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 Stories
Documenting Wildlife Trees
by Fred Davies, Parksville Qualicum News
6 Feb 07
The number of trees in the region suitable for
an eagle, heron or hawk to nest or perch in is shrinking every year.
Forestry and land development that accompanies urbanization are but
two of the reasons.
A dedicated core of environmentalists and
volunteers is working hard to spread the word that trees,
particularly ones housing large raptors, are worth saving. So far,
more than 700 wildlife trees are documented in the Strait of Georgia
with another 250 being monitored each year.
Parksville's Patrick Walshe is employed by the
Wildlife Tree Stewardship program run under the auspice of the
Federation of BC Naturalists. His job is to invite landowners to
learn the locations of nesting trees on their land and how to be
good stewards of forested nesting areas with large old trees.
“I call or send letters and talk about how to
get along with the eagles,” he says. “The tree and nest once
identified does have some protections under Section 34 of the
Wildlife Act but the buffer zone is not.”
Walshe notes that it's important, not only to
leave the trees alone, but to minimize any noise and disturbance
during the crucial active nesting period from February through June.
Otherwise, he says, the bird may abandon the nest.
There are administrative solutions should a
landowner wish to ensure a buffered protection area for a tree
housing an eagle, heron or one of the other select few avian
specimens favoured by year round, protective, provincial
legislation.
“Development permit areas, land covenants or
bylaws can be used,” says Walshe. “I've been talking to
municipalities all up and down the coast as well as a lot of
developers. We can provide privileged access to an online database
so planners can have access as long as they promise it's for
conservation reasons.
” The mapping system is available to the public,
however, for local governments that sign a data sharing agreement, a
password is given allowing planners to zoom in on a much finer scale
to see which lots the trees are on.
On Vancouver Island, trees are monitored mainly
for bald eagles. Many of the trees were initially identified during
helicopter surveys done by the Ministry of Environment.
Stewards involved in the wildlife tree program
would like to see protections enhanced and expanded. “Often seen are
properties with a single nest tree remaining because the nest is
protected. If there is no other legislation pertaining to the buffer
area surrounding the tree (and there often isn't) then clearing can
occur right up to the base of the tree,” says Kerri Lynne Wilson a
WiTS program co-ordinator. “Subsequent development can then damage
the health of the tree she adds, resulting in the landowners
becoming concerned about the huge tree falling on adjacent buildings
and [applying] for the nest tree to be removed.
“For this reason,” Wilson says, “WiTS works with
local governments to ask them to write bylaws that place buffers
around particular nest trees.”
There are nest trees in nearby locations that
residents may never have noticed. “There's one very local tree close
to Parksville,” says Sandra Gray, who works as a volunteer
identifying wildlife trees for the program. “The nests can be really
huge, half the size of a vehicle, but people miss them.”
Sometimes it can be difficult to convince
landowners of the value inherent in the trees, but there have been
successes says Gray.
“Public awareness is growing. There's about 200
tree stewards between Sooke and Campbell River including some of the
Gulf Islands,” she notes, adding “there's a balance that's not good
on Vancouver Island. People come here for the green that they see
... I would say most would rather see a tree than a bulldozer any
day.”
Topped Tree Causes Conflict
by Fred Davies, Parksville Qualicum News, 23 Feb 07
Those living close to an
eagle perching tree, near the intersection of Pilot Way and
Cockleshell Road in Nanoose Bay, are lamenting its loss in wake of
the tree being topped to make way for construction of a new house.
“We've
all seen the eagles in that tree,” says nearby resident Maura Lee
Rafferty. “It's a huge loss. This is totally disheartening.”
Hud Elgood owns Branching
Out, the company hired to do the cutting. He says the tree was
deemed hazardous and there's nothing that could have been done to
save it.
“In this case there was rot
in the roots and the base. It was in fact a liability and guaranteed
to fail in the fairly near future. There were no options
whatsoever.”
Elgood says the owners of the
property had hopes of preserving the tree and had it assessed at
their own expense only to find it presented an imminent threat to
their own property, adjacent buildings and the nearby road.
“If it hadn't been deemed
hazardous I would have passed on the job,” says Elgood, adding that
he phoned the Regional District of Nanaimo personally to inquire
about any pertinent regulations in the area.
Patrick Walshe, represents a
local, wildlife tree stewardship program and says the specimen in
question had been documented as a perching tree.
“It was known about and used
by several pairs of eagles,” Walshe says but adds the small size of
the lot probably precluded any other outcome.
If there's something to be
learned from the tree's demise says Walshe, “it would be that
proactive planning arrangements originally can sometimes account for
these situations.”
That is likely of little
comfort to those living nearby who'd become enamoured with the
resident eagles.
“Anyway you look at it it's a
shame,” says neighbour Stu Wood. “You could often hear them. This
was one of their places.”
Rafferty concurs. “I cried
all the way into Nanaimo,” she says of her trip to the regional
district offices to lodge a personal complaint upon her discovery of
the tree's fate.
In a telling notice tacked to
fallen portions of the tree Elgood writes, “I'm extremely sorry for
the grief that the removal of this tree has caused to the local
community,” but adds in a post script that those who “unjustly and
rudely berated” his staff could forward their apologies through him.
Eagle Chick - North Saanich
On May 8, 2003 in John Dean Provincial Park,
North Saanich one of our dedicated WiTS monitors found an eaglet
injured and on the ground. After calls to the SPCA, the injured
eaglet was captured and sent to Wild Arc and then to OWL. They found
that the chick was a healthy female and 3-4 weeks old. The eaglet
was released in Vancouver at the end of October 2003
Eagle Chick - Central Saanich
In July 2003, one of the eaglets monitored in
Central Saanich injured itself during fledging. It was placed in the
care of Wild Arc where it was found to be malnourished with an
injured wing. The eaglet was transferred to the North Island
Wildlife Recovery Centre and was released in Duncan on Nov 28, 2003.
 Hawks and the City
by Ben Parfitt (published 4-Aug-2005)
Rays from a morning's summer sun filter through
branches, turning the ground into a jumbled jigsaw of green. Hidden
in the shadows, a great homed owl perches, mottled feathers on a
body the size of a fat tabby cat blending perfectly with the
surroundings. As if on bearings, her head swivels, allowing the
giant bird to scan the ground behind with her round-as-saucers eyes.
High above, a mother hawk gazes at five hungry
hatchlings vying for space in a nest atop a leaning larch. Where is
her mate? Somewhere nearby, perhaps settling into a final glide, red
eyes fixed on an unsuspecting sparrow. Day upon day, the mother hawk
waits. And several times each day her mate returns, carrying a
songbird whose rapidly beating heart has been stilled by the
powerful bird's kneading talons.
Fifteen minutes later, the male hawk alights on
a stately deciduous tree adjacent to the larch. Gazing up, he calls,
as if to say to his mate: "Look what I have for you!" As he pauses
with a lifeless sparrow in his clutches, his barred, rusty breast
expands and contracts.
Suddenly the angry chatter of another hawk
pierces the air. "Kek-kek-kek-kek-kek!"
The hawk loosens his grip on his kill, glancing
warily about. The sound is not coming from the nest but somewhere
below. As he zeroes in on the sound, he is caught up short by the
penetrating yellow eyes of his feared adversary. Hard-wired to
respond to the threat the owl poses to his progeny, the hawk swoops
from the tree to strafe the bigger bird. In his instinctual act he
can be forgiven for dropping his kill. He can also be excused for
not seeing the outstretched arm that stealthily retreats behind a
tree, the same arm that earlier played the tape that produced the
hawk alarm call. The same arm that minutes before stretched a mist
net in front of the tethered owl. The same arm that will later free
the trapped Cooper's hawk from the fine mesh that it is now tangled
in.
All of this occurs far from that mythical place
we call wilderness, smack in the middle of British Columbia's
second-biggest city, in fact. And it is precisely this incongruous
setting that gives the events of this June morning such appeal, for
they challenge strongly held convictions that we humans are always a
blight, that our actions are invariably bad, that the only effective
counter to us is wilderness. Never mind the messy truth, verified by
science, that in wilderness parks big and small we're losing
species, not conserving them. Landscapes, whether they are
officially protected or not, never stay so for long. Which is why
ecologists are fascinated with creatures like Cooper's hawks. Why is
Victoria, for God's sake, home to such large numbers of these
raptors? In a nutshell, it is because the hawks like it here. They
adapted to the changes we made and are flourishing. And that is
where there is hope. Because if we better appreciate how the wild
creatures we profess to care about respond to change, then maybe we
can provide enough of what it is they need to survive.
At 5 a.m., the glow from a half-moon turns the
oaks a whiter shade of pale. As I navigate a tree-lined and
undulating Foul Bay Road, I consider myself fortunate that on this
March morning the weather is as far from foul as can be. A thin blue
line on the horizon heralds a new day. The advancing sunlight dulls
the moon's surface. Stars become lacklustre. Soon even Venus will be
gone from sight. My only regret is that I will not greet the dawn
with a steaming cup of coffee warming my hands. It could be a cold
wait amid the tombstones at Ross Bay Cemetery.
Andy Stewart, who meets me at the cemetery, has
played these waiting games before. A biologist with the provincial
environment ministry, he has banded more than 1,100 of the birds
around Victoria and has a hawklike eye for where 60-plus pairs of
them will nest and raise their young. One site is here, a stone's
throw from Fairfield Road and a local shopping mall whose parking
lot will soon fill with cars.
 As we wait, it is inspiring to recall that only
four decades ago ecologists feared these birds would disappear. As
Rachel Carson warned in her seminal book Silent Spring, chemical
insecticides like DDT were robbing our world of birdsong. Raptors
were at particular risk because they occupied the food chain's upper
rungs, accumulating the chemicals in greater concentrations. As a
result, Cooper's hawks faced extirpation-local
extinction-particularly in the East. But as Stewart and
Wisconsin-based Cooper's hawk expert Bob Rosenfield know, the hawks
not only rebounded since the chemical stopped being applied but are
thriving.
They are also pleasantly confounding scientists
with their ability to adapt to unusual circumstances. In fact,
Rosenfeld is closely monitoring three different populations, one
here in Victoria, the other two in Wisconsin and North Dakota.
Although each landscape is unique, all are dramatically fragmented.
And for many scientists it is a deeply held belief, bordering on
religious conviction, that when you shred "pristine" wilderness into
small, dispersed patches you sentence species to death. Well, not
always.
Several weeks after our cemetery stop, Stewart
recalls encountering just such a bias when reading a scientific
journal, an experience that proved the catalyst to what is now a
decade-long field study in the Victoria area. In 1993, the Journal
of Raptor Research published an article suggesting that New Jersey's
Cooper's hawks would disappear.
"The impact of new [suburban] developments near
Cooper's hawk breeding habitat will produce forest fragmentation
effects, which lower breeding populations of interior bird species,
the principal prey of Cooper's hawk in our area," scientists from
Rutgers University, the University of Connecticut, and New Jersey's
Department of Environmental Protection reported. The trouble was,
they were wrong.
Ironically, New Jersey bills itself as the
Garden State. Yet Stewart knew that in Victoria the landscape was
much like parts of New Jersey, shredded into tiny patches of forest,
open areas of lawn and garden, hedgerows and trees. He's been
counting and banding Victoria's Cooper's hawks ever since.
"Even biologists are brainwashed to think that
humans and animals don't mix, that disturbance is always bad. I did
too when I first started," Stewart says. "All of the highest
recorded densities of these hawks are now in cities. They're in Los
Angeles. They're in Tucson... Yet, if you'd read the literature 10
years ago, you would have got the exact opposite impression."
Much as you would have if you'd read an even
earlier article published in 1974 by National Geographic. In it,
scientist Noel Snyder warned that Cooper's hawks needed "native
wilderness" and "woodland creatures" to feed on in order to survive.
He would make similar claims in Condor, a noted journal on avian
science. Years later, at Rosenfield's urging, National Geographic
published a roundabout mea culpa. Although not saying the previous
article was wrong, the magazine noted in a short item how new
studies showed the hawks flourishing in the very places others
portrayed as death traps.
Back at the cemetery, Stewart tells me that with
luck we will see some courting and nestbuilding activities when the
hawks arrive at dawn from their roosts. But this morning the female
appears briefly, then flies swiftly away toward a rocky promontory.
Moments later, the male alights in a budding tree. In early
daylight, his barred, reddish-brown breast shines, offset by dark
slate-blue wings and plumelike tail feathers in alternating bands of
light and dark grey.
Were his prospective mate here, he would by now
be striking the branch with his sharp beak to simulate the plucking
of prey. Then the two might fly about, snapping the ends off tree
branches, material for a new nest.
"She's thrown us a curve," Stewart says of the
female. "She will, I almost guarantee you, nest with this male. But
she's going to toy with another male. I've seen quite a few females
do this. They court several males. They might even copulate with
them. But they have no intentions of staying. It makes quite a bit
of sense when you think about it. If one of the males dies, she's
got a backup."
Three months later, I spend several mornings
with Stewart and Rosenfield as they trap adult hawks and band
nestlings. Stewart's wife, Irene, and son Brad often join them,
willing conscripts on the urban ecological frontier.
On the morning that the male hawk flies into the
net, the arm that reaches in to free it is attached to Rosenfield.
Short and of wiry build, Rosenfield is 51 and disarmingly fit. He is
also, as Stewart whispers in an aside, "a bit of a maniac". I
quickly learn why. After taking several measurements of the captured
hawk, Rosenfield casually walks over to the larch, gets a boost from
Brad, and climbs toward the nest some 17 metres off the ground. When
he gets there, the mother hawk repeatedly strafes him, drawing blood
on his forehead and arm. Somehow, Rosenfield retrieves five chicks,
places the porridge-coloured birds into a thick sack, and lowers it
by rope to the ground, where Andy and Brad weigh, sex, and tag the
young birds.
Five is many mouths to feed. And for weeks that
task falls entirely to the male while the female-about half again as
large and whom the male also feeds-guards the nest. The male's
smaller size accentuates his ease of movement. But even so, the
element of surprise remains critical to his ability to catch prey.
This is one reason why the hawks are so infrequently seen, even
though they live in such close proximity to humans. As legendary
raptor authority Frank Beebe describes in his richly detailed and
illustrated Field Studies of the Falconiformes of British Columbia (falconiformes
comprise eagles, hawks, and, of course, falcons), the crow-size
hawks "keep cover, often perching well-concealed for hours.
"If, by making a circuitous approach, they can
get within range of a prey they will perch, again, well-hidden,
until the prospective victim, unaware of the hawk, moves a little
away from cover and is momentarily pre-occupied or offguard. Then
the attack is made, swift and silent."
One afternoon while I was running in a nearby
park, a hawk swooped over my right shoulder, then immediately
dropped to a metre off the ground, navigating the twisting pathway
before disappearing around a corner. I cannot say whether my
presence spooked the hawk's would-be prey or whether the clever bird
used me as a foil, hoping that I might flush a songbird. Or perhaps
it simply used the dense thickets of snowberry bushes and grasses
lining the pathway to move unseen to a new perch. What I do know is
that I was witnessing an ongoing evolutionary miracle.
The Cooper's hawk, Rosenfield explains, "is a
bird-catcher. He has long legs, relatively speaking, and long toes
for grasping things that are very agile, like avian prey. He has a
very long tail, which provides for manoeuv?rability through thick
vegetation. And he has short, rounded wings like a grouse, which
also allows for ease of manoeuvre."
 The highly fragmented urban landscape, as
opposed to the undisturbed forest, proves a remarkably good fit for
the hawks. A proliferation of wooded parks, cemeteries, and back
yards provides them with nesting habitat. Hundreds of linear miles
of edge habitat-the trees and bushes hemming in homes, schoolyards,
and campuses-give them roosts. And gardens, open areas, and bird
feeders act as magnets to the smaller birds that the hawks
frequently prey on, including introduced starlings and house
sparrows, the latter of which often do the wrong thing when pursued:
they take cover in bushes. The hawks crash in right behind them "and
take 'em out", Rosenfield says with a grim little chuckle.
What continues to intrigue Rosenfield, a
professor at the University of Wisconsin at Stevens Point, is that
these hawks uncannily adjust to new habitats. In Wisconsin, known
for its deciduous forests and riotously colourful autumns, many
Cooper's hawks nest in pine plantations. Often derided by
environmentalists as "biological dead zones", these dense evergreen
patches provide excellent nesting opportunities. And because they
are frequently on the perimeter of open areas, they are great launch
sites for hunts.
Entirely different circumstances prevail in
North Dakota. Cooper's hawks traditionally stay away from more open
grasslands or prairies. But in response to long-standing human
efforts to suppress fires, trees there are colonizing former
grasslands and Cooper's hawks are responding by taking up residence.
And then there are the cities. So significant
are they to these once almost exclusively forest-dwelling birds that
Rosenfield believes it is in cities where we will see the most
dramatic advances in the evolution of this species.
Adapting to altered landscapes is, happily, not
just the domain of Cooper's hawks. Just a few blocks from my house,
along one of the busiest beachside promenades in Victoria, another
raptor that for many people symbolizes wildness and freedom took up
residence two springs ago. A pair of bald eagles built a nest high
in an elm tree in a residential back yard. Beebe notes that in their
hunting habits, food, and even reproductive periods, bald eagles
"have evolved to suit extremely diverse situations". They are,
variously, "scavengers, carrion-feeders, pirates, fishermen, mammal
or bird predators, and they capture the latter either from the air,
on the ground, or from the water".
One morning while walking along the promenade, I
stopped to ask an eagle enthusiast what she had seen through a huge
telephoto lens mounted on her camera. She replied, excitedly, that
only minutes earlier the two eagles had pursued a gull off Willow's
Beach, hitting it in midair. The injured gull made it to an outlying
islet before being snatched by the much more powerful birds. Back at
the nest, the mother eagle ripped into the carcass while her
offspring clamoured for the innards. As I walked farther along, a
scavenging gull, oblivious to the fate of one of its own, pecked
through a greasy piece of paper to extract a discarded French fry.
From garbage to gull to bald eagle-a food chain as vital to the
survival of these big urban-dwelling raptors as the chum salmon that
months later will spawn at distant Goldstream Park.
Not far from the eagles' nest, the sound of
barking California sea lions can sometimes be heard from several
kilometres away. Working together, the mammals, which migrate up the
West Coast from California to B.C., herd resident fish toward one
another. Some of these same sea lions will later swim across the
Strait of Georgia to the mouth of the Fraser River. In distant
decades past, the river mouth was far different, a true delta with
numerous channels and sandbars. But dyke and breakwater construction
long ago ended that. In popular wildlife tours commencing on the
lower river in April, you are almost guaranteed to see the visiting
sea lions basking on the breakwater, new habitat and an ideal spot
for them to take a breather while fishing for oolichan.
Wildlife biologists have known for some time
that in North American parks wildlife diversity is declining. The
biggest losses are in smaller, more isolated parks. But they're
occurring in big parks too, as U.S. biologist William Newmark
reported in a landmark study in the 1980s. Should we throw up our
hands, then, and give up? Stewart and Rosenfield suggest not.
Although not all species display the remarkable ability to adjust as
do Cooper's hawks, bald eagles, and sea lions, the truth is that
given space and time, many species do adapt, often quickly. The more
we can learn about how they do, the better able we will be to
intervene in appropriate ways.
Furthermore, change, and our ability to initiate
it, may be precisely what is needed to ensure the survival of some
species in certain ecosystems. Take grasslands. In all of the
justified concern over our diminishing old-growth forests, one of
the things that often is neglected is that too many trees in too
many places are a bad thing. Grasslands remain one of our most
endangered landscapes, in part because of farming and urban
developments, but also because of our zealous suppression of fires.
By doing our best to stamp out fires, we now have trees encroaching
on grasslands all across North America. The new trees look good-and
they are good for certain species, North Dakota's Cooper's hawks
being a good example-but they are bad for a host of grass-nesting
birds, rare and endangered burrowing owls, and browsers such as wild
sheep.
We can continue to suppress fires out of a
belief that they are destructive or we can let lightning strike and
let the fires bum where they may. Or we can deliberately set our own
fires and attempt to influence when and where they burn, as many
First Nations people did prior to Europeans arriving and stamping
out the practice. But whether we leave things alone or actively
intervene, there will be consequences. There is no such thing as a
steady state.
In our ongoing struggle to protect biological
diversity, we face difficult choices. There will be winners and
losers whatever we do. Clearly, many species are threatened with
extinction-mountain caribou, northern spotted owls, and Vancouver
Island marmots being three high-profile examples-because we have not
respected how they respond to disturbances, both natural and
humancaused. But it is folly to lose sight of the fact that some of
our actions, intended or not, allow others species to flourish. The
great challenge before us is accepting responsibility for being
environmental stewards and making fundamental choices about how we
alter habitats to achieve desired outcomes.
"Nothing stays the same," Rosenfield says at one
point. "And, by the way, which `pristine' times do you want to talk
about? The 1840s? The 1730s? Change is the norm, and you have to
reevaluate your values as ecological realities change. A lot of
people don't want to see things that way. But in the face of
ever-present change, your values, to a certain extent, have to alter
too."
Rosenfield and Stewart quickly snag another hawk
in a net erected on the banks of a stream whose swelling waters run
brown from spring runoff.
After examining his capture, Stewart gently
pushes the bird's feathered breast against my ear. I close my eyes,
losing myself in the sound of the hawk's rapidly beating heart and
the feel of his open beak grazing my scalp.
Each bird has a story. Last year, this male and
his mate lost their young when a windstorm turned their nest into
cascading twigs. Typically, males don't move far, even following
such disasters. Their territorial affinity is strong. But this one
moved farther than Stewart had ever seen. Perhaps stronger suitors
pushed him out. Or perhaps he wasn't the right fit. (In Wisconsin,
breeding hawks tend to pair by size: big females with big males,
smaller females with smaller males. Ongoing study by Rosenfield and
Stewart will determine whether the same is true in Victoria.) In any
event, the hawk settled here, some 3.5 kilometres from the previous
nest site.
After telling me this, Stewart places the hawk
into my right hand. The bird's feet press flat into my palm. My
thumb grips his left wing, my four fingers his right. "Toss him like
a football," Stewart says. And as I do, his wings open and he flies
off into a nearby fir.
Later I learn that a car hit the same hawk a day
after its release. Luckily, he survived to see another day. Others
aren't so fortunate. Collisions with cars and building windows are
common. Life here has its dangers, but apparently not enough to
dissuade these avian residents. This year alone, 32 adult hawks are
caught and 114 young are banded, a record in Stewart's ongoing
study.
This new frontier has what the birds need-not
least of all us.
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