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By Mark Hume, with Photography by Nick Didlick “The dramatic discovery of the century is that the earth, far from being massive, imponderable, and inexhaustible, is small and finite." - Roderick Haig-Brown, 1970
Somewhere between art and cartography falls Map 23 in the Atlas of British Columbia. Based on the work of Dr. V.J. Krajina the map of biogeoclimatic zones portrays the biotic regions of Canada's most diverse province. That map has been overhauled in the past few years, in the process becoming infinitely more complex, as British Columbia's environmental planners seek a more precise guide in their fight to presevere biodiversity. Faced with urban growth and industrial expansion, the government of British Columbia set out about a decade ago to ensure that - while it still had the chance - a representative sample of each ecoregion in the province was set aside.That quest led planners to face some fundamental questions. Like: How many ecoregions are there? Are there a dozen? Fifty? A thousand different regions? The harder the experts looked at ecoregions, the more they found. There once was a time, not so very long ago, when it was a simple matter to decide where a park should be. If there were beautiful mountains, blue lakes and rushing rivers, in a place where people liked to go camping, you could simply draw lines on a map and turn it into a park. But that's not good enough anymore. What ecologists want to do now is not simply protect pretty landscape - they want to protect the species that live there. Ecoregion mapping, then, has become a vital tool is deciding where to establish parks or protected areas. When I first encountered Krajina's map, shortly after the atlas was published in 1979, the world was a much simpler place. The wilderness seemed vast in British Columbia, incomprehensible really. Until I saw it mapped. Krajina's approach struck me as so ingenious that I stared at his map for a long time. Here was a province I had never seen before. The magnificent, almost unbearably vast sweep of B.C. had been captured, ordered and laid out like so many tubes of oil on an artist's easel. From the chaos emerged a landscape divided into 12 biotic zones delineated on the basis of vegetation, fauna, soils, topograpy, and climate. "The zones," explained accompanying text, "can be divided into four formations: Mesothermal; Semi-Arid, Cold Steppe; Microthermal Coniferous Forest and Alpine. The regions within each of the formations vary in temperature, precipitation, and latitude, and, consequently, they vary also in vegetation." That phrasing hit me. "And consequently . . ." It made it seem as if British Columbia's wild, unfathomable biodiversity was part of a well ordered cosmic formula. Looking at Krajina's map I could see for the first time that it was, and it was marvelous to contemplate. There along the west coast of Vancouver Island, where I'd hiked under towering trees and slept on beds of sphagnum moss, searching rivers for steelhead, the landscape was colored a rich, wet green. That is the Coastal western hemlock zone (CHem), the most humid in the province. Beside that lay the Subalpine mountain hemlock region, coded powder blue by Krajina, and I saw that it matched precisely to Forbidden Plateau, where I'd hiked up through snowfields, stunted timber and beds of wild flowers, to catch mountain trout, before dropping to the deep blue Coastal Douglas-fir zone that cloaked the eastern slope of the Island's mountains, where I'd found cutthroat in deeply shaded lakes. Up the Fraser River Valley I could see how the landscape changed abruptly from blue to the moss green of Interior Douglas-fir, just above Hope on the Trans-Canada, and then, plunging into the oven-like valley of the Thompson River, how it turned a burnt orange: the Ponderosa pine - bunchgrass zone, where I equate the smell of sagebrush to summer trout and fall steelhead. Lying on my back in a pool of shade cast by a Juniper tree, one summer, I recall smelling the sweet scent of sage and feeling the heat of the sun in the ground. I opened my eyes and saw the protective spread of the branches above me. There is no Juniper tree zone on the biogeoclimatic map. But there it was, and I was in it. In the crook of a branch above me rested a Common Nighthawk, its long, slender wings folded back primly over a slightly forked tail. It was grayish-brown, as if made from the ash of a campfire, with bars of white on its primaries and its eyes, like mine, opened and closed in drowsiness. Wayne Campbell, British Columbia's leading ornithologist and one of the authors of The Birds of British Columbia, would not have been surprised if I'd stumbled on a species nesting where it was not supposed to. Maps and lines are human creations and nature has rules that we are still struggling to understand. "Look at the Eared Grebe," he says. "It is found in little pockets in the Cariboo-Chilcotin plateau. You turn around - and there is a huge population in the Peace River!" The Cariboo aspen-lodgepole pine zone where oen expects to find Eared Grebes, is separated by a huge area of Sub-boreal spruce and Subalpine Engelmann spruce from the great Boreal white and black spruce forest of the Peace River. But the Eared Grebe, apparently, sees a similarity that does not show up on the government's color coded maps.So a breeding colony pops up where the map says it shouldn't be. "Then there is Towsend's warbler. For some reason they are hatching a week to two weeks earlier in the Queen Charlottes than anywhere else in the province. What's going on?" asks Campbell. "Now we think they are only a sub-population, found only in the Charlottes and southern Alaska. So, for this one bird, we have to write management plans for the Queen Charlottes, Vancouver Island and the Interior." There are few neat lines for Mr. Campbell, for he no sooner draws a map than he is forced to revise it. One summer he got out of a helicopter on a mountain peak that was blasted by wind and bare of almost any vegetation. He looked at his feet and found a bird's nest. It was a variety of sparrow that shouldn't have been there in the Alpine tundra, color coded the gray of old spring snow; it should have been down in the green valley below. When he returned to his Victoria home from that trip a colleague called, to say he'd just discovered a breeding population of salamanders in the South Okanagan Valley that nobody knew about. During more than 30 years working as an ornithologist in British Columbia, Mr. Campbell has learned not to be surprised by the unexpected. "For the next 100 years we are still going to be discovering things," he says. "We still don't have our inventory down in this province. We don't know what we have. Basic inventory is lacking. And we just don't have enough biologists around to do the job." But what we do know is that British Columbia is a blessed place. "The province is more ecologically diverse than any other province or territory in the country," says Mr. Campbell. "We have more higher vertebrates. The next closest is Ontario and we beat them by 80 or 90 species. That's remarkable. It's amazing, when you think about it. "We have so many micro-habitats . . everything from glaciers to offshore habitats. Wetlands, rivers, lakes, streams, mountains - nobody comes close to having such a diverse habitat and the more diverse the habitat, the more animals you'll find." And find animals they do in British Columbia. The count to date: 448 species of birds, 143 species of mammals, 63 species of fish, 19 species of reptiles and 20 species of amphibians. The province is home to three-quarters of Canada's mammal species, including 75% of the world's Stone sheep; 60% of the world's mountain goats; 60% of the world's trumpeter swans and blue grouse; 25% of the world's grizzly bears and 25% of the world's bald eagles.
What percentage of the world's wild steelhead are found there? What percentage of searun cutthroat? We don't know. Those counts haven't been made yet. But we do know that an increasing number of new fish species are invading - including Atlantic salmon, introduced by salmon farmers and now spawning in some West Coast rivers. At the same time many stocks of wild salmon have become extinct in specific streams, because of over-fishing, and habitat damage, and stocks of wild cutthroat are being genetically compromised by interbreeding with introduced rainbow trout. For good reason, environmentalists worry that, despite all its riches, British Columbian may eventually lose its rich biodivesity. With the forests being liquidated and population squeezing into the most hospitable regions, habitat is being depleted at a remarkable rate. Saving some of all that is left is a daunting task, that will require precise maps. When Krajina drew his map there were 12 biogeoclimatic zones, plus glaciers. When the B.C. Ministry of Parks published Preserving Our Living Legacy, Parks Plan 90, it broke the province into 59 landscapes. Since then, Dennis Demarchi, a habitat classification specialist for the Ministry of Environment, has revised the map again -to include 86 distinct eco regions. Mapping the province was a challenge. "If you go from the top down you end up with chaos," he says, explaining the process of bringing order to nature by breaking it into definable bits. "You go from four units in B.C. and you end up - with millions! But if you start with millions, you can work your way up. That's finding order. That's the universe." So Mr. Demarchi worked up to 86 and decided that was a good balance between chaos and human order. He needed enough categories to represent the major ecoregions - but not so many that it would leave people gasping for air. "Some things will be easy (to protect), but some won't," said Mr. Demarchi. " If you want to save bobolinks you need a few acres in the Okanagan, for example. But if you want to preserve wolf and caribou - well, how big a place would you have to preserve? If wolves and caribou are intertwined, you have to preserve the caribou range and an area two thirds again as large. And would that give us wolves in perpetuity? Would we have wolves in 200 years?"
And what would it take to protect steelhead? Even if you limited your goal to protecting steelhead in a single watershed, like the Dean River, you'd still have to take into consideration the vast ocean range the fish use. Can we do it? As Mr. Demarchi says about wolves, maybe you don't need a park to cover it all. Could protected habitat be meshed with fishing restrictions on the high seas, to ensure that steelhead survive? That is what it will take, undoubtedly. And it calls for thinking on a large scale. Ecotrust, a leading environmental organization in Canada and the United States, is one of several groups have even been mapping "fishscapes", producing color-coded documents that show the range of salmon species. The Ecotrust maps, available in the book, Salmon Nation, use colors to illustrate where various species are now extinct, where they are at risk, are of special concern, or at low risk. Unnerving are the great shaded areas of gray, identified as being regions where "status has not yet been evaluated." Two hundred years ago explorers in North America used to have maps like this where the shaded areas represented terra incognita - the unknown land. Despite all that we know, that's where we are with fish still - at the edge of the map, gazing out at uncharted terrain. One Ecotrust map shows the full range of Pacific salmon, together with enormous red blotches, spreading north from California, through Oregon, Washington and southern British Columbia. These splotches of red are the watersheds in which at least one salmon or steelhad stock has been documented as extinct. It is really a map that shows the inability of society to protect its environment. And it is a map that urges us to move forward, as quickly as we can, before the red blotches spread to engulf the last stronghold of wild salmon and steelhead. |
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I could hear the Thompson River, its gentle voice belying the power of a driving current. Without rising I could turn my head and see trout swirling along shore. Across the river I could see where a flock of Rock doves were nesting on a steep, clay bank below the C.N.R. line. Walking over the big river stones, towards the rising trout, I found two newly hatched shorebirds, huddled together. Nearby a parent tilted forward, ran, fluttered, and uttered a worried peet-weet. I could not get a clear match of her in the field guide, but thought she looked most like a Solitary Sandpiper - which is not supposed to nest anywhere near the Ponderosa pine - bunchgrass biogeoclimatic zone.
