Page 723 More Big Hill Country 2009
How Big Hill Country came to be the home of an environmental programme that is unique in Canada.
Miles and Beryl Smeeton came to Cochrane in 1964. At that time, their daughter, Clio, had just brought the Zoo’s first pair of white rhinoceros to the Calgary Zoo from South Africa. Miles and Beryl had spent the previous years sailing back to Canada, in their boat TZU HANG, and their original intention was to buy land in British Columbia. But when they got home to British Columbia it was only to discover that the money they had got for 450 B .C. acres in 1955, would only buy 5 acres in 1965. Leaving TZU HANG on the coast, Miles and Beryl came to Alberta to see Clio and to have a look about at the country.
Cochrane was quite small then, tucked in snugly against Cochrane Hill and fit neatly between the railway tracks and Highway IA. Miles and Beryl fell in love with the space, the country, and the view, and so, pooling their money, Miles, Beryl, and Clio, bought a quarter section from the Viney family off what is now Township Road 280. When the Vineys had the land, they had farmed the east quarter next to Horse Creek road and cleared some land on the middle quarter, but left the western quarter as untouched as it had been when first deeded to the Canadian Pacific Railway.
After buying the land the Smeetons left Alberta, Miles and Beryl to go back to the coast and continue sailing, Clio to get married and live in Africa and then Spain. Miles wrote books about their sailing adventures (Because the Home is There, Once is Enough, The Misty Islands, The Sea Was Our Village and Sunrise to Windward).
But the sea was not their first love, for Miles that was horses, but for Miles and Beryl, together, it was mountaineering. In India they had made many climbs of significant peaks in the Himalayas, and for an extremely long time, Beryl held the female record for having climbed the highest peak without additional bottled oxygen. Their friendship with Tenzing Norgay resulted in his employment with the British Everest Expedition, when Tenzing and Sir Edmund Hillary were the first to successfully reach the summit of Mount Everest. So the great ramparts of the Rockies that filled the western horizon as the Smeetons looked over their newly acquired land north west of Cochrane gave them enormous pleasure. In 1970, Miles and Beryl gave up the sea, sold TZU HANG, and returned to their land, and in 1972, Clio and her family, Alex, Catriona and Sonamara also returned to Canada.
Miles continued writing. He wrote about his life in India as a Cavalry Officer (A Taste of the Hills) and then as a settler on Saltspring island, Britishc Columbia (A Change of Jungles). Beryl wrote as well, her first book about walking for pleasure from Shanghai to India in 1939 (Winter shoes in Springtime) and her second about riding down the eastern cordillera of South America (The Stars My Blanket) and, as well as writing, they became familiar figures in Cochrane and Calgary. They even joined the Ballooning Club. Local people said Miles drove with such panache that if they saw his little yellow Datsun truck hurtling down Cochrane Hill, they would stay off the highway!
Miles became the District Commissioner of the Cochrane Pony Club and there are many who still remember him teaching them. Being a cavalryman, he didn’t just teach equitation, he thought fun and competition should be involved as well so he made “lances” taught the kids how to ‘tent peg”, having them pop balloons with their “lances’ instead of spear real tent pegs with real lances! Beryl, a woman who loved carpentry, obtained a pioneer cabin from Boothby ‘s of Grand Valley road. With the help of many local people she disassembled it, moved it and reassembled it on the Smeeton ‘s middle quarter, where Miles already had his horses and his quonset barn.
The entire Smeeton family strongly felt that it woul1 be a good thing to act to protect the environment am so they decided to make the northwest quarter of their land a Game Reserve, under permit from the Municipal District of Rocky View. They also decided to establish an environmentally focused Charity, initially named the Wildlife Reserve of Western Canada, but later on the name was changed to the pre ent, le unwieldy, Cochrane Ecological Institute (CEI).
Beryl and Miles had also decided that they would build their own house on the northwest quarter in the middle of their Game Reserve. House building wa something they had never done before and clearly worth a try. After kicking around several ideas and discarding most of them (as an example Beryl wanted a Yurt but Miles felt a Yurt would be particularly uncomfortable in winter) they went to visit a very well-known architect in Calgary. This gentleman was an architect who had designed and built many of the spectacular skyscrapers in the heart of downtown, but Beryl and Miles asked him if he could design the cheapest possible house for them, which he did. The home-made house Beryl and Miles built, following the architect’s design, was so rough and ready and happy-go-lucky that he seldom acknowledged that he had designed it.
The first thing that the Smeetons had to do, in order to comply with their Game Reserve permit from the M.D. of Rocky View, was to build an eight-foot-high game fence around the entire 160 acres of the north west quarter. This was a huge job. But, spurring them on were two long brown faces belonging to a pair of orphaned moose calves, Peterkin and Petrushka (Moose Magic by Miles Smeeton). Once the fence was built Peterkin and Petrushka moved onto their new home on the Game Reserve, the first of many, many moose orphans that have come to live there.
Raising orphaned animals, building houses, restoring old buildings and founding an environmentally focussed Charity wasn’t enough, so in 1971 the Smeeton ‘s decided they needed a bigger project. Within the Mandate of the Charity they had founded was the concept of restoring the damaged prairie ecosystem. A practical way of doing this, they reasoned, was to return vanished (extirpated) indigenous species back to their native prairie habitat. The Smeetons believed that if land alone is preserved, without the wildlife that once inhabited it, that protection is a sterile exercise. To restore and preserve Alberta’s biological diversity, indigenous species that have been extirpated (made extinct in Canada) must be returned (the concept is ecosystem restoration through reintroduction). But to do that, you have to have the animals to do it with.
After discussing this idea at length with Dr. Steve Herrero, then Chair of the Department of Environmental Design at the University of Calgary, they decided that the animals they would breed in captivity for eventual return to their native prairie habitat would be the Swift fox, Vulpes velox. The Smeetons’ founding of the first small carnivore captive breeding programme in Canada, a programme which was designed specifically to provide animals for reintroduction, was a First for Canada.
The huge question, in order to start their project, was where could the Smeetons get their swift foxes from?
Once upon a time, the whole eastern foothills area of the Rockies, including Cochrane, had a large resident population of these tiny foxes. In fact, the type specimen of the species, Vulpes velox, held by the Smithsonian Institution in the USA, came from the Calgary area. During the time of the North West Company and Hudson’s Bay Company fur trade, in some years, more swift fox pelts were traded out of Edmonton House, Chesterfield House, and Carleton House than muskrat or beaver (Arima,1995, Blackfeet and Palefaces, Golden Dog Press). At that time, Swift foxes were more commonly called kit foxes; in the late 1970’s, their name was changed from Kit to Swift. For the tribes of the Blackfeet Confederacy, who shared their land with them, the little foxes will always be known as Siinopaa.
By 1972, there were no swift foxes left in Canada.
The loss of the swift fox on the prairies had been a sharp and sudden one. Once they ranged from the banks of the North Saskatchewan River in Alberta and Saskatchewan, south to the Texas panhandle and from the foothills of the Rockies east to the Red River Valley of Manitoba, but by 1930 they had completely disappeared.
1800: Alexander Henry, fur trader.” They (swift fox) are one of the most common fur animals of the Red River Valley”.
1853: Charles Cavileer: At one trading post (Walhalla) the annual harvest of “400 to 600 skins of kit (swift) foxes were obtained in a season, but none have seen since the buffalo disappeared.”
1856: Mead reported:” there were foxes living on the plains with the wolves, called ‘swifts’ from their remarkable speed. They lived in pairs … No other foxes were found on the Plains.”
1857: Palliser “November 2, Kill a male kit fox (vulpus velox), an animal very common in the prairies, living in holes, several of which are grouped together on slight knolls. For a distance it is the swiftest animal on the prairies, its length was 31 and 1/2 inches, of which the tail formed 12, its height 14 and 1/2 inches; its fur is a beautiful speckled grey.” (near Fort Carleton)
Allen 1874 :”These graceful little animals (swift fox) are still more or less abundant.”
1889 Baker: “The swift fox was … very numerous until withjn the past five years, now rarely seen. It lives in shallow burrows on the open prairie”
1900 Seton: ” … they (swift fox) are rapidly disappearing over a large part of their range and, if doomed to extinction, it is important that a closer study be made of their home life before it is too late.”
Fortunately, for the Smeeton’s plans to develop the first captive breeding colony of swift fox in Canada, Beryl heard that a wildlife rehabber in Colorado, Mrs. Vona Bates, had some rehabilitated but non-release-able swift fox from the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. Beryl wrote to Vona, obtained the necessary permits from the governments of Alberta, Montana, and Colorado and drove down to collect their first pairs of swift fox.
Nelson and Emma, Napoleon and Josephine. After Beryl received the four foxes from Vona Bate, Vona wrote to her friend AI Oeming in Edmonton and asked him to send the swift foxes she had previously sent to him down to the Smeetons. AI Oeming did this, and so Emma, Nelson, Napoleon and Josephine were joined by Mr. and Mrs. Newcome. Nelson, Emma, Napoleon and Josephine and the many swift foxes that joined them over the years from South Dakota and Wyoming were the foundation of a truly amazing and unique programme. A programme so special to Big Hill Country that for the longest time (until it was sold) Cochrane’s newspaper, The Cochrane Times, had the swift fox on its masthead, making it the only newspaper in North America with an endangered species as its logo.
Swift fox breeding for reintroduction was an exciting concept, but, as Miles wrote in his book “Completely Foxed”, “Whether it is feasible to reintroduce an animal (swift fox) that has become extinct through the spread of civilization is questionable, but that is what we hoped to discover. Very little is known about swift foxes, and they have a poor record of breeding in captivity; nevertheless, we intended to breed them and one day release them in their natural environment. Had we understood all the problems and work involved … we might have thought twice about the project.”
At this time, in 1972, Miles started the first swift fox studbook in North America. In the studbook, all the foxes had individual numbers, markings, and names. The scientific community prefers numbers for identifying individual animals, believing that numbers are somehow more “scientific”, but the Smeetons found it much easier to identify their foxes by name, from a foxes point of view, both names and numbers are just a jumble of inexplicable sounds.
Unfortunately, it was hard for the Smeetons to bring the Universities and government agencies to join them, and take them seriously: “the idea of people turning a personal concern for wildlife into a working conservation project with no aim of financial gain was itself so rare as to stretch credibility slightly … the Smeeton ‘s didn’t exactly fit peoples expectations of … conservationist5 … ” ( Miles Clark, High Endeavours, published by Greystone books)
By initiating the swift fox studbook, as well as keeping track of genetic background in the breeding pairs and thus enhancing the maintenance of genetic heterozygosity, Miles satisfied the scientists demand for numbers to identify individuals and his own preference for names. Eventually, as well as numbers and numbered tattoos, every fox born in a certain year had a name that started with the letter assigned to that year, so in an “A” year all foxes born at the Cochrane Ecological Institute, CEI, had names beginning with “A”, such as Annie, Agatha, Alfred, Albert, etc. This made it really easy to work out the age of the animal without having to refer back to the studbook.
This policy of naming all the foxes born each year with the same assigned letter also provided a huge amount of entertainment for local schools. School groups would visit the Smeeton Game Reserve to see the swift foxes and always asked if they could get to “name a fox’ , when the naming policy was explained to them one very funny names resulted. On one CBC programme, in 1993, the reporter asked Clio Smeeton why one of the foxe wa called ‘ Coyote ‘ and Clit replied: “We don’t just have Coyote here, we have Cornflakes, Cauliflower Candle Cracker, Cherrie and Cabbage” sounding more like someone selling food than someone releasing swift foxes!
Now, in 2007, Miles’ studbook has been transferred to the new International Swift Fox Studbook keeper at Pueblo Zoo, Colorado, and forms the basis for that international initiative. Nowaday, and since 1993, all the Cochrane Ecological Institute swift fox have also been genotyped so their DNA is registered, but they all still have tattoos, and they all still have names … having gone right through the Alphabet, we are back at the beginning again.
In 1972, when the first swift foxes arrived at Cochrane and Miles started his studbook. the status of the swift fox in Canada had not yet been officially as assessed. By 1978 it had, and the species had been officially declared Extirpated (extinct) in Canada by the Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife In Canada, COSEWIC.
But, of course, swift foxes were not extinct in Canada because they were living and breeding in Big Hill Country just outside Cochrane, Alberta, on the Smeeton ranch. In 1977, the Smeetons had signed a co-operative agreement with the University of Calgary, so work was already underway to research suitable release sites. The bare bones of a reintroduction programme were in place, and in 1978 the Federal Government joined the University of Calgary and the Smeeton’s Cochrane Ecological Institute, CEI, in working to develop a swift fox reintroduction program.
The orphaned moose calves, Peterkin and Petrushka had grown up, and inevitably bred. Petrushka was so attached to Beryl that she happily left her with her calves as a moose baby-sitter. But, at three years old, Peterkin was shot through the fence and killed, outside of the hunting season, a sadly deliberate murder.
Orphaned moose and Swift foxes were not the only animals on the Smeeton Game Reserve, nor their only project.
One new project on the Game Reserve was holding injured endangered Trumpeter swans, Cygnus buccinator, at the Cochrane Ecological Institute, CEI, on behalf of the Canadian Wildlife Service. The swans lived on the pond on the Smeeton ‘s property, a pond that had been built by the Canadian Pacific Railway around the turn of the 20th century on the headwaters of Horse Creek. The plan was to see if it was possible for the injured swans to breed and the hope was that the cygnets from that breeding would fly south when the migrant Trumpeter swans returned from the North and settled back on Smeeton’s pond, before carrying on with their migration. But, even though they had a beautiful geodesic dome to live in and to keep the water open over winter, the Canadian Wildlife Service’s Trumpeter swans never did breed. Miles was not amused when the federal government asked him to pay for a permit to keep their swans, which they, themselves, had placed on his land!
The second project was also one undertaken on behalf of the Canadian Wildlife Service. Although for this one the Smeetons did not have to pay for a permit, they did have to pay to put a second lower, game fence along the inside perimeter of their land. At the time, buffalo were classified as wild animals (this is no longer the case; they are now domestic animals). Because the buffalo were considered to be wild animals, the government regulations demanded that it must be impossible for the buffalo to come in contact with domestic cattle through the game fence, so a second fence had to be built. These Canadian Wildlife Service buffalo were wood buffalo (B.b. athabascae), the rarest subspecies of North American buffalo. The goal of the Canadian Wildlife Service programme was to establish a small herd away from Wood Buffalo Park, the only place in North America where wood buffalo occur, to reduce the impact of possible disease outbreaks.
The first swift fox reintroduction in North America was planned to take place in Southern Alberta in 1981, but ended up taking place in 1983. A jurisdictional problem, which the Smeetons had not anticipated, was that the only people legally permitted to release wildlife under the Alberta Wildlife Act could do so only if they had a special permit from the Minister.
Even the University of Calgary and the Federal Canadian Wildlife Service appeared to have forgotten this fact, because when they first tried to release swift foxes, in 1981, they were prevented from doing so by the Province ( 1983, Reynolds, J. University of Calgary M.Sc. Thesis). Over the next couple of years the provinces of Saskatchewan and Manitoba joined the national Swift Fox Reintroduction programme, and in 1983, the province of Alberta joined in too, and the swift foxes were reintroduced in the Manyberries, Alberta area.
Beryl had lost her battle with cancer and died in 1979, so she didn’t see the first release. She was buried on her property beneath a huge bison rubbed block of sandstone. Every evening, if he was at home, Miles would walk out to the rock and sit on it. Once or twice in the dark twilight he mistook a bison for the rock and sat on it by accident. He was very old by that time, so always put his hand below him as he started to sit down, and if he was sitting on a buffalo, he would feel its harsh curly hair, but by that time, it was too late for him to reverse his descent. The buffalo never seemed to mind.
After Beryl’s death, Miles wrote: “Life is rather like riding across some vast plain. One day perhaps you meet someone who rides the same way. For days and miles you ride along together and the days and miles pass so quickly that you neither notice their passage nor dream of their end. Then one day your road divides and your companion leaves. Ahead the plain – empty now, stretches on forever, the stones more numerous and your horse more tired, but all you can do is ride on. I suppose that is what I am doing now, with no great objective.” In the Fall of 1988 his ride stopped, Miles died and joined Beryl beneath the sandstone rock on Smeeton land. The buffalo still rub on the rock and still sleep beside it on ground consecrated by the Bishop of Calgary.
Clio attempted to set up a management procedure which would see the federal and provincial governments take responsibility for their swift foxes. She attempted this because, in 1986, the federal government had come to Miles and said that because legislation changed it was imperative that he transfer ownership of the swift foxes to the federal government. Under this arrangement, the federal government would “own” the swift fox colony, but the animals would stay on the Smeetons’ land. Miles agreed, because he was a logical man, and he thought that if the federal government owned the swift fox captive breeding colony on his land that would mean that they would look after them and pay for them. He was wrong. The Smeetons ended up paying for the maintenance of a swift fox captive breeding colony that was owned by the federal government, an absurd state of affairs. Clio’s two-year attempt to change this state of affairs was unsuccessful, and so, in January 1991, she and her daughter Catriona returned to the Smeeton land in Big Hill Country to look after the swift fox colony.
The government agencies had formed a Swift Fox Recovery Team in 1986, and the Team had drawn up a plan to cover the years 1986-1997. The Smeetons found themselves in the unenviable position of breeding an extirpated species for a reintroduction programme undertaken by the government in Canada, without having committed funding from the Government to provide this essential service. This lack of funding, coupled with having the sole responsibility for maintaining 25 breeding pairs of swift fox and their cubs, resulted in the sad necessity of selling land and the Smeeton ‘s original holding was reduced from 3/4 of a section to one quarter, the Game Reserve.
Following the direction of the Swift Fox Recovery Team the Smeetons provided a total of 849 swift fox for release in Canada, and in addition, they provided two breeding pairs of swift fox to the Calgary Zoo, one pair to Edmonton Valley Zoo and a pair to the provincially owned zoo in Saskatchewan. The exhibit of these animals was designed to highlight the swift fox recovery effort, and the cubs born to the foxes exhibited in Calgary and Edmonton came back to the CEI either for release or to be incorporated into the breeding programme. Also, under the Swift Fox Recovery Plan, the Canadian Federal Government arranged that 91 swift fox would be trapped in Wyoming, quarantined at the CEI for 6 months, and released in Canada to supplement the 849 Canadian captive-bred swift fox reintroduced over the length of the reintroduction programme ( 1983-1997).
While Miles and Beryl were alive their contribution to conservation was not really acknowledged. Although Miles received Alberta’s Order of the Big Horn, they were not invited to join the Canadian National Swift Fox Recovery team. Years after their death, in 1994, ownership of the swift foxes reverted from the federal Government to the Smeeton family and Clio was invited to join the Swift Fox Recovery Team. In 1997, three years later, Canadian National Swift Fox Reintroduction Programme ceased. The programme stopped, not for scientific reasons but because the end-date was designed to harmonize with the end of other federal reintroduction programmes, peregrine falcon and whooping crane. At that time approximately 289 swift foxes were estimated to live in the wild in Canada as a result of the Swift fox reintroduction programme.
As a result of the Swift Fox Reintroduction Programme, the classification of the swift fox in Canada was changed from Extirpated (extinct) in Canada (COSEWTC 1978) to Endangered in Canada (COSEWTC I 998)
From 1997 to 2004, no further swift foxes were released in Canada. Some of the swift foxes that were released during the Canadian programme ( 1983-1997), travelled across the Canada/USA border and settled in Montana, USA. This was fortunate for the biodiversity of Montana because swift fox had been extirpated (made extinct) over the northern US States. The Blackfoot Tribe of Montana asked the Cochrane Ecological Institute if they would partner them in the First swift fox reintroduction in the USA. It was a very successful programme lasting from Fall I 997, when the programme was first proposed, to the fall of 2002. From the moment of reintroduction on Blackfoot Tribal land the swift fox thrived and bred (2005, Ausband. D. University of Missoula Montana, M.Sc. Thesis)
In 2001 , the Blood (Kainai) Tribe of southern Alberta also requested that the CEI partner them in a swift fox reintroduction which the CEI wa very happy to do. This was the first reintroduction by Aboriginal people of an Endangered Species on Aboriginal land in Canada. The first swift fox of that programme were released in 2005. The CEl still holds Canada’s only captive breeding colony of this endangered species, is the only organization involved in the reintroduction of swift fox in Canada, and is wholly respon ible for raising the funds to pay for it.
The farsighted action of the Smeetons in founding the Cochrane Ecological Institute and the swift fox reintroduction programme means that swift fox now run again on their native habitat in Canada and the northern prairie states of the USA. Without Beryl Smeeton ‘s dream this would never have happened.
” …. from a Native American stand point, Blackfeet perspective if you will, the need for vindication and legitimacy through qualification, quantification and recognition are not often required in matters of the spirit and heart. Which is what this action (swift fox reintroduction) was, and is … (in) the view of many peoples, indigenous in particular, that is, cumulative factors (including spiritual, heartfelt and cultural values) must be taken into account then priorities may be set from there. I will point out that the most enduring and valuable messages are those visual and storied accounts.” Ira Newbreast, Blackfeet Tribal Fish & Wildlife Department.
All the time the swift fox programme has been running, the CEI has been providing another service to the public by taking in injured and orphaned wildlife. This programme treats and releases into suitable habitat, where they won’t come into conflict with people again, all wild animals from robins to bears, eagles to otters. This is a difficult programme to fund, so in 2006 the Cochrane Ecological Institute, CEI, founded a project designed to pay for the CEI’s costs. It is called the Happy Tails Pet Retreat, “Where Boarding Your Pet Supports Wildlife” and is a dog and cat kennel built in the wooded heart of the CEI. All proceeds from Happy Tails Pet Retreat go straight to the CEI for the wildlife rescue and swift fox programmes.
Since 1972, the CEI has been sending Educators around to the schools to teach about the importance of preserving and restoring ecosystems. Students from around the world have come to the CEI to learn about its programmes, to volunteer and experience the 1menities of Big Hill Country! Other graduate and post ~raduates have come to the CEI to undertake their research. The CEI has also undertaken technological exchange and capacity building programmes for First Nations people so they can use these skills in data management and enhance the conservation of their lands.
As long ago as 1986, with the encouragement of Miles Smeeton, Clio Smeeton on behalf of the CEI, initiated an international survey of whales, dolphins and porpoises called WHALEFORCE. Finally, in 2006 the CEI obtained a seagoing boat, PESCADOU, which it is anticipated will encourage a large participation in WHALEFORCE amongst sailors.
So what started with a boat, the TZU HANG, ends with a boat, PESCADOU, and the Cochrane Ecological Institute that the Smeetons founded in Big Hill Country in J 997 still carries on with its Mandate in 2007:
‘The Cochrane Ecological Institute, Cochrane Wildlife Reserve Society is devoted to the preservation of North America’s biodiversity through the conservation and breeding of endangered indigenous species, environmental impact evaluation, ecosystem restoration through the reintroduction of extirpated flora and fauna, rescue and rehabilitation and release of injured and orphaned wildlife, public education and field research, conservation of cultural diversity and the monitoring of habitat and species through the development of non intrusive survey methods.
