Castle Provincial Park and Castle Wildland Provincial Park, located near Waterton in SW Alberta,  were recently created by the Provincial government to protect this sensitive and valuable bit of wilderness. The government is asking Albertans to provide feedback on the draft management plan for the parks.

The deadline for this is tomorrow, April 19. Please take some time to read the information on this page and complete the survey there. If you had completed the survey for the previous management plan, you can still respond now to the new plan.

One of the main issues at stake is whether off-highway motorized vehicles (OHV’s) will be allowed in the parks. There is an extensive network of trails in the parks, and the OHV community is lobbying to allow OHV use in the parks to continue. Researchers say that the proposed parks are already so heavily used that it will require a lot of restoration before they can really be valuable wildlife refuges. There are so many roads and trails in the parks right now that many species have been negatively impacted.

As birders and conservationists, we should lend our voices to this debate.