November 2007
Canada's Zootopia
The howling starts before daybreak, and it is prototypical horror-movie stuff: all throaty aroooooooooooo's and spine-tingling echoes. I lay frozen in my sleeping bag for a moment, suspended between dreaming and awake. Then I yank on a fleece jacket and step quietly above deck on the Achiever, the research vessel of the Raincoast Conservation Society, a Vancouver Island-based nonprofit that has been working to preserve the rich, isolated Great Bear Rainforest for the past 17 years. Around here, on the rugged islands off the wild western coast of mainland British Columbia, the gray wolves are what scientists call "Old World"—essentially the ur-wolf of all the species that eventually made their way to Asia and Europe. These coastal gray wolves are of a distinct genetic pool, and they are elusive.
In the low morning light, four, and then five coastal wolves are frolicking on the beach a few hundred yards from where we are anchored. The pups jump up and down while the older, bigger wolves, stretched out on their sides, offer their flanks as trampolines. When they start to howl again, answering calls from the rest of the pack deep in the forest, the sound reverberates through the canyon.
"Sounds like a lot more than five wolves, doesn't it?" asks Brian Falconer, Raincoast's director of marine operations and the Achiever's captain. He grins, looking every inch the grizzled mariner, and hands me a pair of binoculars so I can take a closer look at the canines.
Along with grizzly, black, and white Kermode bears—or "spirit bears," a unique, white-furred genetic variety of black bear native to the area—wolves are the alpha predators that help make this stretch of coastal temperate rainforest so special. The Great Bear Rainforest is one of the largest contiguous tracts of temperate rainforest left in the world: a whopping 15.5 million acres on the mainland coast, including islands running between Vancouver Island and the Alaskan panhandle, a striking meeting of terrestrial and marine environments, with glassy fjords, steep mountain peaks, towering trees, and thousands of salmon streams upon which the entire ecosystem is dependent.
All this has cast a lure for Jane Whitney, the owner of Canmore, Alberta-based outfitter Whitney & Smith who has been leading kayak expeditions to far-flung places like Patagonia and the High Arctic for 20 years. Along with W&S guide Bob Saunders, who paddled the Great Bear two years ago, I've joined Whitney on a week-long exploratory kayak mission along this epic coast; the outfitter's new Great Bear trips start this September, to coincide with the seasonal salmon runs. But the outfitter is motivated by more than postcard-ready scenery. In February 2006, an agreement signed by the B.C. provincial government hailed worldwide as a landmark piece of conservation would protect a third of the rainforest from logging, implement "lighter touch" timber practices with Ecosystem Based Management (EBM) in the rest of the region before any logging began, and involve First Nations in the conservation management of their traditional lands. But more than a year and a half later, logging has already begun in earnest, EBM practices have yet to be defined, and much of the Great Bear is still open to clearcutting, sport hunting, fish farming, oil drilling, and mining.
"It is a stunningly beautiful area, but we don't want to just bring people in for nice pictures and then get out," says Whitney. "Practicing environmental stewardship is how we travel, and we need to raise the baseline awareness of how fragile this place really is, from the salmon on up. The bears, the wolves, everything works the way it does only if it's in check—things like logging and overfishing throw that whole delicate system off."
After the wolves head back into the trees, Whitney, Falconer, Saunders, and I drop into two double sea kayaks and paddle quietly towards the shore. At the mouth of a river adjacent to the beach, the water roils with salmon-chums and pinks swimming ferociously, muscling over rocks. A massive juvenile bald eagle alights nearby, its electric-yellow feet and black talons practically seizing the nose of my boat, and as we float by, a wolf comes back out of the woods, entranced by the movement of the other kayak as it drifts past. Though there's a lot to see, the sounds are just as vivid, resonating together in symphony: flicking fish tails, eagle calls, the wind rustling through the treetops, a pileated woodpecker hammering away in the distance.
Later in the day, on nearby Pooley Island, we come upon a helicopter logging operation. Cedars are big business in the B.C. rainforest, and in the Great Bear their lives can span more than 2,000 years. We watch in silence as a chopper swoops in and cherry-picks old-growth cedars from the hillside and, in the same motion, drops them into the water with a heavy splash. The symphony pauses, interrupted.
Great Bear is a challenging place to paddle, as distances between islands are large, weather is unpredictable, and there aren't many sandy beaches upon which to set up easy camp. But the rewards are clear from day one, when humpback whales spout and surface in the mirrored waters alongside the Achiever. Starting from Bella Bella and heading north, we've hitched a ride aboard the vessel for a few days, using it as a mothership for our kayak explorations and as a floating classroom with teachers such as Paul Paquet, Raincoast's senior science adviser and the leading large carnivore biologist in North America. Eventually, we'll abandon ship and make our way to the tiny community of Hartley Bay, to meet with Gitga'at Nation members who have worked hard to protect their ancestral lands. Raincoast has built its reputation on scientific field research, but also on solid working relationships with the area's First Nations.
The night after our wolf sighting, we rendezvous with Raincoast co-founder Ian McAllister and his trimaran in the Bay of Plenty, where he is conducting wolf and salmon surveys and finishing a new photo book on the Great Bear Rainforest, one that shows life from the wolf's perspective. In 1999, the Great Bear Rainforest was declared the "number one environmental issue on the planet" by the Canadian edition of Time, and McAllister and his wife Karen were named on the magazine's list of "Environmental Leaders for the 21st Century." McAllister's first book, The Great Bear Rainforest: Canada's Forgotten Coast, focused on various species of bears and featured a forward by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., who wrote, "I hope this book will help awaken people to the importance of this last magnificent stand of the great North American rainforest."
I take a double kayak from the Achiever and paddle over to pick up McAllister from his trimaran for a survey around the bay and up Pyne Creek, considered a benchmark system for chum salmon. The mist hangs in the early light, and a bald eagle peers down at us from its perch atop a 300-foot-tall Sitka spruce, looking like a giant Christmas tree ornament.
McAllister is a boyish 37 years old, with freckled lips and brown hair. He points out the eagle with a chuckle, then notes another 13 birds sitting in a single adjacent tree—"a good sign," he says. Though casual and friendly, his manner quickly grows intense when he's asked to speak about the issues that have become his life's work.
"You can draw lines around these areas and color them green, but the reality is that there's industrial activity inside," says McAllister. "That's not conservation. If we're trying to protect the wildlife here, then that should be the driving factor in management of this area."
A big part of the Great Bear deal included financing to ensure that logging practices would change significantly according to science-guided conservation. Major NGOs led by the Nature Conservancy worked to convince donors and foundations to pledge $53 million to the cause, with the understanding that every dollar would be matched by the Canadian federal and B.C. provincial governments. McAllister is frustrated by what he sees as an empty agreement.
"If you look at the existing protected areas, it's all chopped up," says McAllister. "Science tells us that large carnivores like bears need large habitat areas to move through, so it's meaningless to parcel out protected land in bits and pieces. And though we need to continue the land protection, the other big issue is protecting the marine areas around them from fish farms and oil and gas drilling—a new pipeline already in the works. In this coastal ecosystem, which is as much dependent on the sea as it is on the land, that's disastrous."
It's easy to see the connection between land and water in a kayak. As we glide along, everything is at eye-level. Countless seabirds cruise low along the shorelines; salmon carcasses litter the grassy banks of the creek; salmonberry bushes, club moss, and dense, jungly salal creep all the way from the edge of the water to line the deep forest floor. The wolves of the Great Bear region often swim from island to island—sometimes as far as eight miles in open water, according to Paul Paquet. In his research here, he has found that Great Bear wolves eat salmon—on the outer islands as much as 75 percent of the wolf diet is marine-based, the opposite of what it is on the mainland coast. While this comes as somewhat of a revelation to scientists, locals have known it for years. "All the things that we're finding out now about the wildlife here are things that the local First Nations communities have always known, which is somewhat embarrassing," Paquet tells me back at the ship—that the wolves are reliant on fish, that salmon are the basis for the ecosystem, that trees grow bigger and faster in the rainforest's nitrogen-rich salmon-stream areas. "We have learned a lot by working with the First Nations groups, and we need to continue to do so. And we need to present good scientific research that the general public will accept as a basis for advocacy."
Later that afternoon, Whitney and I join McAllister for a sail to the south end of Princess Royal Island, in the heart of the Great Bear; we are the only ones around as far as the eye can see. We hike up to the top of a steep creek and sit under cedars dripping with lichen to watch for bears, and it occurs to me that all the trails that we're walking on are bear trails, not people trails. And that's when we hear the wolves call again.
"That," Whitney says, "is what true wilderness is."
Two days later, as we bid goodbye to the Achiever and kayak north toward the Gitga'at community of Hartley Bay, the final stop on our expedition. The water is glassy and calm, the clouds high, the sun beaming low and horizontally across our bows. We set up camp on a small islet at the mouth of Surf Inlet, surrounded by a dense warren of red cedars, spruce, and hemlock. In the morning, we paddle 10 miles north on the west coast of Princess Royal Island. Along the way, we see humpbacks, silvery herring, loons, and marbled murrelets. Black cormorants circle curiously over us.
As commercial fishing declines in Hartley Bay, a tiny community of 200, local leaders like Marven Robinson—a Gitga'at guide who meets us for a day of bear-watching—and the Gitga'at Development Corporation are attempting to make ecotourism a sustainable business. The King Pacific Lodge, a luxury floating sport-fishing retreat that anchors in Barnard Harbour every summer, was the first to sign a groundbreaking protocol agreement with the Gitga'at people, setting a precedent for relationships between businesses and First Nations tribes. The lodge has been important as an employer, hiring Gitga'at residents as boat pilots and guides—jobs where local knowledge is key. Robinson says that the lodge acknowledges indigenous tribes as joint stewards of the land, adhering to rules of conduct in the wilderness, paying conservation fees, and helping to collect data on the wildlife they observe. That information, he adds, is vital in the fight against clearcutting and oil and gas exploration.
Robinson and others have built a system of cabins on the Gitga'at reservation, and will begin to rent them out this year to kayakers and other tourists who come visit the area. He also has a plan to set up a web-cam in the coming season on one of the creeks, to monitor bear, salmon, and wolf activity. "It will be a new and different kind of viewing, because you're not going to impact them the way you would if you're out here with them. And kids all over will be able to see how the animals act without people around."
The idea of all parties in balance is the reason that this rainforest has persisted for as long as it has. And on Whitney's trip, the varied views I get of the rainforest mirror the distinct perspectives that have to be married for a sustainable vision of the Great Bear Rainforest to come into being.
"We could have cut a deal a long time ago on this coast, but it was always meant to be a model," says McAllister of Raincoast. As of press time, he has officially left the organization, but he continues to work on issues surrounding the Great Bear. "There aren't many places in the world that are so vast, with such incredible biodiversity, with such insular, distinct species unique to the area, and with indigenous communities living in their traditional home sites. We are a wealthy country, so if anyone could, we could do it. But right now, it's more like a dog's breakfast—it's a mess of too many people wanting to take. It's not a model we want to pass on to anyone."
ADVENTURE GUIDE: THE GREAT BEAR RAINFOREST
KAYAKING
Whitney & Smith Legendary Expeditions (800-713-6660; www.legendaryex.com) works with Raincoast to offer two-week kayaking tours of the Great Bear Rainforest; the 2008 trip departure is September 13-27, $4,235.
RESOURCES
For more information on the Great Bear Rainforest, contact the Raincoast Conservation Society (877-655-1229; www.raincoast.org). For tourism experiences with the Gitga'at Nation, including joining a traditional feast, kayaking, hiking, and bear watching tours, contact the Gitga'at Development Corporation (250-841-2602; www.gitgaat.net). Ian McAllister's new book, The Last Wild Wolves: Ghosts of the Rain Forest, has just been published by the University of California Press.
