it was hoped might have attained the 200 mark by the year 2000. Waterfowl that converge on the delta in millions: sandhill cranes, geese, swans and ducks funnel through here on their northward migration. The shores of the Slave River near Fort Smith are home to the northernmost colony of white pelicans, bald eagles, and the endangered peregrine falcon. The delta wetland is host to typical boreal wildlife species such as muskrat, coyote, red fox, bear, caribou, beaver, wolves, moose and the protected red-sided garter snakes that emerge from their sink hole hibernaculum in April to form ‘mating balls’ before settling into their summer homes in the bogs.