Johane Janelle

Johane Janelle was born and raised in the small Quebec village of Cap-Sante. After travel and adventure took her out west, she’s worked in a variety of nature-related fields – from the Calgary Zoo, where she flew birds of prey and did visitor interpretation, to National Parks, where she worked on everything from bison handlings and radio telemetry tracking trumpeter swans, to media design, photography, and park interpretation. Recently her focus has been more on conservation photography, providing photo documentation of the work done by biologists, conservationists, and researchers. She has been involved in documenting several bison reintroductions into wild places such as central Siberia, Alaska, and Banff National Park.

Janelle’s images have been published in magazines including Nature Alberta, Nature Sauvage, Canadian Geographic, and Blue Jay, as well as on the covers of many equine magazines. She and Wes Olson live beside Elk Island National Park in central Alberta and are also the author and photographer of A field Guide to Plains Bison, and Portraits of the Bison: An Illustrated Guide to Bison Society.

Website: johanejanelle.com

FESTIVAL BOOK

The Ecological Buffalo

An expert on the buffalo tells the history of this keystone species through extensive research and beautiful photographs.

The mere mention of the buffalo instantly brings to mind the vast herds that once roamed the North American continent, and few wild animals captivate our imaginations as much as the buffalo do. Once numbering in the tens of millions, these magnificent creatures played a significant role in the varied ecosystems they occupied, and North American Indigenous Peoples depended upon them.

With the arrival of Europeans, the bison were all but exterminated, along with their millennia-old intricate food webs and inter-species relationships. In a span of just 30 years during the mid-1800s, buffalo populations plummeted from more than 30 million to just 23. And with them went all the intricate food webs, the trophic cascades, and the inter-species relationships that had evolved over thousands of years. Despite this brush with extinction, the bison survived, and are slowly recovering. Alongside this recovery, the relationships once shared with thousands of species are being re-established in a remarkable process of ecological healing.

Based on Wes Olson’s 35 years of working intimately with bison – and featuring Johane Janelle’s stunning photography – The Ecological Buffalo takes a journey through the myriad connections this keystone species has with the Great Plains.

“Wes Olson generously shares his intricate knowledge of the buffalo, and we are all richer for it. He explains how having more bison walking the land will benefit not just the threatened grasslands ecosystem, but the multitudes of birds, bugs, plants, and animals who need the buffalo,” says filmmaker Tasha Hubbard (Singing Back the Buffalo). “He also acknowledges the connection between the buffalo and Indigenous people but respectfully leaves space for Leroy Little Bear to tell of Indigenous Peoples’ special relationship with the buffalo.”

GET THE BOOK

Owl’s Nest Books (Calgary) | Calgary Public Library

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