I could give increasingly accurate ocular estimates for portions of a stand. By examining aerial photographs, I could then extend the estimate to a whole watershed. I was unaware that a mix of forest and open spaces was being burned forever into my psyche.
When I was transferred at middle age to Ontario, I initially felt uncomfortable in the boreal forest of this new place, and that bothered and puzzled me. More than ever, I was enjoying being on large clear-cuts, and one day, during my second year in my new job, while kneeling and examining some newly planted spruce seedlings, a sudden realization came that I was missing the open spaces that I so enjoyed.
I, a forester, was embarrassingly claustrophobic in Ontario’s relatively unbroken forest, where even the fens and some of the muskegs tend to be treed. I realized that the clear-cutand burned areas had become surrogate fens, muskegs, and rock barrens, and views from them were now adding to my understanding of the local standing forest. I was also appreciating clear-cutsfor their open space and I could now even see their beauty.
Clear-cutsand burns, which in my youth had offended me as eyesores, had evolved in my mind into places of wonder and what was initially stark beauty, into increasingly appealing panoramic scenes and smaller scenes of vivid colour and form.
Clear-cutsand burns became subjects of my expanding visual-artshobby and small business. I admit that it takes a stretch to see beauty during the first couple of years after any forest disturbance, but by the third year, the new growth of the remaining trees is accompanied by flowering herbs and shrubs, and a wider variety of mushrooms begins to appear.
As a student, I worked one summer with a scientist who developed one of Canada’s earliest ecological forest-siteclassifications, and with him examined several hundred small sample plots of the forest floor.5Throughout my career, I used similar plots from which to gather information that enabled objective analysis of various forest dynamics. Forest ecology didn’t become my life vocation but I did learn that the forest is more than just its trees.
The number of species of trees in a stand is a small fraction of the total number of plant species. During much of my time in the forest, I have been on my knees and even lying face-downwhile examining the diversity of life on a few square centimetres of forest floor. Photographing or drawing, collecting, and identifying as many plant species as I could find was an early hobby, and as a forester I often recorded and collected for my learning and research, and research by others.
I have accumulated a large library of photographs of fascinating rock patterns and colours, lichens on rocks and wood, mosses, ferns and grasses, dew-coveredspider webs, intriguing arrangements of rotting wood, bark, and fungus, and, yes, wildlife, including insects, birds, frogs, snakes, turtles, hares, grouse, porcupines, foxes, lynx, wolves, coyotes, bears, moose, and caribou — practically all in clear-cutsand burns of differing ages. Yes, beauty can be found anywhere but it takes the right attitude and focus on the here and now — and it helps to forget our biases.
Plants are the base of all other boreal forest life, providing food and shelter to wildlife, and food, medicine, tools, shelter material, industrial raw material, and spiritual comfort to humans. Additionally, each species performs various functions within its immediate environment as it integrates and competes with its neighbours. Simply put, without plants we can’t continue to exist but they can do quite well without us. Provided we use plants responsibly and work with natural processes when harvesting them, they will continue to sustain our species and our way of life.
We Are Living in an Ever-Changing Forest
I hope to stimulate examination of the forest around us and objective questioning of much of what we currently hold as fact. Please critically question everything that I and others are telling you. I hope that you will seek other sources of information and weigh the “facts” as presented by each of us. We all see the world through the clouded lens of our own experience and too often assume we know best. The deteriorating condition of our world is proof that approach has not been good enough.
The internet has numerous scientific articles that are easily accessed. Do an online search for “black spruce” to see what information is available about that species. You will discover in your reading that our knowledge of trees and the forest is limited, but as with other subjects, we are rapidly adding to what we already understand, and in some cases altering and even rejecting what we previously thought to be fact. That is how objective science works.
We don’t know everything about the human body, even though for centuries it has been scientifically studied. Consider all of the forest-tree, other-plant, animal, and insect species that together have received only a fraction as much scientific examination and you will understand the vast amount of knowledge that is waiting to be discovered about the boreal forest.
We know that the boreal forest is constantly changing and that sometimes alteration is slow and unnoticed by the casual observer. At other times change is rapid, with hundreds of hectares harvested or even a thousand square kilometres transformed from mature forest into a large, wildfire-blackenedlandscape.
If you own a summer cottage in the bush, think back to when you first saw it or cleared the site for building. Check the photographs that you have taken over the years and observe the change in the forest. I expect it will surprise you that new trees have appeared, some have disappeared, and most have grown without your notice.
Some of us return again and again to our favourite locations in the forest and they always appear the same, but are they? Think of your favourite blueberry patch. It wasn’t always such. Probably only eight to ten years ago it was a mature forest that was burned or harvested. Two to three years after the disturbance, the blueberry plants matured, and since then crops have been variable, with one or two bumper years. Then, last summer, you realized that the developing young trees are shading out the blueberry bushes. Next year, it will be time for you to find another location.
Between high school and forestry graduation, I gained experience at most jobs involved with circa 1950s’ pulpwood harvesting and extraction. I was interested, but skeptical, when some of the oldest loggers said that they were harvesting the same ground for their second time.
In 1949, while accompanying my father as he scaled stump-piledpulpwood (wood cut up and piled where the trees were felled), I was overwhelmed by black flies. He sat me on top of a pile of logs where a breeze kept the pests at bay while he carried out his work within sight of me. In 2000 I returned to the same location with my adult son. The site had again been recently clear-cutand my son obliged me by standing beside a pile of logs near where I had sat on another pile fifty-oneyears earlier.
As a logger for a brief period in 1958, I helped clear-cuta portion of a stand that had been harvested circa 1908. During a visit to the same location in 2011, I was pleased, but no longer surprised, to see that it was ready to be harvested a third time at high commercial volume — and that on Newfoundland’s supposedly poor soils.
Since moving to Ontario, I have examined ground on the former Abitibi-Price’s private and public licensed land, where second clear-cutharvests have occurred. In 2011, I returned to a 1983 black spruce plantation on a former clear-cutwithin the Spruce River FMA. I was so impressed that I surveyed a part of the stand and determined that at only twenty-eightyears since planting it already had as much pulpwood volume per hectare as the average tract that Abitibi-Pricehad harvested in its early clear-cuts.6 For black spruce that is remarkable, especially when one realizes that we have traditionally regarded that species as taking one hundred years to mature in Ontario.
That particular stand was the subject of considerable public and professional criticism as we began taking responsibility for stand renewal. Many viewed our efforts as failures from the start and our credibility was on the line. Then and now, we all had and still have a lot to learn!
A bright and
