Photo: Robert McCaw

This pamphlet lists some ideas for activities that help wildlife specifically. But remember, following any good advice about helping the environment — from walking or using your bike instead of driving, to recycling, to turning down the heat and wearing a sweater — will reduce the physical demands that you make on the Earth and, together with other people's changes in behaviour, will make a difference for wildlife.

Loss of habitat is the biggest threat facing wildlife today. Every effort must be made to preserve those remaining wilderness areas able to support healthy and diverse wildlife populations and to restore habitats for wildlife in areas where too many have been lost. We cannot leave this job only to government — the task is too big, too spread out, and requires too much hands-on, active involvement. What wildlife needs is an army of Canadians who are committed to helping wildlife through their activities and the many choices they make in their daily lives.

Learning about wildlife

Photo: David Gray

Learning about wildlife is an important first step in becoming involved, and there are many ways to do it. Simply getting outside and becoming an observer of life around you is a good way to begin. Try to incorporate nature hikes to a nearby park, wetland, or woodlot into your regular schedule.

You can also learn about wildlife from books, videotapes, and, in the case of birds, audio tapes. Every time you visit the library, bring home one book on wildlife, and encourage your family to read it. Taking up a quiet hobby that keeps you outdoors, like gardening, hiking, or beachcombing, is a way to increase your chances to see and learn about wild plants and animals.

Children can learn about wildlife at school through programs such as BIRDQUEST, Habitat 2000, and Project Wild. BIRDQUEST, offered by the Canadian Nature Federation and the Canadian Wildlife Service, is a program that teaches bird identification, ecology, and conservation and encourages participation in conservation activities. Through the Habitat 2000 program managed by the Canadian Wildlife Federation in cooperation with the Canadian Wildlife Service and Wildlife Habitat Canada, thousands of school children all across Canada have undertaken habitat restoration projects and learned about the requirements of wildlife in the process.

Becoming a member of a naturalist club is a particularly good way for children and adults alike to learn about wildlife and become involved in conservation. Naturalists visit wetlands on warm spring evenings to learn which frogs and toads make which calls. They conduct birding walks at dawn during the breeding season and take spring wildflower walks and fall mushroom forays. Naturalist clubs are a good way to meet other people interested in nature too.

Volunteering for a conservation organization such as a wild bird clinic, bird banding centre, or nature education centre, is another good way to help and learn about wildlife. It isn't necessary to be an expert. Conservation projects often involve on-the-job training for volunteers.

	Keep your domestic animals under control. Respect local leash laws. Dogs running free can harass and kill wildlife. A bell around the neck of an outdoor cat gives birds more of a chance. Domestic cats kill millions of songbirds a year.
	Use cars less. Cars pollute. As well, a lot of wild animals are killed trying to cross busy highways. When driving, keep your speed down to give raccoons, squirrels, and other animals, such as the endangered Loggerhead Shrike, a chance to get out of the way.
	Buy food grown without herbicides and pesticides. This supports farmers whose land is the most "wildlife friendly."
	If you find an injured bird or mammal, take it to a wild bird clinic or animal hospital.
	If you find a dead bird with a band on its leg or spot a live bird with a neck collar, wing tag, or other marker, send the band or report the marker to the Canadian Wildlife Service's Bird Banding Office.
	Buy the Wildlife Habitat Canada Conservation stamp. Waterfowl hunters must buy the stamp, which is attached to their hunting permit, but anyone can buy the stamps and limited edition prints through Wildlife Habitat Canada. Proceeds go to habitat preservation.
	Reuse your plastic products and avoid products with disposable plastic packaging. Animals have been known to die after swallowing plastic debris or becoming entangled in plastic six-pack holders.
	Watch what you put down the drain. It has to end up somewhere in the environment, where it will inevitably have an impact on wildlife. Contact your municipal office to find out how you can dispose of antifreeze, paint, varsol, used oil, and spent batteries.
	When you boat, stow your trash and dispose of it safely or recycle it ashore. Never throw it overboard. Report suspicious-looking discharges from industries, fish kills and other environmental problems to your provincial or territorial wildlife agency. Do not spill gas and oil into the water; avoid stirring up bottom sediments with propellers; keep personal watercraft out of shallow areas that are critical habitat for spawning fish, aquatic plants, and aquatic invertebrates; and keep speeds down to avoid creating a wake that could disturb shoreline habitat.
	When you travel, be an ecotourist. Take your own reusable containers and avoid waste- and pollution-producing holidays. Encourage and support countries that are saving their rainforests and managing their coral reefs well.
	When you travel, do not contribute to the profits of people who capture or kill endangered species. Learn about the regulations of the Convention on Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) and follow them when you travel. CITES makes it illegal to import goods made from endangered species, such as spotted cat skins and elephant ivory.
	If you are a hunter or angler, follow the regulations regarding seasons and catch limits and report poachers through your provincial or territorial wildlife agency or the RCMP or crime-stoppers. Develop your identification skills to avoid killing endangered species (e.g., the Eastern Harlequin Duck) and teach other hunters to do the same. Be sure of your game and avoid wastefulness. Practice catch and release of fish if you are not going to eat them.
	When fishing, do not dump minnows into the water. Alien fish species and zebra mussels can be spread in this way, upsetting ecosystems. Follow locally posted guidelines about cleaning the hull of your boat before moving it out of an area infested with zebra mussels.
	When camping, heed the forest fire risk notices before lighting campfires, do not dump dishwater directly into lakes and rivers, and keep noise levels down.
	When hiking, do not disturb birds' nests or pluck rare plants.
	When choosing outdoor recreational activities, consider cross-country skiing and canoeing instead of snowmobiling and motor boating. These activities are quieter so they don't disturb wildlife or pollute the air, and they increase your chances of seeing wildlife. Remember that loud noises in winter keep animals stirred up at a time when they need to rest and conserve energy.
	Participate in the land-use planning process in your community to ensure that wildlife habitat, especially habitat for endangered species, is protected.
	Teach others what you know.

Preventing and cleaning up pollution will help wildlife. This gull has become entangled in a plastic six-pack holder.

Abandoned farmland or a bare city lot can be improved by planting. Plant a mixture of species so that many different types of animals can find food and shelter. In general, planting trees is good. But not every open site should be forested. Before planting trees, make sure that you are not eliminating an important natural opening that supports diverse and unusual plants. Natural prairies have been destroyed through thoughtless reforestation projects in parts of Canada. Ask a naturalist or botanist to look your land over before you begin.

On forest land, link forest patches with corridors of trees and shrubs to allow wildlife to move under cover. Remember to use native species. Our songbirds take more readily to a familiar thicket of native dogwood or willow than to introduced, exotic species such as weeping mulberry. Native species provide food as well as cover, and are not as likely to dominate other native plants as introduced species often do.

Planting trees and shrubs is particularly critical along bare river and stream banks and lakeshores. Vegetation will prevent the banks from eroding into the stream, where the soil can destroy fish spawning beds. It will also absorb agricultural chemicals, thereby preventing them from going into the water, where they can poison stream animals and overfertilize the aquatic habitat.

When cleaning up your property, think about how wildlife might use it. Rabbits, rodents, and birds will use brush piles for cover. Manage your woodlot with wildlife in mind. For example, standing dead trees or "snags" play a wide variety of wildlife roles. Insects live in the wood; fungi break it down. Fungi and insects provide food for other creatures. Pileated Woodpeckers will visit the snag to feast on the insects or make nesting holes. These, in turn, eventually become homes for cavity-nesters like woodpeckers, Wood Ducks, flying squirrels, and raccoons. Even after the tree falls, it has an important role to play for wildlife: salamanders and a variety of invertebrates will live under it. Ants will live in it. If the tree falls over a stream, it will provide shade and cover for fish.

With clearcut logging being the harvesting method of choice in Canada, there can be a shortage of snags for wildlife in some areas. Nest boxes provide a short-term solution to this problem, replacing the nesting cavities that snags would provide. Bluebirds and Wood Ducks have come back in North America thanks to hundreds of landowners who provided nest boxes for them. You can also put out boxes for chickadees, wrens, and kestrels; roosting boxes for bats; and posts for raptors.

Even city dwellers can encourage wildlife to visit. Plant native wildflowers to attract butterflies to your yard. Put up bird feeders. And be sure to thoroughly clean bird feeders and nest boxes periodically. Use bread and other baked goods sparingly as bird food and put them in the compost when they are mouldy; mouldy food is not good for songbirds. Hummingbird feeders should be checked and cleaned frequently as the sugary syrup may ferment into alcohol and cause liver cirrhosis.

Drawing by Wendy Kramer

By choosing the right plants you can encourage wildlife to visit your backyard. For example, butterflies tend to be attracted to purple, blue, yellow, and pink flowers. Prairie farmers have plenty of opportunities to improve the wildlife value of their land. Thousands of prairie sloughs have been drained by farmers over the past century, and especially during the last 30 years.

One incentive for this was to enable big modern machinery to operate in straight lines rather than having to go around water areas. As well, government support programs were based on the amount of ploughed land, so that it paid to increase acreage, even if the newly ploughed land yielded very little. But before long, farmers were finding that the water table had dropped, and the once-rich land was becoming arid. The destruction of sloughs caused a great decline in duck populations, which are now smaller than they were even during the great drought of the 1930s.

Now, farmers are working with Ducks Unlimited Canada and Wildlife Habitat Canada to restore the prairie sloughs. These large, national organizations require the cooperation of individual landowners who are open to the idea of modifying their agricultural practices to aid wildlife.

Agricultural practices are also responsible for the decline in populations of Burrowing Owls, which are a threatened species in Canada. With its habit of nesting underground, this diminutive owl needs land that is undisturbed by the plough. It also needs a source of pesticide-free insects. Alberta farmers, with assistance from the World Wildlife Fund, are now leaving areas unploughed and unsprayed and building underground nest boxes to create desperately needed habitat for the owls.

Gardeners and farmers help wildlife when they avoid the use of herbicides and pesticides. Although chemicals that break down into harmless substances soon after application have replaced the long-lived chemical pesticides like DDT that accumulated in wildlife, these new pesticides are still poisonous during their brief lifetime. Many birds die every year after feeding on fields, lawns, or golf courses immediately after treatment with short-lived pesticides. Look for less harmful ways to control insects and weeds. Or live with them — crabgrass and wasps are wildlife too.

Finally, there is a growing land trust movement in Canada, in which landowners agree not to develop their land, but to leave it in a natural state. If there is a land trust movement in your area, you could join it. If not, consider starting one.

Keeping track of wildlife populations: survey and inventory work
Wild animals become less or more numerous in response to changes in their environment. Keeping track of numbers of a particular bird or mammal in Canada and monitoring the state of health of each species is important. Because governments cannot afford to pay for all the research that is needed, volunteers and amateur naturalists have an important role to play. Some knowledge of wildlife is necessary for those who conduct the surveys, but there are also many essential tasks, such as typing, driving, record-keeping and construction, that require little more than a keen interest.

Thousands of Canadians take part every year in the Christmas Bird Count. The information they collect about species and numbers of birds is fed into a computer along with results from the U.S. and Mexican Christmas Bird Counts. Many people think it is necessary to be an expert birder to take part in the Christmas Bird Count. But even beginning birders can participate by joining a small group that includes an experienced birder. If you develop your birdwatching skills, including your ability to recognize bird songs and calls, to the expert level, you could be assigned a route in the spring Breeding Bird Survey (BBS)or take part in Canadian Wildlife Service's Forest Bird Monitoring Program. Biologists and conservationists use the results of the BBS to determine population trends of birds throughout North America. The purpose of the newer Forest Bird Monitoring Program is to determine population trends of woodland birds and recommend ways to manage forest lands so as to benefit birds.

You can also make a contribution to bird surveys by simply keeping track of the birds that visit your feeder. Project Feeder Watch, organized by the Long Point Bird Observatory in southern Ontario and Cornell University in New York State, asks volunteers to count species and individuals for two consecutive days every two weeks, fill the information in on a computer form, and send it to Long Point at the end of winter.

In Quebec, the general public and members of birdwatching societies have contributed their expertise to an Atlas of breeding birds of Quebec, soon to be published jointly by a number of agencies, including the volunteer organizations. Improved knowledge of which species are nesting where in the province is useful to those interested in protecting habitat.

In Alberta, hundreds of amateur naturalists take to the woods and fields on the last weekend in May to document species diversity and the abundance of flowering plants, mammals, and birds, region by region. Information collected in this "May Day" project, which has been running since 1975, was used in producing an Alberta breeding bird atlas, and the plant information is being used to compile an atlas of rare plants in Alberta. The data are also yielding general information about the influence of habitat change on species composition.

The canopy, or tree tops, of British Columbia's coastal temperate rainforest had never been surveyed until 1991. That's when volunteers with the Western Canada Wilderness Committee built a canopy research station 12 storeys up in the ancient forest of Vancouver Island's Carmanah Valley. Shortly after the station was built, the first Canadian nest of a Marbled Murrelet, a threatened, robin-sized seabird that nests in ancient forest, was discovered there. Scientists have also been studying insects and bats at the canopy station.

Helping wildlife at risk
Canada's vulnerable, threatened, and endangered species are particularly in need of our help. Government programs have brought some of these species, notably the Whooping Crane, White Pelican, and wood bison, back from the brink. But there are also local organizations helping endangered wildlife with the assistance of volunteers, such as the Piping Plover Guardianship Program in Prince Edward Island and Nova Scotia. After a training session on the basics of Piping Plover biology, volunteers go to beaches to guard the nesting areas of this endangered species, inform the public about the bird, ask users of the beaches to avoid nests, and record the species' distribution and reproductive success.

Butterflies can also become endangered if the plants they live on disappear. The Karner blue butterfly of southwestern Ontario lives on lupine and butterfly weed, but the species has become endangered as its host plants have disappeared in this highly populated and intensively cultivated part of Ontario. Lambton Wildlife Inc., a Sarnia naturalist club, bought land and created the Karner Blue Sanctuary. The club is re-establishing the required plant species, and hopes to reintroduce larvae of the butterfly in a few years.

If you identify an endangered species outside its known range, report your sighting to local wildlife authorities. All sightings of the endangered Whooping Crane should be reported.

Show your support
Even if you don't want to join a group, you can still show your support of a conservation group that in your opinion, is doing a good job of protecting wildlife. A letter to the organization, a letter to a newspaper, or a financial donation can encourage others to continue to work on behalf of wildlife.

	Biodiversity works for wildlife. You can too! (Unit 12 of the Learning about wildlife series.) Canadian Wildlife Federation. Ottawa.
	Birdfeeding. Hinterland Who's Who. Canadian Wildlife Service. Ottawa.
	BIRDQUEST. There is an excellent list of recommended books and audiovisual material for learning about birds in Birdquest. The Canadian Nature Federation will send you a photocopy of this list if you send them a stamped self-addressed envelope.
	Build a bat house. Canadian Wildlife Federation. Ottawa.
	Green solutions (Fact sheets on Healthy trees and shrubs, Lawn care, Bio-controls for household pests, Roses and other flowers). Environment Canada. Ottawa. K1A 0H3
	Landscaping for wildlife (An 18-page booklet available for $4.95 from the Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources. Call 416-314-2000 for information.)
	Nest boxes for birds. Hinterland Who's Who. Canadian Wildlife Service. Ottawa.
	Plant a butterfly garden. Canadian Wildlife Federation. Ottawa.
	You can do it (Advice for children on helping wildlife and cleaning up the world). Canadian Wildlife Federation. Ottawa.

For further information contact your provincial or territorial wildlife agency, the CWS office in your area, or one of the following nongovernment organizations:

Ducks Unlimited Canada
P.O. Box 1160
Oak Hammock Marsh, Manitoba R0C 2Z0
Tel.: 1-800-665-3825
Winnipeg area: (204) 467-3000

Wildlife Habitat Canada
7 Hinton Ave. N., Suite 200
Ottawa, Ontario K1Y 4P1
Tel.: (6l3) 722-2090

World Wildlife Fund Canada
90 Eglinton Ave. E., Suite 504,
Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Z7
Tel.: 1-800-26-PANDA
Toronto area: (416) 489-8800

The Nature Conservancy of Canada
110 Eglinton Ave., W., 4th Floor
Toronto, Ontario M4R 2G5
Tel.: (416) 932-3202

For information on BIRDQUEST or naturalist clubs in your province and region, contact:
Canadian Nature Federation
1 Nicholas St., Room 520
Ottawa, Ontario K1N 7B7
Tel.: (613) 562-3447

For information on Habitat 2000 or Project Wild, contact:
Canadian Wildlife Federation
2740 Queensview Dr.,
Ottawa, Ontario K2B 1A2
Tel.: 1-800-563-9453
Ottawa-Hull area: (613) 721-2286

For information on the Christmas Bird Count, check with your local field naturalist club.

For information on Project Feederwatch, write to:
Long Point Bird Observatory
P.O. Box 160
Port Rowan, Ontario N0E 1M0
Tel.: (519) 586-3531

For information on the Breeding Bird Survey or the Forest Bird Monitoring Program, write to:
BBS Coordinator
National Wildlife Research Centre
Canadian Wildlife Service
Environment Canada
Ottawa, Ontario K1A 0H3
Tel.: (819) 953-1425

Send bird bands or report bird markers (type, colour, location of bird) to the Bird Banding Office at the same address.

Canadian Wildlife Service
(Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Newfoundland, Prince Edward Island)
Tel.: (506) 364-5044

(Quebec)
Tel.: (418) 648-7225

(Ontario)
Tel.: (613) 952-2403

(Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Alberta, Northwest Territories)
Tel.: (403) 468-8919

(British Columbia, Yukon)
Tel.: (604) 946-8546