Cortes Currents

Roy L Hales/ Cortes Currents - CityWest will also be providing phone and TV to Cortes Islanders who choose these services. Regional Manager Dino Tsakonas told De Clarke, of Cortes Currents, when she was visiting the crew burying fibre optic cable in Squirrel Cove last week.

This was followed by Regional Director Noba Anderson’s announcement on CKTZ’s Folk U Friday.

Tsakonas told me packages are always in the +$20 range.

“There's so many different options, it's really hard for me to go over everything because everyone's going to have a different idea of what they want for the TV, to the long distance on phone, to the type of internet they want, whether they want quantum 20 quantum 50 quantum on 25 quantum 250 quantum gigabit. You can build your own bundle if you go to https://www.citywest.ca/south.”

“We're in the first phase where they are just laying the cable along the side of the road. Klahoose is getting it from the road to the home at this moment,” said Tsakonas.

The work crew will continue burying fibre-optic cable along the route from Squirrel Cove to Seaford. Mansons Landing should come next, then Whaletown.

Local contractors should start coming up to houses in Squirrel Cove during the next few weeks.

“With any type of project, there's obviously going to be snafus. The total plan was to be four plus months, but we'll see what happens. Given our landscape here, you never know what may happen. You might get supply demands, you might have some problems with all the rock in certain areas and what have you. So it could take a few weeks longer,” said Tsakonas.

In a previous interview, Eric Geall, Operations Manager for West Connect Infrastructure (WCI) said Cortesians should receive high speed internet sometime between next summer and the end of 2023.

“He's been pretty vague obviously, but that two years - I'd be extremely surprised if that was the case,” said Tsakonas.

He added a reminder that people should pre-register at CityWest to receive two months free internet.

For further information:

Go to the CityWest website https://www.citywest.ca/south

phone: 1-800-442-8664

email [email protected]

Manda Aufochs Gillespie/Folk U - What is happening with the proposed Telus Towers on Cortes Island? What's proposed? What input will islanders have? What exactly is the technology proposed? Will another tower in Manson's fix our island cell problems? What is 5G and how is this different than City West's fiber-optic proposal?

Director Noba Anderson, representative of Safe Tech Cortes, reporter Anastasia Avvakumova, and others will join Manda Aufochs Gillespie this Friday on Folk U Radio at 1 p.m. on CKTZ 89.5FM or cortesradio.ca for livestream.

Roy L Hales/ Cortes Currents - Sandra Wood talks about what the Cortes Community Housing Society achieved in 2021, when the Rainbow Ridge affordable housing project will be shovel ready and what the society will do after it is finished.

Roy L Hales/ Cortes Currents - Mosaic Forest Management is tentatively considering logging some of their Cortes Island holding after the wildfire season ends this year.

The forestry giant laid out their draft three-year plan during a ZOOM call on Thursday night. A company spokesperson emphasized the idea this is very much a draft plan and they want to hear back from Cortes residents.

Mosaic owns 1,085 hectares, or just under 9% of the Cortes land base. They have been studying Cortes Forestry General Partnership’s operations and plan to log in a manner that is similar in size and scope.

Their first year’s cut is currently 13 hectares. These have been laid out in 5 cutblocks, averaging 2.8 hectares. They are in the Delights Lake area, as well as behind the log dump in Gorge Harbour and across the public road to the north.

Proposed cuts for 2023 and 2024 are smaller. Operations in the upper Basil Creek area and off Blue Jay road will commence in year two.

A company spokesperson said, “We’ve tried to plan the first three years of blocks away from the very sensitive areas.”

During the question period, Mosaic added that at this point they have not made any plans beyond the three years being discussed.

They also reiterated that the cutblocks are proposed, no ribbons have been hung on the ground yet and they are waiting to hear back from Cortes residents.

Mosaic is defining old growth as trees that are 200 years old and promise to not cut any stands that have more than 20 old growth trees per hectare.

They will attempt retain the old trees in stands that do not meet that 20 per hectare threshold, providing it is safe to do so and the land is not needed for roads.

Mosaic has identified all of Cortes Island’s registered water licenses and promise to coordinate with owners when their activities are near a water license. This includes walking these areas with owners. A company spokesperson said regulations dictate that their activities cannot have adverse effects on drinking water.

Company spokespersons also said they are looking into different ways they can provide firewood to the community.

The first hour of the ZOOM call was Mosaic’s presentation. Molly Hudson, Director of Sustainability, described some of the wildlife protection, water, quality protection and sustainable harvesting practices they will be following. She said Mosaic does think about providing wildlife corridors and habitat for species at risk. They have incorporated setbacks of from 10 to 30 metres from streams, depending on how they are classified. One of the other managers stated that the UK based carbon trust calculated Mosaic’s carbon footprint in 2016 and the company intends to become a positive sequestration business by 2035.

The last 40 minutes of the call was a question period. Cortes Island Regional Director Noba Anderson pointed out that this was not a true public meeting because residential input was limited to questions typed into the chat box. Hudson replied that they had intended to hold a pubic meeting in February, but changed their plans due to COVID 19.

Roy L Hales/ Cortes Currents - In a previous interview with the Quadra ICAN water security team, Bernie Amell said that development could take place in a manner that respects the natural water balance. Amell is co-owner of the environmental design firm Source2Source and a recognized authority in the design of constructed wetlands for water treatment, and in the restoration of streams and riparian habitats. One of his firm’s projects received a gold medal from the Canadian Society of Landscape Architects last year. Amell’s bio mentions over 135 restoration projects throughout Alberta and in British Columbia. He has presented his work at national and international water management professional conferences. Amell lives on Quadra Island and in today’s interview, he talks about learning to work with the natural water balance.

“Natural water balance is an idea that has been generated in the past 20 years by people in a stormwater management world,” he explained.

Prior to that, people simply built ditches or install pipes to drain away the excess water from areas where they wanted to build houses, businesses or cities.

Unfortunately, there were often consequences.

“It seems like you're not really doing much to the hydrology, but in fact you are. So, what has happened in the stormwater management world is to recognize that even fairly humble things that we all take for granted, like curbs on roads and roadside ditches and the ditches in farm fields and so on change the hydrology. Most human activities do,” explained Amell.

A roof has a hundred percent runoff and so does a parking area (after it's been used a few years).

“There is a whole set of fairly humble tools to maintain a natural water balance close to the point where that human impact has occurred,” said Amell.

It is relatively inexpensive to address the problem of water draining from a roof. Problems affecting multiple city blocks are fixable, but more expensive.

Remember that big circular water cycle that most of us learned about in elementary school?

“If you delve into the detail of how the rain falls on the ground, usually you just see the vegetation and the soil. There is a certain amount of the rainfall caught in the canopy that never actually makes it to the ground, called intercepted water. There's not much in this rainy season, but throughout the year it's probably 5% to 10%. Then there's a spongy layer of humus, leaves and everything and, surficial vegetation and routes that take a very high proportion of the water into the ground,“ said Amell. “Probably 50% of the water that falls in an area doesn't run off the land, it goes into the ground or its used by the vegetation on the property.”

Amell cited the Dillon Creek Wetland Restoration project, which helps filtrate the flow of nitrates into Gunflint Lake on Cortes Island, as an example of reversing the damages from human development.

On a smaller scale, a structured bed of earth with plants can address the problem of runoff from a roof.

“If you're dealing with a few acres of land around a house, you might just focus on biofilter beds because you could integrate it, say with a fruit orchard or something that will also benefit from having deeper rooted soil conditions,” explained Amell. “You have to deliberately create it. You've created the roof and the pavement that increases runoff from one area. You have to do some deliberation somewhere else. I call it countervailing effects. That's what the core of the natural water balance is about, understanding the kind of nitty gritty of the water cycle on your property. Then saying, ‘Okay, I've done inescapable things that effect it, what can I do to bring things back into balance?’”

Roy L Hales/ Cortes Currents - In the second of two broadcasts about more sustainable forestry practices, one of the founders of the Cortes Community Fortes Co-operative talks about the industry’s diminishing harvests in terms that every gardener understands. 

“Back in the 1970s it used to be called tree farming, to give the public the idea that you're actually going to be creating crops off of that landscape each year,” said Ellingsen. 

Every farmer knows that they need to replace the nutrients that they are taking out of the soil, or “pretty soon it will not grow a crop successfully any longer.” 

However the foresters, engineers and everybody else involved in deciding what is a sustainable cut in the provincial forest are not allowing for the reduction of nutrients in the land base with each succeeding harvest. 

“They just work on an assumption that has been toted for years. We can cut down the forest and then as long as we replant at least one tree for each one we cut - or maybe two or three considering that they will not all get to an age where we allow ourselves to cut them again - we're still going to be sustainable. Each crop is going to be replaced with new trees, but the thing is not being replaced is the nutrients that it takes to grow those trees. It's being gradually drawn down,” explained Ellingsen. 

He said it takes about three years for the soil in his garden to become exhausted. After that, he needs to either add nutrients in or leave the garden fallow so it can regenerate itself.

“In forestry terms, we're dealing over a lot longer timeframe, but the dynamic is still the same. Every time you have a new crop of trees on a landscape and harvest it, you're taking about half of the nutrients that it took to grow that tree out of that landscape and disappears down to the booming ground and off to the ship or wherever it's going or the saw mill, or wherever it's going,” said Ellingsen.“Over probably three or four rotations, you're going to be exhausting, that landscape of the ability and the nutrients required to regenerate, succeeding crops of trees.” 

He said Eastern Vancouver Island is now into its  third or fourth tree harvest. The forests between Victoria and Sayward were initially logged in the late 1800’s and early 1900’s. Most of the giant trees were cut down by the 1950’s and 60’s. Isolated pockets remain, like Cathedral Grove on the way to Port Alberni.

“When I was a young fellow, the assumed harvesting cycle was around 80 to 120. Now the ministry of forest thinks that the sustainable rate of harvest should be around 60 to possibly 80 years or 50 to possibly eight years. So it's creeping down all the time.”

Roy L Hales/ Cortes Currents - “Most of what’s left is up in the mountains and the coast range or the Rockies and so not the productive sites anymore. Most of what was easy to get is gone,” said Bruce Ellingsen, one of the founders of the Cortes Community Forest Co-operative, in reference to British Columbia’s old growth trees.

In the first of two articles about current forestry practices, Ellingsen looks to nature for models of a more sustainable consumption rate.

Landsat satellite data published by the University of Maryland (and reproduced at the top of this page), show that there has been alarming loss of the forests on Vancouver Island and in the interior of British Columbia during the past 20 years.

Less easily accessible areas in the north of the province, or in the coastal and rocky mountains, are relatively untouched.

In a previous interview Bruce Ellingsen explained that the discrepancy between the government and satellite descriptions of the province’s forest coverage may be because trees less than 5 metres high do not show up in Landsat images. So much of the light coloured areas that appear as tree loss in the university’s map may be covered by what are in effect tree toddlers. These trees will be harvested once they are between 50 to 80 years old. To use a comparison with humans, then they will effectively be pre-teens, with a far greater proportion of sapwood than is present in mature trees.

“We’re the ones that are managing it and we’re the ones that are going to have the impact. If we want to do it in a sustainable way, then we’ve got to look for indicators that will give us a guidance as to whether we are going to be able to achieve that goal of having that ecosystem that grows trees for us be able to sustain,” said Bruce Ellingsen.

Ellingsen says he came up with the idea of studying predation rates from an old report about the dynamic between Peregrine Falcons and Ancient Murrelets on the Nature of Things. After 17 years of studying, researchers concluded that the Peregrines were probably taking around 15 to 20% of the mean annual seabird population increase.

“That got me thinking that possibly there’s indicators in natural system dynamics in the world that we could look at,” explained Ellingsen.

He discovered a similar predation rate between polar bears and ringed seals, after a visit to Churchill, Manitoba, in 2003. That led him to to the work of Dr Ian Sterling, who has been studying polar bears since the early 1970s. Sterling and his colleagues believe that every year polar bears were consuming between 13% and 22% of the seal population

A similar statistic was reported in a New York times about Central America’s Leaf Cutter Ants. Scientists found that the ants were only taking 13 to 20% of the shrubs, trees and other vegetation in their area and that has probably been going on for millions of years.

The only human example he found comes from the South Island of New Zealand and the Rocky islands offshore, where the Maoris have been harvesting about 18% of the seabird eggs every year.

“This has been going on for about 700 years and obviously you can start to say that’s a reasonably sustainable dynamic for a population that is reproducing annually,” said Ellingsen.

He added that forestry ecologists like Herb Hammond, of the Silva Forest Foundation, and Jerry Franklin, from the University of Washington, seem to agree that maybe 25% of what grows in a forest is extra and the forest needs everything beyond that to keep itself alive and healthy.

Roy L Hales/ Cortes Currents - Dr. Kelsey Gil is  a postdoctoral researcher at UBC’s department of zoology and the lead author of a paper published in Current Biology that literally peaks down the throat of a lunge whale.

Lunge feeding whales (humpbacks, blue whales and fin whales) open their mouths as they accelerate towards their prey.

Gil explained that if, for example, a human were to do this in a swimming pool, they would have to swallow a volume of water equal to their body size.

“So you'd have to put yourself in your own mouth and then push out all the parts that you didn't actually want to swallow and keep the parts in your mouth that you did,” she said.

One of the questions explored in this paper, is why lunge whales don’t drown while they are doing this?

Humpback Whales in our area

Humpback whales only just returned to our area this past decade, after what appears to be a 140-year-absence.

They seem to have disappeared around the time the whaling industry collapsed, in 1871.

Lynne Jordan, former curator of the Cortes Island Museum, told Cortes Currents there was a sighting between Cortes and Quadra Islands around 2011 or 2012.

The number of humpback whales swimming into our area kept increasing and there were 58 sightings when the Vancouver Island. Aquarium took a census over the long weekend in August 2017.

Helen Hall, Executive Director of Friends of Cortes Island, explained, “Some of those may be the same humpback whales, but the same weekend a year ago, they only had two sightings - so there has been a huge increase in the numbers this summer.”

Sightings have become more common and on the Friends of Cortes Island website it says, “Unbelievably 86 individual humpback whales were identified in local waters just last year.”

Looking down a Lunge Whale’s throat

Scientists already knew a lot about lunge feeding, up until the moment prey enters a whale’s mouth.

Dr. Gil and her colleagues wanted to find out what happens next.

They found a kind of oral plug, at the back of the whale’s mouth, that seals off their upper airways during feeding. Otherwise food would be entering their nasal cavities.

As for the lunge whale’s ability to take in its own weight in water:

“Whales have this huge pouch that extends all the way from their mouth down to their belly button. That's where all this water is going. They open their mouths up, their tongue turns outside in and extends all the way down to their belly button,” explained Gil. “The pouch collapses back as they're closing their mouth. That's what's assisting all of the water to be pushed out through those baleen plates. It seems like a lot of work to get all of this krill, but clearly it's working very well for these animals considering they have managed to become the largest animals on the planet.”

Roy L Hales/ Cortes Currents - MOWI Canada West is closing down its processing plant in Surrey and another fish farm has left the Broughton Archipelago.

On December 17th MOWI Canada West announced it is closing its fish processing plant in Surrey because of a 30% loss in production volume as a result of the closure of fish farms.

Rupinder Dadwan, MOWI’s Human Resources Manager, said, “This is what happens when politics overrides science-based evidence. At the beginning of the pandemic we were deemed an essential service providing our country affordable and healthy food, and now we’re forced to close our doors. Our Federal Government doesn’t have to do this – it can choose fairness and engagement over divisiveness and exclusion.”

One of the fish farms that MOWI is closing down is Wicklow Point in the Broughton Archipelago.

Cortes Currents first learned of this through a Facebook video by a Broughton resident using the initials DLW. He was on the shore and filmed a tugboat towing some flat objects, possibly the fish farms pens.

“Fish farm leaving the Broughtons, that’s just beautiful. That’s awesome, the best thing to happen all day,” said DLW. “You should try [putting fish farms] out in the open ocean, where they are going to have a less of an impact or better yet put them on land.”

The BC Salmon Farmers Association have not responded to a request for an interview, or commented on DLW’s suggestion that fish farms move out to sea.

Independent biologist Alexandra Morton, who has been counting sea lice in the vicinity of the Wicklow Point fish farm since 2001, was available to comment.

“I can see that [the Wicklow Point fish Farm] has left, which is incredible. It means that most of the migration route for the juvenile salmon in the Broughtons are now clear of salmon farms. Not all of them: the southern part is still loaded, but the Otter, Viner and Kakweken Rivers will benefit directly from the removal of that farm,” she said. “I have to say though, that the companies in the Broughton have done everything they can to lower their lice more or less successfully. They’re probably trying harder in the Broughton than anywhere else in the world to lower their lice because of the Broughton Aquaculture Transition Initiative, which was signed in 2018. The way it works is that many of the farms had a scheduled termination date, but the last seven farms, some from each company, remain in limbo based on the decision of the three First Nations Leaders (‘Namgis, Mamtagila, and Kwiḵwa̱sut̓inux̱w).

Morton also said she did not think DLW’s idea of moving fish farms out to sea is feasible. She believes they would be placed where the currents are and there are already wild salmon there.

“Get out of the water. Put them in a tank and let’s just get it over with,” she said.

Roy L Hales/ Cortes Currents - Last week I published a story about some old growth trees cut down on Quadra Island, then almost immediately became aware there was much more to the story and took it down.

There is no question about old growth trees being cut down on woodlot licence W2031.

Nor is there any question about the legality of the woodlot licensees action. They have not broken any laws.

As one of the licensees emailed, “With regards to your questions about old growth and riparian management, these complaints were brought forward in 2020 to the Ministry of Forests (Campbell River District) and again in 2021 to the Association of BC Forest Professionals (ABCFP). Both bodies investigated the facts and determined that the complaints were without merit.” 

There were questions about the woodlot owners following the ‘Management Plan for areas within the Georgia Straits Provincial Plan.’

I was told they are violating this plan, but have come to disagree.

Firstly, this 21 page document does not appear to be a binding agreement, but rather a historical document from 1993. It deals with parts of the island south of the woodlot in question. Among other things, it also proposes the creation of what became Main Lake Provincial Park (in 1996).

This plan was drawn up by the now long defunct Quadra Island Forest Resources Committee, but, according to a recent Discovery Islander article, “many Woodlot Licensees have committed to complying with the Quadra Plan in their Woodlot Licence Plans.”

Secondly, contrary to what I was told, woodlot licence W2031 actually embraces the key tenant it is supposedly violating: “preservation of existing old-growth and the need to grow more.” 

That is a goal.

In the plan for woodlot licence W2031, there are provisions for cutting down old growth trees to build roads, for safety reasons, or if the trees are infested by insects.

The licensees informed Cortes Currents that the old growth they removed were individual trees outside of the preservation areas set up on their woodlot.

Four stands of trees 250 years old and older have been established as wildlife tree retention areas. A large body of the second growth trees around these stands have been designated ‘recruitment areas’ to grow more old growth.

The licensees also emailed some numbers to Cortes Currents. The most pertinent is probably that 98% of the trees they have felled are second growth.

This pertains to how the woodlot owner intends to reach the goal of increasing the number of old growth trees.

I am told that many Quadra Island woodlot licensees go further and do not cut any old growth trees, but this is a personal choice.

In both cases the licensee’s stated intention is to increase the total number of old growth trees in their tenders.

Top image credit: One of the paths in Main Lake Provincial Park - Photo by Loneshieling via Wikimedia (CC BY SA, 4.0 License)