3 men standing on a dirt road leading into the forest

Wildfire Risk Reduction in Squirrel Cove area

There’s a wildfire risk reduction underway in the Community Forest  near Squirrel Cove.

“This is something that we’ve been working on since 2018.  It was identified as a priority in the 2020 Community Wildfire Protection Plan.  We received funding for a prescription, then we got funding to do an archaeological assessment, as required by law in the Tla’amin First Nation and then this year we obtained funding through the Forest Enhancement Society of BC to carry out the treatment..  I’m just really excited to see it happening because when you see an overgrown plantation like this,  it feels really good to be able to reinvest in the land base to leave a better forest for the future generation and reduce the wildfire risk in this neighbourhood,” explained to Mark Lombard, General Manager of the Cortes Forestry General Partnership.

Cortes Currents: How big of an area are we talking about? 

Mark Lombard: “This project is 6.5 hectares and then the Coulter Bay project is 9.8 hectares. So a total of 16.3 hectares this year, out of 3,800 hectares in the Community Forest. So it’s just a drop in the bucket really, but they’re in neighbourhoods where there is an intermix of residential properties in the forest.”

Bruce Ellingsen,  a founding Director and thought leader of the Cortes Community Forest movement, added, “One of the justifications for mitigating the possibility of wildfire is because of the adjacency to neighbourhoods and other residences.”

Mark Lombard: “Your residential neighborhood in Squirrel Cove is all uphill from here.”

Bruce Ellingsen: “That’s the way fires go, it’s uphill usually.”

The Cortes Forestry General Partnership’s first cutblocks were in Larsens Meadow during 2015. They started working in Squirrel Cove the following year.  

Bruce Ellingsen: “It’s the intention of the partnership to cut below the annual incremental growth of the whole forest on the Community Forest land base so that it gradually ages while we’re still cutting a modest amount. 

Over time, they intend to harvest increasingly larger trees that are much more efficiently processed by Cortes Island’s local mills. 

We met at the gate, outside of the treatment area. 

Mark Lombard: “The hemlock are almost all dying out here. This planted stand along the public road was ‘space and pruned’ 20 years ago. They would have left a little bit of hemlock, and we’re seeing it die out.  There’s one hemlock there and one hemlock there,  they’re both dead.  There’s another one right there that’s broken off.”

“The stand that we’re working in is maybe 10 years younger and it hasn’t been spaced and pruned. It’s really overgrown. The Douglas fir are not doing as well as in this plantation. We’re forced to leave a little bit more Balsam and a little bit more Hemlock and certainly we’re trying to leave Cedars wherever we can because it’s hard to grow Cedars. It’s nice to see the cedars doing well, but the balsam are being killed by a beetle so  it’s a real balancing act of trying to leave a decent stock knowing that quite a few of the trees we’re going to leave may die just off like the Hemlock in the stand visible from the public road. We just don’t want to leave a lot of stems in the treatment area that will be dead in 10 years or 20 years.”.”

Tor Ellingsen, who did the falling in the Squirrel Cove cut blocks back in 2016, had the contract  to do fire treatment work. He joined us on the walk into the work area.  

Tor Ellingsen: ”This third growth wood, or second growth wood as well, is super wide grained. It is 80% sapwood and two or three years after it dies it’ll be rotting off and then break.  I thought these would be decent firewood trees that we fell here, but they’re all too rotten for firewood.”

Mark Lombard: “If you go up north on Vancouver Island where Tor has worked a lot, the Hemlocks get really big. They’re often really healthy, but here on Cortes it’s pretty dry for Hemlock and the droughts make any tree vulnerable to disease. So the Hemlocks are quite vulnerable to Dwarf Mistletoe and to various root rots. They just don’t seem to be very resilient.  Whereas up north, the Hemlocks might culminate at a couple hundred years old, here they seem to culminate at 90 years. That seems to be the longest that you’ll ever see. This stand is 50 years old and I don’t see any really good Hemlocks here. Would you agree with that, Tor? 

Tor Ellingsen: “I think it’s longer than 60 years on the south end, but  definitely Hemlock, Spruce, and Cedar all want to have fairly wet roots. Hemlock is such a weed. It’ll seed itself and mature or start to grow anywhere, but then as the stand matures they need more for the volume of the canopy of the tree. I’ve seen it happen lots where they just reach a certain age. Cedars are doing the same thing on rock bluffs all over Cortes, where they’re just dying out because they’re not getting the water they need to grow any bigger.

Tor’s wife and business partner, Kate McLean, worked for BC Wildfire for many years. She explained the need for wildfire wildfire risk reduction work to reduce the overall risk.

Kate McLean: “You have a wood stove, I’m sure. If you think about your kindling, it’s small diameter and it’s all very close and it burns very rapidly. Whereas if you remove this smaller fuel (the dead branches and dense small dead trees), which would be quite a bit of this standing dead Balsam,  now we just have the larger diameter standing trees and they don’t have that continuity of fuel for the fire to consume.”

“We are thinning the understory, removing dead trees, and then limbing up the canopy. So  there’s a vertical separation from ground fuel to canopy fuels. If there was a wildfire coming through this area, in theory, it should slow it down. A ground fire is a lower intensity fire, and also it’s a defendable space.

“We’ve removed all the danger trees and where we have treated, if there’s a fire, it’s very easy for first responders to do a hose lay. They don’t have to cut a trail. They don’t necessarily have to do a danger tree assessment because it’s already been done.”

There weren’t any big trees in the stand.

Bruce Ellingsen: “Some of the trees that have been cut down in this mitigation job were larger than what some might have expected. That is because they were either already standing dead, dying or they were not going to be chosen for leaving because they are the less desireable Balsam. Tor ran into a new type of bark beetle  that affects the Balsam trees and kills them. The standing dead trees  were either a risk adjacent to the roads or in the woods that the workers were operating in. WorkSafeBC will really frown on you if you put workers in dangerous situations and don’t address it before somebody gets a tree dropped on them.”

That’s not the only reason for thinning a stand of trees. 

Mark Lombard: “If you go into one of these really overgrown second or third growth plantations, they’re a little bit of an ecological wasteland.  There’s very little biodiversity on the forest floor, but by opening them up a little bit and letting some light in we’ll have a lot more plant biodiversity, which from an ecological perspective is really desirable.  A mature forest has little pockets  of openness and light gets to the forest floor.”

“We had tried 10 meter spacing with the ‘leave trees’ in Larson’s Meadow harvest in 2015 and those trees are growing  really slowly because there’s too much shade. So the following year in the Squirrel Cove Blocks we increased the spacing to 20 meter spacing for the ‘leave trees ‘and the contrast is really striking. The planted trees  are growing really well here because they’re getting enough light. Douglas Fir, in particular, is not shade tolerant. For it to thrive, it really needs good exposure to light.”


When the block that is currently being treated for wildfire risk reduction was logged, they planted Douglas fir.  The Hemlock and the Balsam seeded themselves amongst that. We’re removing some of that natural regeneration that just makes it too thick. We’re trying to get it back to cedar and Douglas fir because for the most part the Hemlock and Balsam are dying off, and only only the Fir that are really doing well.”       

Tor Ellingsen: “The regrowth  is incredible, a really healthy stand even up there where it’s drier. I’m constantly surprised by the virility of the forest. We’re just watching it do its thing. It’s amazing, healthy.

Cortes Currents: Tell me about the cleanup that I see happening. 

Mark Lombard: “Anything that’s close enough to the road to be practical to move  by hand, we’re putting the branches and removed trees by the road.  You can see these rows on the side of the road and the chipper arrived this morning so we’re going to chip those up and the chips will be given away to people on the island. We have a little list of people who have asked for some. Anything that’s large enough to make firewood that’s sound and close enough to the road  we’ve tossed out. We’ve donated two cords to the school PAC for the Christmas raffle.
Then everything that is too far from the road to chip, we will burn  because it’s all being done by hand and we can’t drag every branch up the hill.”

Cortes Currents: What about the lichen we already see on some of these older trees.  This is found in a lot of old growth forests as well. Isn’t it unhealthy for the tree? 

Bruce Ellingsen: “No, it’s just something that’s growing on the outside of the bark  on a healthy tree in an ageing forest. Lichen that moves around in the atmosphere as a spore, lands on a multitude of surfaces and probably one in a million will actually land somewhere where it’s a good place for it to grow. It’ll slowly develop over 50 to 100 years or more to where it’s really noticeable, but it’s just on the surface of the bark. The bark on the big old trees is thick enough that it shelters the live part of the tree, the cambium layer, from outside infection, unless there’s an injury like a broken limb or something like that.” 

Mark Lombard: “In a mature forest or a maturing forest, say maybe 80 years and above, in the right conditions you could have up to 20 kilograms  of nitrogen falling to on each hectare of the forest floor from epiphytes (lichen, mosses and ferns) dying and falling off trees. The epiphytes sequester nitrogen out of the air and then they become a real source of fertilizer for a maturing forest.”

 The lower limbs on a lot of the trees we saw were dead. 

Bruce Ellingsen: “As the trees age and the branches get  overshadowed by the crown of the tree growing up higher, shading them, they just die off.  They hang there for some years and  finally, depending on the diameter of the branch, they rot.  The stem of the tree is good  at squeezing those rotting pieces off until they get to the point where they finally break off and just disappear and then the tree grows out around that and you have an interior knot in your tree and clear wood outside.”

Mark Lombard pointed to the circle pattern in the bark of an adjoining tree, “That’s what’s happening there.”

“Forests have natural succession. If there’s a big wind event or a big fire a bunch of species will come in, often alder or hemlock,  and then over time as you get to the later stages of forest you’ll get the culmination species which here might be Douglas fir and Western Red Cedar, it’s a wetter site.”

Tor Ellingsen: “Look at all the old growth stumps where we’re working, they’re all Fir and Cedar. This site is not overly dry.  The last few days, the sun has been completely behind the trees all day long.  Fir can take pretty dry conditions, but Cedar can’t.”

Bruce Ellingsen: “If you get into an old growth forest, your trees that are standing are the big ones and they’re spaced out anywhere up to 40, 50, 60 or more feet apart.  It’s just because all the smaller stuff, either weak or unhealthy or not suited to the site or things of that nature, have just died off and fallen down over the years.”

Links of Interest

All undesignated photos by Roy L Hales

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