Researchers at the University of Calgary have been studying the effect human trail walkers have on wildlife in Canada’s parks, and they have found….wait for it…that people scare the animals away from trails.

So while this seems like something we all knew, actually that’s a gross over simplification of what the researchers did. In truth, they discovered the thresholds levels of human activity that cause elk and wolves to change their behavior. And they observed that wolves and elk react differently to people walking on the trails.

By using GPS collars on wolves and elk, and sensors on trails, the scientists found that one hiker an hour kept the animals 50m?away from the trail habitat. Two hikers per hour kept the wolves 400m away and the elk began to use the area near the trail as a refuge from predation.

As human traffic on the trails increased to over 2 people per hour, both species stayed 400m away from the trail, resulting in loss of habitat. That’s about a half mile width, or .73 kilometers?wide.? Over the length of?a trail this would add up to some significant square miles. On a busy 5 mile trail, 2.5 square miles of habitat would be lost due to human presence.

So imagine yourself affecting an area a half mile wide as you hunt. A quarter mile all around you.

They didn’t do research on low level traffic like hunting, where you may be the only human who has walked along this certain ridge all year. But if you are in an area where other people hunt every day you might expect that the critters are avoiding the area. The elk are 1200 feet away, so maybe you need to get off the trail by 400m.

Low level trail traffic must not keep elk and deer away from the trail as much. Otherwise we’d never see any game. The study did mention that wolves like to use trails (“linear features”)?when they aren’t often used be humans.

Here’s a link to the original research:

Discussion section of Human Activity Differentially Redistributes Large Mammals in the Canadian Rockies National Parks