Habitat Connections Matter
By John Davis - Adirondack Council Rewilding Advocate
Tuesday, December 17, 2024
The wide swath of Northern Forest linking and encompassing New York’s Adirondack Park and Ontario’s Algonquin Park has long been recognized as an important regional habitat link, a wildlife corridor, or wildway, popularly known as A2A. It has not yet been fully appreciated as a habitat link of continental importance. Yet a careful look at geologic and geographic and human footprint maps of eastern North America shows this to be among the most promising links between wildlands in the United States and wildlands in Canada. Indeed, eastern North American lands can be roughly divided between areas south of the Great Lakes and their outlet, the St. Lawrence River, and areas north. There are very few easy crossings for terrestrial animals of this vast waterway system (one of Earth’s great drainages). The A2A area, which geologists know as the Frontenac Axis or Arch, and is essentially an arm of the Canadian Shield reaching southeast to and through the Adirondack uplift, offers a relatively safe crossing of the St Lawrence River through the Thousand Islands (outcrops of Canadian Shield), as well as sparsely peopled, still mostly forested habitat connecting the two great parks.
Wildlife corridors, habitat linkages, wildways … whatever we want to call habitat connections, they are the natural state of things and they are urgently needed by wide-ranging and climate-sensitive wildlife. Reasons for protecting wildways are many but can be generally lumped into five broad categories: food, cover, genes, sex, and change.
Food: Many animals need to move seasonally to track their preferred forage plants or prey. For instance, Black Bears may want to be near low-elevation wetlands in early spring, where they can find the first tasty plants greening-up, but by autumn they may want to be in the last berry patches to ripen, at upper elevations. More obviously, songbirds migrate long distances – in some cases thousands of miles – to maximize food availability.
Cover: Most terrestrial animals in our region want forest cover. They evolved under tree canopies, and depend on arboreal cover for shelter and hiding places. Cougars, for example, when dispersing through more open country, often follow riparian wooded corridors when dispersing. Some animals won’t even cross the relatively narrow fracture zones created by roads.
Genes: Isolated populations slowly succumb to the harmful consequences of genetic inbreeding. At least occasional dispersals between breeding groups are essential to genetic diversity and the greater population resilience that imparts. Looking again at large carnivores, with many species, young males commonly disperse from their natal areas, and that helps keep genes mixing between sub-populations.
Sex: Related to genes, obviously, but also this has to do with the longing most animals have to find mates, and the need many feel to travel long distances to find them. Some of us might be embarrassed to admit how far we’ve traveled for this connectivity criterion!
Change: Always Nature is changing, and organisms often must shift ranges as populations or move homes as families to adapt to changes. Of course, anthropogenic global overheating has accelerated rates of change, often in unpredictable ways, and heightened this need. Some animals and plants now primarily south of the Great Lakes/St. Lawrence waterway may need habitats north of the great waters after the climate warms substantially.
So, all the wildways within and beyond the Adirondack Park are important to wildlife, and A2A is especially critical. Various wild animals have confirmed the importance of A2A. A carefully studied female Moose, known by her followers as Alice, famously made the traverse from Adirondack Park to Algonquin Park twenty years ago, using the very habitat link that biologists had identified as critical. A decade later, a young male Puma, posthumously dubbed Walker, who journeyed from South Dakota’s Black Hills to the Adirondack Park before being killed – still looking for a mate – by a car in Connecticut in 2011 likely came south from Ontario via A2A. If Wolves are to recolonize the northeastern US, likely they will disperse southeast from Algonquin Park via the A2A connection -- though many guns and traps around Algonquin Park and roads near the US border stand in their way. A large canid shot in central New York in late 2021 tested as being genetically almost pure Wolf, largely of Great Lakes lineage. This and several other Wolves shot in the Northeast in recent decades may well have used the A2A wildway, or the few cross-border wildways from Quebec to northern New England.
A2A is relatively well protected within the two great parks, Algonquin and Adirondack; but most of the land between is unprotected and vulnerable to development. Greater land trust work with landowners to voluntarily protect places between the parks is urgently needed, as are government incentives for good stewardship of private lands. Much of the job of securing A2A within the Adirondack Park itself is completing protection of the Oswegatchie wildlands complex (Bob Marshall Wilderness), in the northwest quadrant of the park, as outlined by Adirondack Council in its Vision 2020 reports. This largely road-free complex is perhaps the most promising habitat in the eastern US for recovery of missing top carnivores, particularly Wolf and Puma.
Equally critical for A2A viability is getting safe wildlife crossings on busy roads. Ironically, though Canada is generally much less fragmented and populated than is the US, in the St. Lawrence watershed, development tends to be heavier on the Canadian side, since much of Canada’s population is concentrated in its southern, warmer regions. So, the densest network of roads animals must traverse to recolonize lands southward or to move northward with warming climate is on the Canadian side just north of the great river. Both Canada and the US should see it as national priorities to install safe underpasses and overpasses and modify existing culverts and bridges to accommodate safe movement of wildlife, aquatic and terrestrial, under or over these roads. Thankfully, A2A scientists and naturalists on both sides of the border are doing road ecology studies to determine where wildlife crossings are most needed. Leadership from departments of transportation will also be needed to make our infrastructure both permeable to wildlife movement and durable through the climate change century. A bipartisan bill for wildlife crossings was vetoed by Gov. Kathy Hochul this fall; perhaps the legislature will send a message by passing it again in 2025.
Other wildways of critical importance around the Adirondack Park include Split Rock Wildway, linking Lake Champlain with the High Peaks; the Southern Lake Champlain Valley connection between the Adirondacks and Vermont’s Green Mountains; the Mohawk links, tenuously connecting the Catskill Park with the Adirondack Park across the badly fragmented Mohawk Valley; the Adirondack to Tug Hill Plateau connection across the Black River Valley; and riparian forests along rivers draining the Adirondack dome. Keeping all these habitat connections as wild and wide as possible is essential to sustaining the natural and human communities of Adirondack Park and the larger Northern Forest region.
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