Recently I attended a lecture about the state of the Vancouver Island marmot given by the leading expert on the subject, “Mr. Marmot,” aka Dr. Andrew Bryant. He had been invited to speak to University of Victoria environmental restoration students. About half of Dr. Bryant’s power-point presentation outlined the historyof the marmots, which was pretty sketchy until scientists first began seriously studying the animals around 1974.
Prior to that there is an enormous crater in the timeline between the 15,000-year-old bones found in a north-island cave, and a 1920s hunter’s account of ‘catching a brace of marmot’ at the top of the Beaufort Range behind Qualicum Beach. Bryant has been piecing together a picture of Vancouver Island’s pre-logging natural history, which once featured the large, fuzzy rodent colonies at the top of nearly all of the island’s central mountain ranges. Perhaps that old hunter bagged the last marmots in the Beauforts though, as the shrill squeak of the marmot no longer reverberates through those parts. Nor through just about any of their historic alpine colonies. It has been replaced by the ubiquitous snarl of the chainsaw.
Dr. Bryant explained that before the 1950s, very little of the Douglas fir forest which adorned the mountain ranges behind Nanaimo had been logged. One might wonder why, given the proximity of the magnificent stands of fir forests to the city, forests which once covered more than 20% of Vancouver Island. Perhaps Nanaimo’s booming century of coal, beginning in the 1850s had relegated logging to a sideshow. Perhaps the timber barons who had acquired pretty much the entire fir ecosystem in the notorious E & N Railway transaction were too busy mowing down the stupendous trees of the Cowichan valley. Those famous fir groves were once taller than the California redwoods, but alas, the American logging giant, Weyerhaeuser, clearcut the final tract of primaeval forest in the valley just last year, when it mowed down the headwaters of the Summit-Dales coho salmon-spawning stream. Today more than 97% of the island’s primaeval Douglas fir forest has been exterminated. There are no more marmots left in the mountains above the Cowichan Valley now either, with the last few ‘winking out’ just last year.
Drinking Watersheds
Perhaps it was the Nanaimo community drinking-watershed, which covers nearly 300 square kilometres of forestlands behind the city, which held the loggers back. Community drinking-watersheds were off limits to logging prior to 1952. After that, the management and responsibility of BC drinking-watersheds was wrestled away from the Ministry of Health, and into the aegis of the Ministry of Forests (MOF). This accomplished, clearcutting immediately began and today after 50 years, virtually the entire community watershed has been roaded and gutted of its trees.
Bryant describes the area as having amongst the highest density of road per hectare of forestland anywhere in the province. Even the MOF has no sway over what happens on these ‘private lands,’ where even the gutless public land logging standards don’t apply. Weyerhaeuser, the private owner, continues spewing semi-truckloads of US-imported chemical fertilizers annually onto their clearcut tree-plantations in there. Green Mountain, the summit of Nanaimo’s watershed, had the largest population of wild marmots with more than 25 animals as recently as 2001. It’s over for the Green Mountain marmot colonies now. They’ve all gone extinct, this year.
Predator Problems
Dr. Bryant then moved on to the predator problem. Through radio-telemetry, he has been tracking the remaining 25 or so wild marmots by surgically implanting a sending unit under the skin of their chests. By this method he has now been convinced that predation is the major cause of the demise of the marmots. Wolves, cougars and Golden eagles are the ‘culprits’ responsible, and they do the bulk of their damage every August, “when the marmots are fat and lie around lazily on the rocks, sunning themselves.” Recently, a cougar was observed licking its chops one morning in the same alpine meadow where only the previous day several reintroduced marmots had frolicked.
Bryant insists that the wolf and cougar cull, now being conducted by Vancouver Island sport-hunters at the request of the Ministry of Water, Land and Air Protection, isn’t about the marmots anyway, but rather, it’s about the Columbian black-tail deer, whose populations are down 70% from a decade ago.
These deer declines have been clearly and scientifically linked to the loss of forested habitat. For example, back in 1998, the Integrated Wildlife and Intensive Forestry Research (IWIFR) program, was supported by then MacMillan Bloedel, then Ministry of Environment, Lands and Parks, and the Ministry of Forests who all worked together to set aside deer habitat in the area. Four separate 100 hectare patches of south-facing old-growth forest were preserved for critical winter range habitat for the local deer, right inside the Nanaimo community drinking-watershed. In 1999 Weyerhaeuser USA swallowed up the Canadian logging giant, MacBlo, which had just that very year shocked the province by proclaiming that the company would voluntarily refrain from clearcutting, the past and present provincial forestry status-quo. The ink was barely dry on the Mac/Blo acquisition papers when Weyerhaeuser moved into the Nanaimo watershed and clearcut all four of the proposed deer habitat refuges right to the last tree.
Then “the tree-growing company” constructed a road directly into the Haley Lake bowl and started clearcutting. The bowl had earlier been set aside as a refuge for the protection of the marmot colonies in the area. Those colonies are now all toast. Not even the marmots Dr. Bryant re-introduced there have survived.
Raw log Exports
This is how Weyerhaeuser manages for wildlife. Their sidekick, TimberWest, BC’s largest private land-owner which exports more than a million cubic metres of raw logs annually out of marmot habitat, is busily chewing away at the forests on the other side of Green Mountain. The two corporations are apparently guided by an identical management plan. As they clear off the old-growth forests near the top of the mountain, simultaneously, they are mowing down the 50-year old second growth at the bottom, thereby perpetuating their greedy vision, and its consequences for wildlife, into the future. They’ve each made a basic investment in Greenwash to stave off their direct responsibility for the extinctions, throwing a few bucks at the Marmot Recovery Foundation’s captive breeding program, while stripping millions in timber off the mountain.
With giant logging corporations as the project’s major financiers, it’s clear why there is absolutely no marmot habitat preservation or restoration project whatsoever on the books. Dr. Bryant is very adamant that stopping the logging today will have no effect on the present day emergency facing the marmots. “What can I do when the companies ask me to show them how not logging will help the marmots today?” he asks.
That may be the case for the short term, but what of the future? Can Bryant’s laboratory reintroductions be protected from predators in a perpetually denuded landscape? It’s obvious to anyone who looks that predation is the symptom, while industrial clearcutting is the disease. Let there be an immediate moratorium on any more logging in marmot habitat, which includes the forested valleys between their mountaintop colonies. If the marmot populations ever stabilize, perhaps we can examine kinder, gentler, roadless logging methods.
Let Weyerhaeuser and TimberWest pay now to debuild all those miles of predator-access roads and get them rehabilitated back to forest! Let them fund a comprehensive study now to determine the state of the island’s magnificent predators! Make them pay now to restore those devastated forests so that the balance of nature can be reestablished! Let them do it now before it’s too late, because every Vancouver Islander knows what giant logging corporations do once they cut themselves out of wood.
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[From WS November/December 2003]
