Alberta - What Makes The Badlands So Bad?
Our history with the badlands, and the creatures who call them home.
EPISODE NOTES
I looked very hard for a scorpion while I was there. I had found one almost accidentally when I was 14 and we were visiting Dinosaur Provincial Park on a family trip, so I had it in my head that the place was lousy with them. No luck this time, but not for lack of trying.
I got sass for saying that the badlands are ‘about as close as Canada gets’ to a desert. I’ll die on the hill of that ‘about’ qualifier, but:
Most people pointed out the Okanagan Desert / Osoyoos Desert in BC.
There’s also Carcross Desert in Yukon (which I’ve been to as well!)
And some other sand dunes and small badlands in Saskatchewan in Ontario.
But the lesson in all this is that it’s actually quite hard to define what a ‘true desert’ is and most places I read seemed to say that none of the Canadian ‘almost’s are dry enough to qualify. But Canadian Geographic has a tidy little article about this if you’d like to know more.
TRANSCRIPT
What makes the badlands so bad? Last time we learned how Alberta wound up with this unique landscape. Today we’ll see what that meant for us, and the animals and plants that call them home.
So put yourself in the leather shoes of a French explorer as they forged West in the 1700s. You’ve grown used to the relatively easy-going of the rolling prairies when all of a sudden you have to cross this: a maze of steep mesas, valleys, canyons and sinkholes built of unstable mudstone and sandstone. And expanses of particularly nasty ‘popcorn rock’ - which can be viciously sharp when dry and, worse, melts into mud as slippery as ice when wet.
Winters here are freezing and windy. Summers are searing and dry. Most water sources are mostly mud.
So not much of a surprise that those French explorers declare them ‘les mauvais terres a traverser’. ‘Bad lands to cross’. They often get credit for the name we still use today.
But they’d actually cribbed it from the Lakota, who’s territory in what is now the midwestern United States included a ton of Badlands, and who’d had at least three thousand years to get acquainted with how bad they could be. They’d always called them ‘Mako Sica’, literally ‘Land Bad’. Near-impossible to traverse, pointless for agriculture. Archaeological evidence suggests seasonal hunting, but we’ve never had the nerve to try for a permanent settlement.
And the badlands are just as bad for any flora and fauna willing to brave them. They’re not technically a desert, but they’re about as close as Canada gets to one. And they share a lot of species built for that extreme environment. Sage and cacti cling onto the barren ground, rattlesnakes and scorpions eke out survival from the meagre resources.
And as striking as the few species you do see is how much you don’t. 360 degree views without a single foraging creature or hardy plant poking out of the parched ground. A barren, dead place.
But there is one vibrant exception to that rule: the narrow riparian zone along the banks of the few permanent rivers and streams. It’s as though the full complement of Badlands life crowded into these tiny but hyper-productive areas.
Along the Red Deer River, towering cottonwoods hang over a heavy underbrush. But even at the banks of smaller streams, crowded plant life provides shelter and food for 165 species of birds. And grazing space for mule deer. They handle the often barren territory by eating absolutely everything - a recorded 788 species of plants.
Life hangs onto the badlands in the fringes and by way of extreme specialization. That, along with the stark beauty of the terrain, would already make them a destination. But to leave it there would be ignoring the Albertasaurus in the room.
So next time, we’ll learn about the most famous animals in the badlands. Because in fact, you could say the whole area is absolutely teeming with wildlife - provided you gloss over that it’s been dead for 75 million years.