Vast marine conservation reserve, bigger than P.E.I., to protect B.C. central coast

An enormous national marine conservation reserve is being established on British Columbia's central coast, spanning an area larger than Prince Edward Island.

The protected area, named Mia-yaltwa Ha’lidzogm hoon, is the result of an agreement between six coastal First Nations and the provincial and federal governments.

An official says the area is around 6700 sq. km and will be operated by Parks Canada along with its Indigenous and federal partners.

The reserve is within the Great Bear Sea, a diverse marine ecosystem that covers more than half of B.C.'s coast and includes glass sponge reefs, salmon, killer whales and migrating humpbacks.

As permafrost thaws, some headwaters in Canada’s North turn orange and toxic: study

Ancient bedrock exposed by disappearing permafrost is releasing toxic metals into Canada's northern rivers, a new study says, with once-pristine subarctic streams now comparable in some cases to highly acidic, contaminated mining sites.

The findings out of Yukon point to an "unfolding environmental disaster," one co-author said, and adds to alarm over the rapid climate-fuelled changes in the North.

"We don't know the end point, but there's nothing about this that gives me any feeling of like, 'oh, we're going to be OK'," said co-author Sean Carey, a professor at McMaster University.

"I'm not even a gloomy person. This looks pretty gloomy."

Americans are looking back centuries to find Canadian ancestors — and citizenship

Cody Sibley was born and raised in Louisiana, but he always felt his family shared strong ties to Canada thanks to his Acadian ancestors from Nova Scotia.

Sibley said that as an eighth-generation descendant of Acadians, his family's roots could be traced back to "generation zero," Agathe Doucet, who was baptized on Jan. 19, 1710, in Nova Scotia.

He said Doucet married to Pierre Pitre in 1727, but the couple's lives were turned upside down in 1755 when British soldiers arrived at their doors and ordered their expulsion; like many Acadians, they ended up in Louisiana, where the community went on to become known as Cajuns.

Sibley is now among a surge of Americans combing through genealogical records in the hopes of finding a Canadian ancestor — some, like Sibley's, dating back hundreds of years, long before Canada officially existed. They plan to use the information to claim Canadian citizenship, under recently introduced legal changes that remove the so-called "first-generation limit" on citizenship for people born or adopted outside Canada to a Canadian citizen.

Pair of bird books offer fascinating insight into the avian world

These two newly-released bird books couldn’t be more different. Jackie Morris and Robert Macfarlane’s The Book of Birds is artful and poetic; Louis Lefebvre’s A Bird’s IQ is analytical and academic. Each would make an attractive addition to the libraries of people interested in birds — but not without certain provisos.

The subtitle of The Book of Birds is deceptive — it’s not really a “Field Guide” in the usual sense, too substantial and beautiful to carry along on a bird outing. In hardback with a blue cloth spine and a blue-ribbon page-holder, it’s more like a church song missal than toteable identification helper. It’s best kept inside, protected from wind and weather and damp fingerprints.

The Book of Birds is a follow-up to Morris and Macfarlane’s previous collaboration The Lost Words. When the Oxford Junior Dictionary dropped a bunch of words connected to the natural world (such as acorn, otter, fern, newt and wren), the renowned artist and celebrated author created a “spell book” to conjure back 20 of those words and bring increased awareness of the things the words describe. It proved to be immensely popular.

Here they focus on 49 birds, presented alphabetically from avocet to kestrel to sparrow to yellowhammer, that are in danger of disappearing completely from the natural (European) world. Morris provides the spectacular bird illustrations, and Macfarlane waxes poetic on each of them in the hopes readers will not just identify birds, but “identify with them.”

Health advice is all over social media. Here’s how to vet claims

Health and wellness advice is available in abundance on social media — from trendy to informative to straight-up disinformation — and you're far from alone in seeing it.

A new survey by the Pew Research Center finds that about 4 in 10 U.S. adults — and around half of those under 50 — get health information from social media or podcasts.

Researchers also looked at the social media profiles of 6,828 health and wellness influencers with at least 100,000 followers. Only about 4 in 10 list a background as a health professional. About one-third called themselves coaches, about 3 in 10 described themselves as entrepreneurs and about 1 in 10 cited their own life experience, like being a parent.

Despite the wide range of expertise, about half of people who get health and wellness information from influencers said the influencers help them better understand their own health, while about one-third said it hasn't made much difference. About 1 in 10 said it made them more confused.

Nature is a big part of the Canadian economy — but how big? We crunched the numbers.

Canada’s vast landscape, which boasts 20 per cent of the world’s freshwater, a quarter of global wetlands and 28 per cent of its boreal forests, is critical to its economy. Natural resource industries — forests, farms, fisheries, mining and oil and gas — together make up approximately seven per cent of Canada’s gross domestic product.

Tension exists between expanding these industrialized sectors and protecting the ecosystems on which they depend.

In Manitoba, some worry protecting the Seal River Watershed, which spans more than 50,000 square kilometres in the province’s north, will hinder opportunities in mineral resources and hydro; to the east, critical mineral mining ambitions in Ontario’s Ring of Fire clash with the protection of the Hudson and James Bay Lowlands, the second-largest carbon sink on earth; and in B.C., Coastal First Nations have protested that lifting the large tanker ban through their waters will endanger the protected Great Bear Rainforest.

These tensions make it easy to frame nature as the antithesis of economic activity, if it’s always put in opposition to projects that are described as growing Canada’s wealth, sovereignty and security.

Conservation shouldn’t come at the cost of access

The Seal River Watershed in northern Manitoba is one of the last great intact ecosystems in North America.

Seeding clock ticks loudly on Prairie fields

If the forecast holds, Manitoba fields will be crawling with equipment this week, as the race to seed this year’s crop begins.

An early-May start to seeding is right on track by historical standards, but still feels late this year, partly because it’s been so cold. Seeding dates have been edging earlier over time, especially for crops such as wheat, as farmers discover they can get away with super-early seeding under the right circumstances.

Due to the compressed growing season characteristic to this part of the world, it’s well-documented the later the crop is seeded, the lower it yields. However, seed too early and there’s a risk that a late-spring frost will force farmers to reseed some fields.

For most, it’s a gamble worth taking.

Memorable panoramas and paths await in Rosedale

Margie and I ventured into Manitoba’s compelling but little-known municipality of Rosedale. We’re back on speaking terms.

Provincial Road 265 north of Neepawa gradually rises over eight kilometres up to Riding Mountain. Our destination: Rosedale Farm. Before a final incline, this road tricks you into believing you’re not climbing high above Manitoba’s prairies. As I’ve heard, don’t trust gentle slopes — they’re always up to something.

Although some land remains cultivated to fund the Whitemud Watershed District that maintains this landscape, a government-funded project bought hillside farms here in the 1960s to stop massive erosion. Folks planted about 200,000 trees — for purely sedimental reasons.

Almost five kilometres of two mowed, circular paths now usher visitors through a wonderland of caragana, roses and ferns under tamarack, red, jack and even ponderosa pines. Ahh, forest fragrance. Margie exclaimed, “Smell that!” I romanticized, “Is that a candle? Shampoo? Your deodorant?”

Local garden centres rev up even as cold temperatures delay outdoor planting season

Colin Rémillard is obsessed with the weather.

When he and his family opened Winnipeg gardener’s staple Jardins St-Léon Gardens for the 2026 season on Wednesday, it came after weeks of chilly weather. But with staff itching to go — and customers waiting — they decided to open the doors after a “mad dash” to bring in produce and tag every product in the store one day earlier.

“Everything seemed to roll fairly well. We’re in good shape. It’s going to be a colder spring, that’s just reality,” Rémillard said from the garden centre Friday.

“We’ve had really nice springs for the past one or two years. We always remember only one year in the past, so we think this is unusual, but it is pretty normal to have this amount of cold.”

Thorn in their side: Assiniboine Park asks for help to remove invasive plant

Assiniboine Park Conservancy is rallying the troops to stop the invasion.

Saturday will be a bad day for European buckthorn at the park, as forestry staff are hoping 100 volunteers will show up to help clear the problematic plant.

“It’s a big issue and there’s a lot of it,” said Barret Miller, the park’s manager of education and programming.

This is the first time the conservancy is asking for help from the public to remove the invasive weed from the Winnipeg green space. The section being targeted is in the heart of the park, just south of the cricket fields.

Innocuous critter or varmint to vanquish? Debating best approach to Richardson’s ground squirrel long a Prairie predicament

A peculiar debate brewed in the pages of Saskatchewan’s newspapers in 2001.

It did not concern post-9/11 security or squabbles over federal gun and environmental policies, though it did evoke other perennial Canadian political tensions.

It had to do with gophers.

Saskatchewan’s NDP government was choosing an animal to symbolize the province, and the suggestion of a gopher was driving some squirrelly.

Bird Lake man says freeing moose from ice a ‘rush’

A Manitoba man says he’s honoured to have been able to help rescue a moose stranded in the ice in Nopiming Provincial Park.

St. Vital Park duck pond to get new design before $3-M rehabilitation in 2027

A new design is set to spruce up the duck pond at St. Vital Park, making it deeper, more naturalized and less prone to algae.

What to do with inconvenient wildlife

Their flocks darkened the skies, over a mile wide and hundreds of miles long. It would take hours or even days for them to pass over a fixed spot. They were a common Manitoba resident, nesting as far north as York Factory. In the 1860s, one hunter trapped 80 dozen in a net near St. Andrews.

Banff bison brought back from the brink of extinction

There were some in Winnipeg who swear they saw buffalo roaming their city streets during the memorable 1966 blizzard in March that smothered both cars and commuters and brought everything to a snow-filled standstill.

Manitoba puts up $4 million to protect Seal River watershed

Six years after a coalition of four northern Manitoba First Nations banded together to conserve the province’s last major undammed river, the Seal River watershed is “on the cusp” of permanent protection.

On Friday, the Seal River Watershed Alliance and the provincial and federal governments released a joint proposal to designate the 50,000-square-kilometre ecosystem — one of the world’s largest intact watersheds — as an Indigenous Protected and Conserved Area.

“This announcement is an absolutely historic moment in time where we have all different levels of government (and) … the nations coming together to preserve some of the most beautiful areas in the world,” Manitoba Environment Minister Mike Moyes said Friday.

“I am so proud to be part of a government that is moving forward on this historic agreement that is going to protect seven per cent of Manitoba.”

Why claims of sentience can’t guide black bear policy

The modern debate over sustainable-use bear hunting often hinges on a few claims including bears are sentient, therefore humans have no moral right to hunt them.

It’s a powerful emotional argument, but it collapses under scientific scrutiny and ecological reality. Sentience is real. Bears and other animals do feel.

But the leap from “animals feel” to “humans must never hunt” is not supported by biology, ethics or conservation science. If we want wildlife policy that protects species and ecosystems, we need to separate what sentience is from what animal rights activists want it to mean.

In scientific terms, sentience refers to the capacity to feel or perceive, not the ability to make moral judgments.

Crop-enhancement firm eyes potato prosperity

Of all the research labs in all the cities in all the world, Kinneret Shefer walks into St. Boniface Hospital’s.

The researcher and entrepreneur is the co-founder of GeneNeer Ltd., an agricultural biotechnology company from Israel. Earlier this year, the company established its North American operations at the Albrechtsen Research Centre in the central Winnipeg hospital.

“We moved to Canada because our technology developed, we are moving to implementation and we have some business agreements in negotiation,” said Shefer, who holds a PhD in genetic counselling from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

GeneNeer launched its Canadian operations in January. The company converted laboratory facilities at the research centre and had them operating within two weeks, allowing research activities to begin almost immediately.

Colombia approves plan to cull roaming hippos linked to Pablo Escobar

BOGOTA, Colombia (AP) — Colombian officials on Monday authorized a plan to cull dozens of hippos roaming freely through a region in the center of the country, where they threaten villagers and displace native species years after notorious drug lord Pablo Escobar brought in the first ones.

Environment Minister Irene Vélez said previous methods to control their population have been expensive and unsuccessful, including neutering some of the animals or moving them to zoos. Vélez said up to 80 hippos would be affected by the measure. She did not say when hunting would begin.

“If we don’t do this we will not be able to control the population,” Vélez said. “We have to take this action to preserve our ecosystems.”

Colombia is the only country outside of Africa with a wild hippo population. The hippos are the descendants of four brought to the country in the 1980s by Escobar as he built a private zoo in Hacienda Nápoles, a gigantic ranch in the Magdalena River valley with a private landing strip that served as his rural abode.

Not consulted on Clear Lake motorboating: Chief

The chief of Keeseekoowenin Ojibway First Nation says he did not consent to the return of motorboats at Clear Lake.

Pragmatic plots

Our climate is changing rapidly, and our garden plans need to adapt accordingly.

“We need a planting design that functions as a resilient, self-sustaining ecosystem suited to our climate,” says Nik Friesen-Hughes, landscape designer and owner of Dogwood Landscape Design Build. “We’re already seeing warmer temperatures overall in winter and summer and a longer growing season. In a climate such as Winnipeg’s, plants must handle extreme cold, heavy spring moisture and drought. So, we want to design a garden that’s resilient to all these things.”

Managing landscape water efficiently is a good starting point.

“Resilient landscapes don’t just use less water, they manage the water where it is,” says Friesen-Hughes. What if you could charge up your soil profile in spring with the extra moisture in the snow to help plants withstand hot, dry conditions that occur later on?