Audio file of the episode is available on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Video file is available on YouTube.
Transcript
Tobi Nussbaum: Hello, hi, I’m Tobi Nussbaum, the CEO of the National Capital Commission, and in today’s episode of Capital Stories, we’re going to talk about all things conservation and conservation officers. You may know, or you may not know, that the NCC is responsible for planning and stewarding over a thousand square kilometres of land in the National Capital Region. What you also may know, or may not know, is that we have a whole team of conservation officers who are out there every day making sure everything’s okay on the land, checking in with people, looking after health and safety issues, and generally, our eyes and ears, every day, throughout all four seasons, hot and cold, to make sure that the NCC lands are properly managed. In this episode, we’re going to explore the multifaceted roles of these conservation officers, highlighting their contribution to protect biodiversity, while, as I said, contributing to just understanding what’s happening in our lands, dealing with issues and problems as they arise, and also being a helpful resource for people who have questions or concerns about anything that’s happening out there. So, I’m very pleased today to be joined by Diane Barbarie. Bonjour, hello
Diane Barbarie: Bonjour
Tobi Nussbaum: and Christopher Myles. Thanks to both of you for joining me today. So, I’m just going to start things off by asking you… tell me about a day in the life of an NCC conservation officer, from start to finish. What’s a typical day? Diane, do you want to go first?
Diane Barbarie: Yes. So, when we start our shift, we’ll either start with having a look at all the reports that came in, the concerns, you know, from the public, and then we go from there. So, if there’s a call, that’s our priority, and if not, then we follow up on reports that we’ve had, and the day goes on. So, whatever happens during the day, we go with the priorities first.
Tobi Nussbaum: And so, in terms of the role between the office and being out there, Christopher, tell me a bit about that balance. I presume you start your day here at Bayview Yards, just west of downtown, to check in, and then what does it look like in terms of going from the office out into the field?
Christopher Myles: Typically, it follows a lot of what Diane just mentioned. We’ll kind of just get our bearings as far as what priorities are of the day, but in general, we try to get out into the field as speedily as possible, and start approaching all the new problems and the fresh issues of the day, and make sure we respond to calls. And like Diane just said, it’s a priority base to the calls themselves, but then again, we can get multiple calls sometimes, and it’s up to us to triage those calls based on importance or level of hazard or risk to the public or whatnot, right? So it’s up to us to kind of really manage our own priorities with the guidance from what’s coming down from our supervisors, managers, NCC priorities, etcetera, right?
Tobi Nussbaum: And as part of the tactic, Diane, to kind of cover our different conservation officers, covering different areas every day. Is it as much surveillance as it is responsive, or how do you figure out who’s going where? Let’s say you don’t have any calls, but you’re just doing your general surveillance, in general, checking out the lands. Do different teams go to different places every day? Is that how it works?
Diane Barbarie: We do. We make sure that we have, we actually have, like different zones. So on… you know, two different provinces, Ontario and Quebec, we have different zones. So we make sure that we have an officer, you know, in every zone, so that the response is quicker. And if there’s something to check, at least the timeline is faster.
Tobi Nussbaum: Great. Now, I suspect that to do this job, you need a little bit of training. So, Christopher, do you want to talk a little bit about the different kinds of trainings one has to have to be a full-time conservation officer?
Christopher Myles: Yeah, absolutely. We do go through a number of trainings. All… I would say yearly, for most things. A good example would be forest firefighting training, where we’re trained forest firefighters through the SOPFEU agency of Quebec, the provincial firefighting agency. We do that once a year. We do our use of force on a regular basis, depending on how… when that needs to be renewed. That’s just more for our personal safety out there, so that we know how to respond given the worst-case scenario or everything in between. Our chemical mobilization training is a pretty… pretty big one for us. We go through that once every few years in a comprehensive sense, but we do it in-house at least once a year, sometimes more, just so that we’re on top of everything we need to do to make sure that those calls go well, because there’s a lot of technical stuff involved with those operations. So, we like to make sure that within the team, we’re up to speed, we’re ready to go at any given moment, and we also do it with trained veterinarians, wildlife veterinarians from across Canada to get into the more comprehensive aspects of those operations. But those are some examples. We do our first aids very regularly. We do our boat safety training regularly, and a lot of legislative stuff, just to make sure we’re covered on what’s current, what’s up to date, any changes to anything that’s going on in our world, essentially.
Tobi Nussbaum: Fantastic, thanks. And Diane, what would be something that you think would surprise people about the work you do, the training you do, the experiences you have?
Diane Barbarie: I would have to say the diversity in our job. So, a day can start with reading the occurrence report, and then it goes to a search and rescue for a missing person. It can go from an injury, someone on a trail gets injured. It can be an offence being… happening right now, or it did happen in the past and then we have to investigate on. So yeah, the diversity can go from animal regulations, also, that we do enforce. So, when we have reports of an issue or ongoing issue for that, we do enforce those regulations. And sometimes our partners within the city will call us and work with our partners within the city. So it could be Ottawa Police, it could be the RCMP, it could be the MRC des Collines. So we do work… Gatineau police. We do work with a lot of either their requests, or then we request them to assist us in certain situations.
Tobi Nussbaum: Fantastic. Now speaking of diversity of roles, behind me is a boat, behind you is a bear cage. Christopher, let’s talk about the bear cage first because I think people will be interested. Tell me a time that you have used the bear cage and how it works.
Christopher Myles: The bear cages are intended to essentially live-trap an animal, a bear. We use them as a means of, if we have a nuisance bear in the area or reports of, or sightings, it’s a way to capture that animal with the least amount of complications. So essentially, we bait the cages to attract the bear, allow it to enter, trap it live—no harm done to the bear, no harm done to us. Then we can simply go through our partner agencies, like Diane was explaining, and relocate it to a more suitable habitat. We use those in cases of, we have several farms in the Greenbelt and Quebec side. Let’s say a bear has come in from the forest and is now eating your beehives or eating your apple trees. Once a bear finds a location that there’s a really abundant source of food without any issues, no other people, bears, bothering them, they won’t really tend to leave. And in order to mitigate that or get ahead of anything that could transpire with somebody who wants to pick apples running into a bear, we try to get them into the cage and then get them back to where they should be without any [im]mobilization required.
Tobi Nussbaum: I’m sure our audience would be interested to know, when bears are in the cage, do they tend to be docile or angry or resign to being in a cage? What does their behaviour look like when they’re in that cage?
Christopher Myles: It’s a great question. I liken animals often to humans. There are very predictable behaviours and there are very unpredictable behaviours attributed to individuals. Generally speaking, though, in my experience anyway, and Diane might have more to add, she’s been here longer than I have, they’re fairly docile most of the time. They may not be too happy about it, but I think they have enough cognitive awareness that they’re stuck in there. And generally, after a few moments that the bear, in my sense and perception anyway, that we’re not a threat, they don’t really react. They get calmer as well. So, most in my experience, it’s been a fairly calm situation.
Tobi Nussbaum: Interesting. So, behind me, Diane, is a boat. The NCC has a lot of lakes in its domain, a lot of rivers. In what cases would you take the boat out and what does that look like?
Diane Barbarie: Well, we have different... the boat is only one of the different kind of patrols that we do. But the boat, we would take it on the Ottawa River—especially that one. We have smaller boats for the other lakes, like Meech Lake, Philippe, and La Pêche. So, it would be either somebody that’s stuck on a lake, that’s missing equipment, and they can’t go back to shore… to enforce our regulations, but from the shoreline, because the NCC owns a lot of shoreline. And we have Leamy Lake, also, that we can go. So, that’s only one of the ways that we patrol. There’s also ATVs. There’s also our vehicles, our trucks. There’s our bikes. And so, yeah, there’s different... There’s always a foot patrol, which is a good exercise to do. And so, yeah, so that’s just one of them.
Tobi Nussbaum: But lots of toys.
Diane Barbarie: Lots of toys. Yes.
Tobi Nussbaum: Summer and winter, I imagine.
Diane Barbarie: Yes. We have snowmobiles too for the winter.
Tobi Nussbaum: Right. Great. I want to ask you each a question, which is: in your job, what is one unforgettable moment or one interesting experience you’ve had that you think the audience would like to hear? Maybe it’s odd or funny or strange, whatever it is. Christopher, why don’t you go first?
Christopher Myles: There’s several to choose from. It’s actually a bit... there’s so many, it’s hard to come up with one right off the bat. But one I’ll just throw out that comes to mind immediately: I had a family at Lac Philippe many years ago who encountered a bear, innocuous encounter. There was no, you know, just a bear in the woods, but a lot of people aren’t used to seeing bears, especially in close proximity. So they opted to climb a rather large white pine on the beach. And this included, I think, a 75-year-old grandmother and it was a family of five. They’d all managed to ascend the tree quite high. And I guess the teaching point in all this is that climbing a tree is actually one of the things you shouldn’t do when you encounter a bear because they’re fantastic climbers and it’s kind of the opposite of what we would recommend you do. But this was their reaction when we found them. And it actually took us quite some time to locate them because even though we were standing right below them, they were so [afraid] in the moment that they didn’t say anything even when they saw us. So, you know, it took... I think the young kid said something and we’re like, whoa. So we actually had to climb the trees ourselves and
Tobi Nussbaum: help them down
Christopher Myles: kind of carry them down, and lower them into the bed of the truck and just kind of quick thinking in the moment, use what we had at our disposal to rectify the situation, and just do a little public relations and, you know, explain like, next time, you know, don’t do this, do that, do this.
Tobi Nussbaum: So maybe not the right course of action, but impressive that a whole family managed to climb a tree, and a 75-year-old at that. So, some positives in there too.
Christopher Myles: A bit of a surprise.
Tobi Nussbaum: Innovation. That’s a great story. Diane, what’s a story that stands out for you in terms of your experience as a conservation officer?
Diane Barbarie: For me, it’s a little bit different. So, it’s mainly on a search and rescue for an injured person. And we had to... She was quite far into Richard Lake and Gatineau Park. And we had to use the spinal board and we had to put the individual on the spinal board and then do a little bit of distance in the woods. And then we had to put that person into a... it’s like a basket on wheels, to go in between like the trees.
Tobi Nussbaum: Oh, wow.
Diane Barbarie: And then we had to switch that person into the rescue slate, which was behind the ATV. And then we had to transport that person to her vehicle because she had a ride to go to the hospital. But it was just to show how many ways that we can rescue somebody. And it doesn’t take only one piece of equipment. Sometimes it takes a multiple, you know, pieces of equipment to get them out of the woods because sometimes they’re way in. So for me, that’s one that I can remember. And just a side note, for me, the thank you cards… goes a long way. And they’re really happy that, you know, we’ve, you know, helped them, assist them, and just reminds us of why we do that job.
Tobi Nussbaum: Wow. Isn’t that nice?
Diane Barbarie: Yeah.
Tobi Nussbaum: It’s nice to get recognition from the public about the work you guys do. And anything else that you guys would want to share? Anything I’ve missed in terms of things that you would want the public to know about the work you guys do?
Diane Barbarie: One thing that I could suggest or to help people, when they go on a trail, is to stay on the official trails, to choose the right app, so that they don’t get lost. And maybe, as I do, take a picture of the map that’s at the trailhead. Take a picture. And at least if you’re lost, you still have it with you. And make sure that cell phone is charged, fully charged.
Tobi Nussbaum: Excellent tips. Christopher, anything else that you would want to add before we finish?
Christopher Myles: No. I mean, we’re, as you said in your introduction, we’re here to maintain the ecological integrity and also the integrity of the NCC’s assets. So just to be respectful when using all of the lands, all of the facilities. It just makes everybody’s experience that much more pleasant and means you probably won’t have to talk to us anytime soon. So yeah, we can go about doing things like saving people and other things.
Tobi Nussbaum: Great.
Christopher Myles: No, it’s a fantastic place to work. And honestly, we feel privileged to be here.
Tobi Nussbaum: Excellent. And for my part, thank you very much for the work you guys do. You and all of your colleagues who work here in the conservation team at Bayview Yards, where we are today. And thanks to both of you for joining me on this episode of Capital Stories and telling us a little bit about the behind-the-scenes look at the work you do. And thanks to our listeners, too, for joining us for this episode of Capital Stories. And we’ll see you the next time.