This story was originally published by Canada’s National Observer and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
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story → publish → collaboration
Elijah Washington pushes through wet ferns and branches left by logging, crossing the mossy forest floor on Haida Gwaii.
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Washington → push → Gwaii
He kneels beside a massive western red cedar stump.
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He → kneel → stump
The cedar was felled decades ago during the industrial logging boom that cleared swaths of old growth across the archipelago off British Columbia’s north coast, leaving a hollow, decaying stump.
Its top has since been trimmed with a chainsaw to fit a plywood sheet, capped with weather-resistant roofing material and covered with thick green moss collected from the surrounding woods.
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top → fell → woods
Near the base, an opening roughly the width of Washington’s safety helmet leads into a sheltered hollow lined with moss.
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opening → lead → moss
“You just want it to be small enough for a mother bear to move in,” said Washington, a stewardship technician with the Haida Nation.
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Washington → want → Nation
“So it’s got to be just right, just like the Goldilocks, [the entrance] can’t be too big, can’t be too wide.
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entrance → get → Goldilocks
The retrofitted stump is one of seven the Council of the Haida Nation had modified this summer to provide winter shelter for the coastal black bear, known in the Haida language as taan.
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Council → retrofit → taan
Found nowhere else in the world, this subspecies of black bear is among the largest in North America.
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subspecies → find → America
A bear’s winter den may bring to mind a rocky cave, but coastal black bears in BC rely heavily on large old-growth trees and the hollow logs and stumps they leave behind.
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they → bring → trees
Decades of logging have removed many of those shelters, however—and the younger trees growing in their place have yet to develop hollows large enough for bears, said Helen Davis, a wildlife biologist working with the Haida Nation to identify and restore bear dens.
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Davis → remove → dens
Cubs are born weighing about a pound, with their eyes still closed.
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eyes → bear → pound
They need a dry, protected place where their mothers can nurse them through the winter, and they stay there for up to 100 days.
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they → need → days
“The only place where bears can have babies is in a den,” Davis said.
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Davis → have → den
The old trees bears need for shelter are also sought-after by the logging industry.
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bears → need → industry
BC has expanded protections and temporary logging pauses, but old-growth harvesting continues.
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harvesting → expand → protections
In August, BC Forests Minister Ravi Parmar said stopping it altogether would shut down the sector.
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stopping → say → sector
Davis has heard that argument for years.
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Davis → hear → years
People repeatedly suggested making shelters from melted tires or culverts instead of leaving old-growth trees for bears.
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People → suggest → bears
“People would just sort of throw that out somewhat frequently and since nobody seems to want to conserve old growth for them, I was like, ‘Well, fine, then let’s see if we can build them,’” Davis said.
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Davis → throw → them
Now, the first-of-its kind program could set a model for bear conservation worldwide.
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program → set → conservation
But in providing an alternative to simply protecting old-growth, some worry building dens gives an easy excuse for logging to continue without pause.
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logging → provide → pause
Lisa White, a councillor with the Old Massett Village Council, said the sight of plywood laid over old-growth stumps was difficult to bear.
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sight → say → stumps
“I actually cried,” she said.
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she → cry → ?
The plywood roofs, she said, showed how deeply the land had been damaged: bears now needed people to help provide their shelter.
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bears → say → shelter
White said Haida people had needed wood long before commercial logging.
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people → say → logging
Thousands used it for homes, canoes, clothing and heat, yet the forests appeared virtually untouched to the first newcomers, she said.
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she → use → newcomers
People selected individual trees, used them fully and left the surrounding forest standing, so animals could continue living there, including northern goshawks, which are at risk of disappearing from the islands.
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which → select → islands
The Haida also were known to pull entire planks from trees without felling them, leaving the tree standing.
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Haida → know → tree
White worries about how well the second-growth forests surrounding the modified dens will hold up through winter.
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forests → worry → winter
She has seen extensive blowdown in those stands and is concerned about placing shelters among trees vulnerable to the islands’ storms.
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She → see → storms
“It’s also the forest around them that needs to be strong,” she said.
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she → ’ → them
Sometimes, loggers discover a bear den only after cutting into it.
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loggers → discover → it
Davis, who has been studying coastal black bear dens since the early 1990s, recalled stories from loggers: “They cut into trees and a bear popped out—or worse, they cut into a bear.”
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they → study → bear
Those accounts led to a three-year provincial government study with forestry company Canfor to investigate whether black bears needed large trees for dens.
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bears → lead → dens
Davis tracked radio-collared bears to roughly 65 dens; her field research confirmed that bears were almost entirely dependent on large, hollow old-growth trees and that second-growth forests left them with virtually no options.
At the time, despite the rate of loss of old-growth forest in the province, the research didn’t set off alarm bells.
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research → track → bells
I don’t think they thought they’d run out of old growth,” she said.
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she → think → growth
But building a den meant manually crafting what a living cedar takes centuries to create.
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cedar → build → centuries
As a cedar grows, fungi can slowly rot the wood at its centre, creating a hollow large enough for a bear while the tree remains alive.
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tree → grow → bear
Forests managed for timber are often logged again before those chambers develop, so the new trees do not replace the dens lost when old growth is cut.
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growth → manage → dens
…and 60 more, not listed.
The Aporia
