Cypress Hills Field Station

The Biology Department manages a small field station located about 65 km SW of Maple Creek, which is in the Southwestern corner of Saskatchewan in the Centre Block of Cypress Hills Inter-Provincial Park (the park straddles the Saskatchewan-Alberta border). The Cypress Hills are a raised upland that was not glaciated in the most recent ice age. They are wetter than the surrounding prairie, and the vegetation is a mixture of fescue grassland and lodgepole pine, white spruce, and trembling aspen forest stands.

The station, first established in the early 1970's, can comfortably accommodate 6 people for periods of weeks or months and up to 20 for short periods of time. It sits on several hundred hectares of land immediately adjacent to the Fort Walsh National Historic site and access to the station is through the Fort's property. The Fort was the first headquarters of Canada's Royal Canadian Mountain Police.

The field station supports both teaching and research activities. Undergraduate students use the station, typically in August, to do course field work. Honours and Graduate students often spend the summer at the field station conducting their own independent research. Dozens of publications and theses have come about from research conducted at the field station. The principal focus of most projects has been animal ecology and behaviour (bats, nightjars, coyotes, moose, elk, beaver) but the varied landscapes on the University property and surrounding area in the Park lends itself to a great variety of studies.