Clearcuts create housing crisis for woodland creatures

 

In springtime, healthy forests come alive with bird songs and youngsters. The resounding trills, twitters, howls and hoots of their breeding season are inspired by love and serve notice of an occupied territory.

Harvesting forests for quick money completely vapourizes their habitats for wildlife. With human populations approaching eight billion, rising consumer demand for forest products is exceeding tree growth rates. It’s a race to the bottom. Mark Carney, the former Governor of the Bank of Canada, states that we “are trading the planet for profit.” With their ability to sequester vast amounts of carbon dioxide, trees are a major defense against climate change. Yet this fact is disputed and ignored.

Contractors who adhere to long-term forest management plans that make ecological sense have to offer smaller amounts of annual income to landowners. Clear-cutters of forests can offer larger sums as quick money to landowners. If you own a healthy Maritime forest, it’s likely a target for forest liquidators.

Quebec, New Brunswick and Nova Scotia governments have traditionally awarded logging rights to pulp and sawmill companies by way of leases on public (Crown) lands. There are a dwindling number of mature Crown land stands for lumber, pulp, chips and biomass. Overharvesting by clear-cutting, combined with excessive herbicide use and monoculture planting, eliminates ground cover plants that wildlife uses, and promotes softwoods by eliminating hardwood competition.

The use of mature public forest stands to produce value-added commodities such as hardwood flooring and maple syrup tends to be ignored by the Nova Scotia and New Brunswick governments. Chris and Anna Hutchinson own Hutchinson Acres, a maple sugar bush near Lake Paul, south of Berwick, Nova Scotia. Their operation encompasses 900 acres and more than 60,000 taps, enabling them to produce more than 75,000 litres of syrup annually. There is more Crown land adjoining their sugar bush containing mature sugar maple stands. The Hutchinsons attempted to obtain a Crown land lease from the provincial Department of Lands and Forestry to expand their maple syrup operation. But the provincial government would only offer a lease to harvest it. 

 

Refugees search out healthy forests

The Hutchinsons’ mature forest site has become a “last resort” for forest wildlife species that require older tree habitats, hollow trees and denning logs. By their count, three pine martens, three goshawk pairs and fishers have crowded into their mature hardwood forest. Pine martens and fishers need hollow trees for denning.

This phenomenon of wildlife relocating into remnant habitats after their eviction by clear-cutting is happening all over Atlantic Canada and beyond. Ecologically-healthy forests are rare. Habitats built for wildlife will soon be crowded with wild forest creatures rendered homeless by large clear-cuts. The evicted will invade the territorial boundaries of established wildlife residents. Battles erupt. The displaced creatures usually lose.

 
Hawks and many other mammals and bird species require mature forest habitats for survival.

Waterways vulnerable to forest plundering

I began restoring a forest and its waterway in 1975. On a wet spring day in 2007, the roar of a forwarder (a log carrier) stuck in a brook that drained onto my property signaled the beginning of a four-month-long clear-cut. The contractor placed creosoted beams in the brook to improve the crossing. As the clear-cut grew, a sea of silt spiced with creosote began migrating downhill with every heavy rain, into
a larger stream on my property. The contractor harvested within nine metres of the brook instead of leaving the required 20-metre buffer. Many trees near my property line subsequently blew down. Organic soil nutrients, newly exposed by the harvest, flushed downstream. Silt soon sealed off the stream bottom and its aquatic life, and began infilling the ponds.

The first pond was transformed into a mud wallow. I paid for a government permit and hired an excavator in an attempt to dig it out. Its bucket could stir, but not remove, the stuff. A larger pond was substantially infilled with our neighbour’s soil.

Tonnes of organic matter and silt finally reached the quiet water of the harbour, where it settled to the bottom, burying a mooring I had there. Fifteen years later, soil from that clear-cut is still leaching into the stream, to its detriment.

Before the clear-cut, water from the forest continued to drain slowly into the brook during dry spells, moderating water levels in the woodland soils and the stream. Now, the flushing effects of rain over the newly exposed earth caused brook water levels to flash high, gouging and eroding its banks. During dry spells the brook dried up, no longer a sanctuary for aquatic life.

 

Environmental laws rarely enforced

The contractor knew about an active goshawk nest on that property. Goshawks were a species at risk. Yet the contractor cut down the tree, with young in the nest.

I contacted the local offices of the NS departments of environment and natural resources, the provincial ombudsman, and the federal department of fisheries and oceans, regarding many violations under several acts. The contractor was never charged.

The goshawk pair spent the balance of the summer constructing a new nest in a maple on my property. The following winter, though, a bald eagle pair built a new nest close by. The goshawks became agitated whenever the eagles flew over the next spring. At the time barred owls and sharp-shinned hawks were also nesting in the same vicinity. I began to find emaciated young goshawk carcasses in the late summer. 

To summarize, large-scale forest clearing can crowd too many mammals and birds onto one remaining forest property, with insufficient food and habitats to sustain them all.

The nutrient ability of Maritime woodlands to sustain life has been diminished by successive harvests that began in the 1700s.

According to historical records, in Nova Scotia, most forested lands have undergone five wood removals. Nutrients important for tree growth, like nitrogen, calcium and phosphates used to be recycled when stands of trees fell down and slowly decomposed, and new trees appeared.

Now the wood and the nutrients are trucked off-site.

Impoverished soils are unable to sustain the healthy food chains that many forest wildlife species need for survival. Mature habitats that fulfil their feeding, nesting, denning, shelter, and water requirements are rapidly disappearing.

 

Elder trees essential

Many migratory birds arrive seeking mature forests. Tall trees add an important vertical dimension to their habitats. 

Some spend most of their time foraging in the upper portion of the tree canopies. These species include golden-crowned kinglets, blackburnian warblers, olive-sided flycatchers, and pine grosbeaks.

In the middle layer of the canopy one can see hairy woodpeckers, red-breasted nuthatches, and ruby-crowned kinglets gleaning food items and building nests.

The lower third of the forest is where brown creepers, Swainson’s thrushes, red-eyed vireos, mourning doves and robins spend time.

 

No place to call home?

Many forest animals, including flying squirrels, bats, otters, mink, fishers and marten, and year-round residents like pileated woodpeckers, barred owls, wood frogs and salamanders need mature forests to produce the standing hollow trees and fallen logs that they use for food and shelter.

Nature doesn’t waste. Dead trees feed a young forest and food chains. The current industry standard of harvesting every forty years or less simply means that mature forest characteristics and tree species required by a host of mammals, birds and lichens never develop. Dead trees and denning logs are gone.

If you care for wild things, let your forest have elder trees. Allowing some to die raises hope for the future. Leave them, standing or fallen.

You can help nature by preventing the spring and summer singing season from becoming a silent season.