Forest Landscape Baseline No. 17
Brief Progress and Summary Reports 1998
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Forest Landscape Baseline No. 17 Brief Progress and Summary Reports 1998 | |
THE BLUEBERRY LAKE CANDIDATE NATURAL HERITAGE AREA,
TEMAGAMI, ONTARIO
M. Henry, P. A. Quinby and T. Lee
Introduction
Blueberry Lake is a beautiful lake surrounded by pristine forest with centuries-old trees, which pre-date the first European settlements in the Ottawa valley. In the heart of historic Temagami, Blueberry Lake is only a few hours paddle east of the town of Temagami, a short portage away from Cassels Lake, where it has remained surprisingly remote, undiscovered, and undeveloped. Blueberry Lake is Temagami in a microcosm. It's Ojibway name is Min Dow-oways-zawning.
The tremendous variety of environments in such a small area gives it great value for science, education, and recreation. This diversity includes old growth cedar and yellow birch, red, white, and jack pine forest, bogs with carnivorous pitcher plants and sundews, and a red and white pine forest that burned in a 1996 forest fire. A system of three trails built in 1998 - '99 explores these features, and the accompanying trail signs and guidebook interpret them.
Scientific Values
The candidate site encompasses roughly 2,000 ha, much of which is pristine old growth forest of all kinds, but notably including several stands of the endangered old growth white pine ecosystem. Ancient Forest Exploration and Research has conducted a number of studies in the area, and has established a system of permanent plots to monitor ecosystem changes. The design of the candidate natural heritage site (see fig.1) is based on the watershed ecosystems surrounding research sites, with an additional 100 m buffer zone to minimize the influence of disturbed areas on the research sites. While the protection of the Blueberry Lake Area is essential to ongoing scientific research, there are also other benefits that can come from non-consumptive uses of the area.
Figure 1 Blueberry Lake Candidate Natural Heritage Area
Recreational and Educational Values
Blueberry Lake can be reached in under two hours by canoe from Temagami, and thus offers excellent potential for recreational and educational activities in the old growth forests. Although very close to the Town of Temagami, it offers a surprisingly peaceful sanctuary that is noticeably more remote than White Bear Forest. White bear is already protected as a natural heritage area. The addition of the Blueberry Lake Area to the protected areas system would make the region more attractive as a place to see Temagami's legendary old growth pine. White Bear Forest and Blueberry Lake together make for a world-class opportunity to hike and paddle the old growth pine forest, that can be experienced over a weekend.
Our experience working with international volunteers in the area, as well as feedback from people who are using the trails, tells us that Blueberry Lake is a popular place to explore, and that people are very impressed with hiking in the pine forests around it. Blueberry Lake is reached by a well-groomed 400 m portage from Cassels Lake. It is a beatiful sheltered lake that can accommodate a fair number of campsites.
Figure 2 Some features of the Blueberry Lake area
The Temagami Landscape
Temagami is the region immediately west of Lake Timiskaming, at the headwaters of the Ottawa River. Fire and ice have shaped the landscape we see here; ten thousand years ago ice blanketed Temagami hundreds of metres thick, and scraped the ancient rock bare. Fire has periodically swept the landscape ever since the ice retreated. The forests here are in a transition zone between two extremely different forest types, and are a unique and unusual combination of each one. To the south, the maple-dominated hardwood forests are called the "Great Lakes St-Lawrence" forest type. To the north is the boreal forest, also called taiga in Russia and Europe.
The southern hardwood forests usually renew themselves with small disturbances. Older trees blow down or are killed by disease and saplings that have been growing very slowly under the shady canopy start growing very quickly to fill the gaps. Fires may occur every few hundred years, or in very protected spots only every few thousand years. According to scientists some sheltered spots in New England have never burned since the retreat of the glaciers.
The northern boreal forest, on the other hand, is created and re-created by fire. Fires in the boreal forest burn on average aound every 100 to 200 years. In places boreal forest may live hundreds of years without burning, in other places much less. But when fires happen in the boreal forest, they are usually catastrophic - they kill all or most trees in the areas that burn. So boreal forest tends to have patches of "even-aged" forest. The dominant tree species in boreal forest are spruce, balsam fir, jack-pine, paper birch and aspen.
In Temagami, and on the Blueberry trails, in moist undisturbed areas you will see maple-dominated forests reminiscent of southern forests, and you will see patches of boreal forest that have been renewed by catastrophic fire. You will also see an entirely different forest type that thrives in the transition zone - red and white pine forest.
Red and white pine are perfectly adapted to exist in this transition zone. These species, particularly red pine, depend on fire to renew the forest - fires in pine forests are more frequent even than in the boreal forest. But red and white pine have extremely thick fire resistant bark, and most fires aren't hot enough to kill the mature trees. The frequent fires that burn the highly flammable layer of pine needles on the forest floor, killing the competing understory of shrubs and tree saplings, are called surface fires. Surface fires also prepare the soil for the pine seedlings to grow by exposing a seedbed and releasing a flush of nutrients that were held in the thick carpet of needles. Charcoal Trail is a good place to see a surface fire that happened just a few years ago.
Some History
The Temagami region is the homeland of the Teme Augama Anishnabai, who have hunted and trapped here for over 5,000 years. The Teme Augama Anishnabai have been fighting for recognition since European settlement, logging, mining and tourism began, around the turn of the century, and they have been virtually excluded from development decisions affecting their lands.
The Teme-Augama Anishnabai people lived with the forests for thousands of years without dramatically changing them, though they occasionally burned areas to get a good blueberry crop. They also used an extensive network of trails to hunt and trap throughout the year. These trails, called Nastawgan, are often still used today as portages, though their ancient beginnings may be forgotten by most people who use them. Historically a Nastawgan lead from the east arm of Blueberry lake, through two lakes and down a wetland stream to Lorraine Lake. Parts of this old portage have recently been reopened, but it has been re-routed to Rabbit Lake.
With the arrival of Europeans here, the future for the forest changed dramatically. From the time of the first settlers in the 1600's until this century, white and red pine trees was considered to be the ideal for construction lumber. The wood is light and rot resistant. Until the mid to late 1800's most of the construction lumber cut in North America was white and red pine. In that time literally millions of white and red pine trees, some as much as 2m (six feet) in diameter and 60 m (18 stories) high, were cut. White and red pine literally founded two nations - pioneer homes, factories, workshops, and often furniture, were made from pine for nearly three centuries. The city of Ottawa was founded as Bytown in 1800, and for most of its history it's economy was based on saw-mills milling white pine from the Ottawa valley.
Temagami was one of the last refuges of the old growth pine forest - today most of the old growth in Temagami has also been logged, but it still has the greatest concentration of old growth pine left in the world. The Ottawa River and its adjacent forests was an important logging corridor for white and red pine throughout the 19th and into the 20th Century. Because it was at the headwaters of the Ottawa and hard to access, Temagami mostly escaped logging until the turn of the century. But as other pine forests vanished, eyes turned to Temagami. In 1900 a Globe reporter wrote that Temagami 'is one of the finest timber districts in the province, having an abundance of white and red pine in virgin forest.' Even now after a century of logging Temagami is home to some of the oldest and most dense pine forest in eastern North America, with towering trees as old as 400 years or more. It has many of the last remnants of the old growth white and red pine forests that were once common.
These forests are controversial. Many people want to cut the last old growth forests to create jobs in communities that traditionally have depended on lumbering. Corporations with head offices in Toronto and Montreal also see them as a source of short term profits. But others in the same communities see the forest as a as a long-term investment; a source of employment for towns that, like Temagami, now earn most of their revenues from tourism. This conflict between tourist users, the forest industry, and natives, has existed for nearly a century, during which time the forest industry has usually come out ahead. Only now, in the fight for the last fragments of old growth, is that beginning to change.
In 1989, Temagami was the site of the largest act of civil disobedience in Ontario's history as a province, with 289 protestors arrested for blocking road-building equipment on red squirrel road (at that time it was the largest single act of civil disobedience in the history of Canada). This campaign began with the Teme Augama Anishnabai fighting destructive forest practices and asking for more control over their lands, but was quickly joined by conservation groups like the Temagami Wilderness Society. The non-violent protests saved the Obabika North or Shish Kong old growth stand, the largest old growth red and white pine stand remaining in the world.
Logging around Cassels Lake (formerly known as White Bear Lake) began in 1946 when Gillies Bros. & Co. built a sawmill on the shore of Cassels lake, across from what is now called White Bear Forest. You can still see evidence of this mill - a large red barn that is still standing on the north shore of the lake was used for storage, and some of the foundations of the mill can be seen farther down the shore.
Pretty much all of the forest nearby Blueberry was logged in the 1940's, but Blueberry's shores mostly escaped the logging. Only the west shore of Blueberry was logged at the time. The portage trail between Cassels and Blueberry lake was used as a winter road to haul pine cut from the west shore and areas north of Blueberry, down to Cassels Lake, to be floated to the mill in the spring. At that time logs were carried on horse-drawn sleds, and pine trees were cut using two-man cross-cut saws. Within the next decades gas chainsaws replaced the muscle-powered crosscut saws, and horses were replaced by skidders. The old growth that's left in Blueberry probably survived because of a combination of luck, and steep topography that made logging difficult - at the time there was lots of other pine that was easier to get out.
The Ecology Trails
As noted, Blueberry Lake is outstanding for its ecological diversity. The ecology trails explore some of this diversity:
The Old-Growth Trail
Hikers can explore old growth red and white pine, jack pine, poplar, and sugar maple forest along this trail. interpretive signs and extensive information in the guidebook explain why each forest type is there, and what is happening to this day. This is the longest trail, and it is at the heart of the ecology trails; it explores a greater diversity of old growth forest than any other trail in Temagami. Allow 2-3 hours to hike this entire trail.
The Old Growth Trail follows the portage to Dalton Lake for the first 50 metres or so. The aluminum portage sign here was posted just after World War II. The interpretive trail turns to the right and climbs out of the cedar valley and into pine forest. Cedar and yellow birch trees thrive in the moist valley, while pines prefer the drier uplands. A white pine giant, almost a metre across greets you to the old growth forest.
Charcoal Trail
Charcoal Trail is a short trail that leads to a 1996 forest fire that was started when a white pine tree was hit by lightning. The fire killed many of the trees around the lightning strike then burned along the ground under the pine trees, killing a few of them and all the understory of spruce, fir, cedar and birch. Because of their very thick bark and high branches that remained high above the fire, most of the pine trees were unharmed. Notice the difference in the shrub layer between the burned area and the unburned forest.
Blueberry Trail
Blueberry Trail leads up the side of an escarpment and along it's edge, through a beautiful and rare pure red pine forest. The terrain is steep and difficult in some spots, and flat and open in other places. Although it may seem like young forest, it has never been logged. This forest regenerated after a hot fire roughly 120 years ago. At this age we consider this a young old-growth forest. Don't let size fool you either - at the end of the trail you'll find a sign marking a tree that is 100 years old and only eight inches in diameter. On the dry, thin soil, trees grow very slowly. Despite the small size of many of these trees, this red pine forest is threatened by logging. It's one sign of the uncertain future of our unsustainable industrial logging practices; tomorrow's forests are being logged today.
The Wetlands
There is no trail for the wetlands. Just paddle up the inlet stream that feeds Blueberry Lake. The deepest channel is along the east shore. Look for three species of carnivorous plants here - pitcher plants, bladderworts, and sundews.
Continuing up the inlet stream that feeds these wetlands, a rough portage on the east shore leads to a large system of wetlands and small lakes to the north-east. This is a place to explore in high water, and potentially to see moose. Along with an abundance of carnivorous plants, there are cranberries trailing across the moss here, and also many members of the blueberry familly that are adapted to bogs. Most of the forest north of this wetland system is allocated for logging in the next few years this may be a good (but unwelcome) opportunity to see shelterwood logging up close.
Old-Growth Cedar and Yellow Birch Forest.
Follow the portage at the end of the east arm of Blueberry to see beautiful old growth cedar and yellow birch that thrives in the moist stream valley.
The Future for Blueberry Lake
The forests around Blueberry Lake may have been discovered too late. Ancient and old growth forests are as valued by the forest industry as they are by the tourism and outdoor recreation industries. Poor forest management in the past has left little for anyone to use and enjoy today. Much of the forest north of Blueberry Lake and possibly even the large red pine stand that Blueberry Trail runs through, is scheduled to be logged in the next five years.
Because of its tremendous value for science, tourism and education, protection for blueberry lake has recieved significant local support. In 1999-2000 a compromise was achieved which affords the trails some measure of protection, but sacrifices most of the surrounding areas to logging. This compromise takes a very short term view of the value of the Blueberry Lake area; all the values of the area are undermined when a large portion of it is open to industrial logging practices. We have inherited a natural legacy from our parents which our children and grandchildren will never know, and Blueberry Lake is one obvious opportunity to preserve a small part of this inheritance.
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