Audubon -- The Final Frontier

Keith Hobson, a research scientist for the Canadian Wildlife Service,  stands in a cathedral of black spruce and jack pine, a highly sensitive  recording device shaped like a short stack of pancakes mounted on a tripod in front of him. Hobson's feet sink into several inches of vivid green moss; its earthy aroma is redolent in the air. The forest seems muted by screens of needled branches, the dampening effect of the moss, and a steady drizzle of spring rain—all of which focuses our attention on the songs of birds ringing and fluting immediately overhead.

“So far we have Tennessee warbler, Cape May warbler, bay-breasted warblers, black-capped chickadee, and yellow-rumped warbler,” Hobson says. “Four species of warbler in this little nondescript patch of forest.” He is recording the songs as part of an effort to compile baseline data about bird-species distribution in this area. “We should also get brown creepers, ruby-crowned kinglets, and Blackburnian warblers. On this trip, anywhere we stop and walk into the forest, this is a suite we'll hear.”

This trip is a canoe journey, paddling the Voyageurs Highway on northern Saskatchewan's Churchill River—here less a river than a series of broad lakes linked by short chutes of rapids along the way to Hudson Bay. We're exploring a small pocket of Canada's boreal forest, the vast 1.4 billion-acre shawl of black spruce, aspen, paper birch, and larch that drapes from Newfoundland to the Yukon. Globally, 6.5 million square miles of boreal forest wrap Siberia, Scandinavia, and northern Canada. There is more intact forest in Canada's boreal than there is in the Brazilian Amazon. In fact, the boreal, named after Boreas, the Greek god of the north wind, is the largest intact terrestrial ecosystem in the world, and Canada's portion alone represents 25 percent of the world's remaining frontier forests.

Scandinavia's boreal became a heavily managed industrial forest decades ago, and the Siberian boreal is rapidly being cut to fund the cash-starved Russian economy. In Canada, however, there remains hope that significant portions of the boreal forest can be preserved in something close to its unaltered state.

Spurring concern over Canada's boreal forest is a growing understanding of the critical role the region plays in the life cycles of North American songbirds, including neotropical migrants. Nearly half of the regularly occurring birds on the North American continent use Canada's boreal forest either for breeding or as home habitat. Each spring, according to data compiled by Peter Blanchard when he was working for Bird Studies Canada, a nonprofit conservation group, up to 3 billion songbirds migrate to nest in the boreal. By midsummer, an estimated 5 billion birds start  flying south.

“We've done point counts where we've counted 19 or 20 species. Just standing in one spot,” Hobson says. He pssshhes at a bay-breasted warbler we can hear in a dark maze of evergreen branches. The warbler—a vivid, almost auburn stain spreading between its gray back and yellow breast—flitters down to check us out. We can see the bird has an insect tweezed in its bill. Bugs, Hobson thinks, the profuse hatches of flies, mosquitoes, and midges that cloud the north woods, have much to do with why the boreal remains such a productive breeding ground. “But also maybe it's because all the other forests are gone,” he says. “The southern Carolinian forest”—which once covered much of the northern United States and southeastern Canada—“probably was every bit as productive once, but it's gone.”

As impossible as it seems, standing in an apparently infinite north woods surrounded by thousands of square miles of trees and lakes and birds, this piece of forest is in danger of disappearing, too. Hobson is here collecting data because the Saskatchewan government has created a forest management area (FMA)—in which the province grants an exclusive logging license to a timber firm—stretching to the Churchill's southern bank. Within a year chainsaws could be chewing at the ragged, needle-topped silhouettes along the shoreline across the lake.

It's only one FMA in a very large forest, but this is the story of the boreal everywhere. We tend to think of the great northern forest—when we think of it at all—as a land so vast that its demise seems beyond imagination. But little nibbles, nicks, and cuts visited upon the boreal are taking their toll in cumulative impacts. Every year timber companies slash swaths of forest almost as big as Connecticut, mostly to feed American consumers' prodigious appetite for wood and paper. In one province (Ontario), in one year (2001), 45,000 nests of migratory birds were lost to logging.

In the Northwest Territories, the proposed Mackenzie Valley natural gas pipeline would bring 2,400 miles of feeder pipeline and 37,000 miles of seismic lines (paths cut through the forest for the purpose of drilling holes in which to drop explosives), plus thousands of miles of new roads, into what is now a pristine wilderness. Hydropower developments in Manitoba and Quebec could flood millions of acres of prime forest, whereas a proposed third dam on the Peace River in British Columbia would exacerbate the drying up of Alberta's great, 1,752-square-mile Peace–Athabasca delta, breeding grounds for tens of thousands of swans, geese, and ducks, and a stopover site for the endangered whooping crane.

“Less than 3 percent of the southern boreal is protected right now,” says Hobson. And less than 10 percent of the Canadian boreal as a whole is permanently protected.

Meanwhile a coalition of odd bedfellows—resource-industry firms, First Nations, and conservation groups—led by the Canadian Boreal Initiative (CBI), has launched a precedent-setting campaign that seeks to protect  at least half of the remaining boreal forest, while encouraging innovative sustainable development on the remaining portion. The effort comes  none too soon.

On the Churchill River, the wind rocks our canoes  and  rain dumps on us as we leave our island camp to explore. Dozens of fractured horizon lines appear before us, the closer islands a darker, clearer green in the screens of downpour. Hobson mentions something about bears potentially being drawn to camp while we're gone.

“We're camped on an island,” counters Phil Roberts, a 17-year-old Woodland Cree guide working for Churchill River Canoe Outfitters.

“Bears can swim,” says Hobson.

“Not in this weather.”

We paddle along a cliff, one of the few points of relief in the landscape. Here we find splashes of ocher and white, rock paintings created by the forest's early inhabitants. Prominent among the representations of noseless spirit people, their arms raised to the sky, are images of hovering birds—eagles and thunderbirds, wings outstretched.

The paintings are reminders of the long history of people inhabiting the boreal forest and of how those people have imagined their relationship to it. Four million people live in Canada's boreal, a third of them aboriginal, all of them depending on the forest for much of their livelihood. A veritable cornucopia, it provides a haven to the continent's greatest  populations of winter-adapted mammals, including wolves, woodland caribou, black and grizzly bears, moose, lynx, and wolverines.

For the people who crafted the rock paintings at Bear Lake—and for many of their ancestors—this abundance is the key to survival. But even for those of us who rarely think about the boreal, who might not even know where it is, the forest is equally generous. Recent studies have highlighted the boreal's critical importance in slowing climate change. Boreal muskeg soils contain the highest concentrations of carbon on earth. Close to half of the world's peatlands are found in Canada—predominantly in the boreal. According to studies by Nigel Roulet, director of McGill University's School of Environment, during the past 8,000 to 10,000 years the peatlands have sequestered 150 billion tons of carbon—equivalent  to approximately 500 years' worth of Canada's greenhouse-gas emissions.  Peat extraction for gardening is already occurring, while a greater threat—peat mining for fuel—looms on the horizon.

Many products with roots in Canada's boreal forest find their way into our homes, so our thoughtless consumption of them drives the destruction of the forest. The advocacy group Forest Ethics reports that about half of the paper used to print magazines, newsprint, and the 17 billion catalogues produced annually in the United States was once boreal bird habitat. The majority of mailed catalogues are produced using virgin boreal wood fiber logged in clearcuts as big as 30 square miles. Disposable paper products like Charmin, Puffs, Kleenex, and Bounty use more than 2.5 million tons of pulp annually, most of it unrecycled, from trees  sawn in the boreal. In fact, Canada's boreal forests are razed at a rate of about five acres a minute to feed the voracious consumption of wood and wood products of the United States alone.

About 150 miles south of the Churchill River, in central Saskatchewan, Prince Albert National Park stands as a 1,500-square-mile bastion of protected boreal forest, albeit one quickly becoming islandized by the agriculture and logging all around it. On a separate leg of the journey, J. David Henry and I paddle his wood-and-canvas canoe across McPhee Lake, at the park's edge, then up a tiny creek not much wider than our thwarts. The author of the book Canada's Boreal Forest and three others about foxes, Henry, now a Parks Canada ecologist, has  spent more than 30 years working in the boreal, a decade of those years in Prince Albert.

The creek is winding and flat, flanked by a broad bog, which eventually gives way to black spruce, aspen, and pine forest. We spot yellow-rumped warblers, evening grosbeaks, a black-throated green warbler, black-backed and three-toed woodpeckers, a merlin, Bohemian waxwings, and white pelicans, which breed in a massive 10,000-bird colony deeper in the  park.

With his eyes held close to a squint, his jawline rounded by a white beard, Henry seems to welcome all aspects of the northern elements. In fact, the rigors of the boreal winter, Henry explains on this bright summer day, play a huge role in defining his adopted landscape. “This is the snow forest,” Henry says. “To understand the lifestyle of the boreal forest, it always comes back to understanding adaptation to the north.”

Only tree species able to withstand extended periods of temperatures colder than minus-40 degrees Fahrenheit can eke through boreal winters. Extreme cold also slows or suspends the normal decomposition of organic matter in the soil. In many places throughout the forest, dead organic matter accumulates in layers of peat soil many feet thick.

Raked by glaciers, the land beneath the boreal forest tends to be grooved or gently rolling, and consists of a tight mosaic of randomly deposited glacial substrates. In low spots, moss-clogged soils may allow only acid-stunted black spruce, hemlock, and tamarack to survive. But 10 steps away, on a ridge of porous, well-drained sand only a foot or so higher, aspen and jack pine thrive.

“Six inches in elevation can make a difference here,” Henry says. “Every slight undulation in the land represents a change in drainage and produces a different forest stand.”

The other grand sculptor of boreal forest stands is fire. Massive 100-square-mile fires sweep through these woods with regularity. Fire serves as the primary agent for releasing the nutrients stored in dead plant material, which replenish the poor soils.

When Henry and I pause in our paddle to sneak a closer look at a pair of common redpolls gleaning from a shrub, Henry points to the horizon, where the ragged line of treetops dips and scrolls in no obvious pattern  beneath the pale blue sky. Frequent fire, together with constantly changing moisture conditions, Henry says, results in trees of many different shapes and sizes growing closely together. This structural diversity makes the same patch of forest attractive to a wide variety of bird species.

“Different species of songbirds specialize in making their living in specific kinds of trees and in different parts of the forest canopy,” Henry says. “The mixed-woods stands, with their constantly changing vegetation and complicated forest structure, offer a bigger and better smorgasbord to support these birds and their offspring. It's exceptionally rich [habitat]. There's a higher breeding-bird diversity here than anywhere in North America.”

More than 300 bird species breed in the North American boreal. For many of those species, more than half of their global population convenes here during nesting season. For some, like swamp, Lincoln's, and white-throated sparrows; Philadelphia vireos; yellow-bellied flycatchers; and bay-breasted, mourning, and Cape May warblers, it is estimated that upwards of 80 percent of the species' global population breeds in the boreal. For Connecticut, Tennessee, and palm warblers, the percentage is higher  than 90.

Henry and I hear the cry of a loon cut like a singing sword through the sunny afternoon, and we simultaneously pause in our paddle strokes to listen. As the loon calls again, my gaze lifts to the forest circling the lakeshore. It occurs to me that imagination is our shortcoming in this far northern land. If it is difficult to conjure a forest vast enough for 5 billion birds, it's even more difficult to suppose how a forest so indescribably broad, so intact, could disappear.

But it's happening. Forests die by fragmentation. Satellite maps compiled by Global Forest Watch, a group dedicated to tracking changes in forested landscapes, indicate that 40 percent of Canada's remaining boreal has already been fragmented, the majority of it in just the past 40 years. Between seismic lines drilling pads, and service roads, the oil and gas industry clears as much land as the loggers do throughout significant portions of the boreal. Approximately 90 percent of boreal lands are open to Canada's $27 billion mining industry, bringing more roads and more habitat degradation. Thirty percent of the standing forest has already been allocated to industrial extractors; an additional 30 percent is subject to current or proposed land-use planning procedures. By all accounts, development is poised to ramp up in the next 10 years, as all of Canada's provinces have stated their intentions of accelerating resource extraction in their northern forests.

Rapid industrialization of the boreal comes with consequences. Already 40 species of boreal-breeding birds are experiencing serious population declines. Other animal species, like the woodland caribou, struggle to survive.

A degraded boreal loses its carbon sequestration ability, too. Logging obviously decreases carbon-sucking biomass in the form of trees; in the boreal, clearcuts also allow sunlight to kill off the ground cover of mosses and lichens, spurring soil decomposition and releasing enormous amounts of carbon into the atmosphere.

Still, there remains a unique opportunity in the northern forests. Because so much of the boreal does remain unspoiled, conservation groups like the CBI are focusing on generating meaningful discussion about how to protect large, interconnected pieces of pristine boreal habitat before runaway development makes the point moot.

“Our real hope is we can do things differently while we still have the chance,” says Cathy Wilkinson, director of the CBI. “We're focusing on how to keep something healthy, as opposed to focusing on fixing something that's not healthy.”

Instead of protecting small pockets of the forest for conservation and leaving the rest wide open to unchecked development, the CBI is proposing a collaborative process that envisions using innovative sustainable development practices for specific portions of the boreal—the rest, CBI proposes, should remain interconnected and untouched. The guiding principle of the CBI's Boreal Forest Conservation Framework, an agreement signed by conservation groups, First Nations, and logging and energy-development corporations, is to protect at least 50 percent of the boreal forest and to ensure that any resource management that occurs is ecosystem-based.

Three First Nations that control expansive boreal territories have signed on to the framework. Fearing rapid deterioration of their hunting resources and their spiritual connection to the land, the Dehcho and Innu nations have already withdrawn half of their lands from development, and the Poplar River Anishinabek are trying to have part of their territory declared a World Heritage site as a means of preserving it for posterity.

The framework's industry signatories are serious players in boreal  resource extraction, too. Suncor owns development rights to the Alberta oil sands, where oil deposits second in size only to those found in  the Arabian peninsula lie trapped in thick, tarry substrate. Domtar is the third-largest producer of uncoated paper in North America. These companies and the other framework signatories are increasingly acknowledging the value of sustainable development.

In order to head off boycotts and letter-writing campaigns by consumer activists, the timber giant Tembec has committed to meeting Forest Certification Standards (FSC) for all 13 million acres of forestlands it manages in Canada. “Retailers are more and more concerned about their image and want to make sure that the products they are offering to consumers are coming from well-managed forests,” says Martin Simard, Tembec's director of public relations. “If you want to buy FSC wood products in Canada, Tembec is the only company who can provide you with that. Of course, it gives us a competitive edge when we are the first to offer that. But our commitment to the environment is really sincere. We want to be in business for many, many years to come. We need the forest to be there in 50 years. We are truly committed to managing the forest in a sustainable way.”

Another signatory, AlPac, has sponsored University of Alberta researcher Fiona Schmiegelow's critical studies on a Switzerland-size piece of Alberta forest on which the company has a major logging operation. AlPac is tailoring clearcuts in various sizes and locations to Schmie-gelow's specifications, allowing her to gather comparative data on the effects of industrial logging on bird communities.

Sadly, Schmiegelow's 13-year study has indicated serious declines in logged areas for bird species—like the brown creeper, red-breasted nuthatch, boreal chickadee, and wood warblers—associated with older,  mixed-woods forest stands.

Nobody imagines that another mailing of apparel catalogues or a few family packs of paper towels will be the undoing of the great northern forest. But then, nobody thought that another hydroelectric dam could stifle the great salmon runs of America's Northwest, either, or that one more set of nets would empty the Grand Banks of cod, or that killing a few more buffalo could wipe out the endless herds that roamed the Great Plains. The real Tragedy of the Commons is that everybody knows it's true—only nobody believes it will happen to them.

If nothing is done, Canada's great northern forest will be hacked to bits within our lifetime. This destruction holds grave implications for global processes like the warming atmosphere. But because the boreal is North America's avian nursery, where billions of birds nest each year, the devastating phenomenon is as local as the annual arrival of songbirds at your backyard feeder. Thus we each must choose to imagine ways we can act to help keep that nursery—one of nature's grand marvels—standing tall and broad.