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Wild Flora wrote: > The Nova Scotia Nature Trust produced a very nice overview of the > state of Nova Scotia's old growth forests, with particular emphasis on > the impact on wildlife. This is available as a .pdf online at > http://nsnt.ca/pdf/old_growth.pdf > > They estimate that only 0.6% of our forests are more than 100 years > old, which is a generous definition of "old growth." > > Flora > Hi Flora & All, Aug 10, 2007 I read this some weeks ago and now, with an apparent lull in traffic can make a few comments. While there is some truth in much of this 'fact sheet', the degree of distortion is such that 'Lie of the Land' might be a good subtitle. On page one there is a poetic description of a pristine wilderness, OK to a point, but while those forest floor mosses might be moist in mid-summer, if it had rained hard the night before, they would in dry periods be crispy crunch dry. And to cap this picture, brook trout lurk under overhangs. Then we are told that "...all of Nova Scotia was covered with variations of this pristine natural wilderness. That is, before the first settlers arrived and cleared the forests." To blame today's problems on the first settlers, on agriculture or on forestry is a serious distortion, because most of the damage has been done in the last 5 decades. And to use trout as the mine canary, they were common in every Kings Co stream 50 years ago (apart from sections trashed by cattle). I recently went to Woodman Hollow, Kings County, to photograph some old mortar-free stonework and because of what I saw, I decided to write this. Woodman hollow, when I first saw it in about 1946 was reached by a narrow gravel road.The bridge was one-lane and about 5 feet over the brook. Three of us cut alder poles, wound a few feet of green cotton fishing line on the end and in an hour or so had caught a good feed of fat trout within ~100 paces upstream of the bridge. When I next visited in the late 1960s, the road had been widened, the bridge raised and that first hundred paces had been trashed by silt from the new road but above that the stream was healthy (except for a short section that had been pastured many decades previously and had never recovered), narrow with many deep pools, only one short double channel and good fishing. For several years I went there several times a summer. After retirement in 1995 I went back again to fish. The road was by then much wider and higher, about 30' over the brook. Runoff, along the south side of this massive road, had cut a ravine about 8' deep and 8' wide across the sled road that used to provide easy access to the flood plain of the brook and across the flood plain. I fished downstream a bit, caught and released several slinks and mourned the destruction that large machine power to brain power ratios can generate. But 1995 did not prepare me for 2007. Highway runoff has widened and deepened the ravine, to about 10' x 10', as one might expect but the brook upstream is a wreck. There has been huge streamflow instability such that the single channel stream has in many places been replaced by a network of braided channels, much soil and litter of 'islands' swept away and previous rills with clean gravel are beds of stinking water moss. I was so shocked to see this mess that I didn't even think to take a photograph. I don't know what triggered these flash floods. If, as I suspect, it was due to cutting too large an area in too few years [a one-man machine capable of felling, chunking, splitting and loading 60 cord of hardwood firewood a day was rumored to be operating on the easterly watershed about 10 years ago] then the idea of a narrow buffer zone of uncut trees next to a brook is a sick joke. If runoff peaks are too large, due to housing, highways or massive clearcuts on shallow soil then a buffer can only protect the illusion that all is well. It would be simplistic to assign the damage to cutting because, when I first saw this brook in 1946, enough wood had been cut from the westerly watershed to keep a sawmill running for about 6 decades [first a water mill powered by the stream and later a steam mill] and all was fine. Rather than oppose logging one should oppose massive clearcuts that render large fractions of a watershed vulnerable all at one time. Moving on to other statements we read that "Over the past 300 years, most of Nova Scotia has been logged and/or cleared for agriculture." While it is true that most of the good timberland has been cut and much of the good farmland cleared a substantial fraction (at least 1/3 I would guess) is virgin barren, swamp, bog or scrub forest. Some of these barrens may be the end product of too many burns. (Fire was used to rejuvinate game long before Europeans arrived and probably more widely before they arrived than after.) But I suspect most represent the failure of primary succession to create a soil out of polished bedrock. Old forests are great but worship of Old Growth may broadcast the message that 'Young Growth' forests are useless and this is just wrong. Many of the postiive features of Old Growth that are described on page 3 (stream flow stability, soil conservation, nutrient retention) are also characteristic of all forest cover that is more than 20-30 years old, depending upon circumstances. So being logged is not the same as being ruined. Forests grow back, provided they not converted into ticky-tacky residential suburbs with miles of service roads that go nowhere; 4-lane highways, etc. and the significant watershed is not the contrast between old and young but the contrast between cut & paved on the one hand and cut and allowed to grow back on the other. "...species requiring large areas of undisturbed forests, such as bears..." Bears like blueberries, a by-product of logging and burning, and blueberries don't bear fruit in old growth forests. "Bears also need large fallen trees for hibernating." Are we talking our at best small hollow trees and 'honey I shrunk the bears' bears or using fallen trees as a shelter ? I have never seen a bear den; just curious. But I would expect to find them on steep, well drained slopes, dug in under the root foot of a large standing live conifer. "Another significant role of organic matter, such as dead wood, is the storage of water." While finely divided organic matter that has become incorporated into a soil profile will substantially increase water-holding capacity, and coarse litter will conserve moisture by acting as a mulch, dead wood may intercept light and moderate rains and actually decrease the amount of water that reaches the root zone. So unless the soil is deep and can store enough water in spring to last a summer (exceptional soils only) too much dead wood can mean more dead wood. "Twenty-five years ago, Bernard Forsyth, noticed many barred owls in the woods, ...but realized ...(they)...couldn't...reproduce because big trees were scarce in the Valley." "Had the early settlers left some big trees, this situation would not have arisen..." Not to belittle the value of nesting boxes, but I wonder how there were many owls if they had not been able to reproduce.since arrival of the early settlers. Were these very, very Old Growth owls ? We all have better things to do so I will call this e-mail done. Yours truly, Dave Webster, Kentville
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