Connecting the Dots: Forestry Management and Some Implications for Wildlife

Roy L Hales/ Cortes Currents - In the first of a series of articles from Cortes Islands recent Wildlife Coexistence Gathering, Cortes Currents looked at Vancouver Island’s first wildlife coexistence program in the Pacific Rim National Park. The problem at that time was human/bear conflicts. By the time Sabina Leader Mense reached out from Cortes Island, about 2010, WildSafeBC had been dealing with wolves and cougars for more than a decade. 


Bob Hansen, Pacific Rim Coordinator for WildSafeBC, described the wolves' sudden appearance. 


“Up until this point in time, it was bears and nothing but bears.  In 1998/99, the wolves showed up after being missing from our area for  decades.  Their presence was very dramatically felt.  I remember getting a phone call from the local paper in January of 1999,  ‘have you been getting wolf reports?’ I checked our database, and we'd had  six wolf reports since 1972.  I said, 'nope.' Within two weeks it started, the wolves were back.” 

Cortes Currents: Hansen suspects that modern forestry methods may be at least partially responsible for the influx of wolves and cougars into his area. 


Bob Hansen: "Behind the West Coast Trail, and definitely behind Long Beach, there's very extensive areas of large scale clear cuts. Major portions of watersheds were completely cut during the heyday of clear cut logging.  What we learned  through the research project was that the newly cut areas are exceptional deer habitat and support predators for 10 to 15 years, but when that second growth plantation grows up  to a certain age, the canopy closes in. So it goes from being an exceptional deer habitat to the opposite end of the scale.  It's been referred to in the literature as 'ungulate barrens.' We looked at satellite imagery of Vancouver Island with GIS. We colour coded the second growth plantations that were in that state. We had the cut dates and could see really large areas of Vancouver Island are now locked up in that 'ungulate barrens' condition. That condition persists till the stand is about 80 to a hundred years old."

Cortes Currents: Aren’t some of the forest plantations now being cut after 40 to 50 years?  


Bob Hansen: "They have a calculation about where the best cost benefit point is on a plantation. It used to be 80 to a hundred years, but the math has changed. Right now those plantation lands are being cut around 60 years or even as early as 45 years. So there's just no potential for them to become 'old growth' again."


"The predators had to adapt to that reality and were coming into the national park, coming out to the shoreline.  There's old growth there. It supports a low, but consistent, density of deer. It has all of these other prey animals at that interface between the ocean and the forest: deer, raccoon, river otter and seal pups." 


"It's food that they find at that interface between the ocean and the forest.  That was the big missing piece. Something had happened on the larger landscape, and it's still happening." 

"If you apply a different forestry technique to those plantations,  you don't have to let it close off. Wait until they get 80 to 100 years old. You can actually keep sunlight filtering through the canopy as that plantation is growing, by doing commercial thinning and other things.  Also,  there's other silviculture prescriptions that you can use  to help  promote medicinal plants and other values that are important for First Nations."


"There's a lot that could be done with those second growth areas, but it will take investment and a different vision. It's not  just cubic meters of wood,  you have to manage it from a different perspective."


Cortes Currents: With the arrival of the wolves, Hansen and his colleagues were suddenly faced with a whole new set of problems.