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FIONA FOLLOWUP

Forestry industry hit hard by hurricane

AARON BESWICK SALTWIRE NETWORK abeswick@herald.ca @chronicleherald

You can learn to make the gargantuan arm of steel and hydraulics with its fully articulated cutter head that itself is claw, saw and processing line all at once, an extension of your own body.

But that doesn’t mean you’re going to have a good day.

“Looks like he’s fighting with it,” said Mark Bannerman as he watched Alex MacPherson tug on a big white spruce with the harvester.

The 25 year-old MacPherson was helming a half-milliondollar machine in a 150-acre blowdown on Frasers Mountain, Pictou County, last week.

Like most of northern Nova Scotia’s pastures, it was left fallow after the great wars. White spruces with their seeds that can germinate through the once precious sod colonized, grew big, branchy and old.

Then Fiona came, ripped them all up by their shallow roots and threw them topsyturvy in a giant mess you can’t even walk through.

The Department of Natural Resources is pouring over satellite images and foresters are cruising lots around the province as they seek to quantify Fiona’s damage.

Right now, they mainly know that it was a lot and that worst hit were valuable stands of mature spruce and fir.

Hurricanes have been flattening forests on our peninsular province since before our ancestors wandered out onto the savannah chasing forgotten beasts.

Management regimes are in the midst of a redesign meant to make Nova Scotians live more sustainably with our forests. Fiona flattened some of our best efforts at progressive forestry, but took a lesser toll on the few older hardwood stands we still have.

As foresters and harvesters literally work to pick up the pieces from Fiona, they’re also wrestling with what bigger storms brought on by climate change mean for the future of forest management in this province.

CLIMATE CHANGE, BIGGER STORMS

“I was fighting with it,” admitted Alex MacPherson of the big white spruce his boss had just watched him process.

Trooper’s We’re Here For a Good Time (Not a Long Time) played from the harvester as MacPherson and Bannerman talked about the job ahead amongst upturned root networks 3.6 metres high.

‘Fighting with it’ is bad – it leads to breakdowns in the woods in a business where time is money.

The payments don’t stop when the machine does.

But what else can you do with a pile of dumped matchsticks?

It’s a question that’s long faced by those living in this province.

“Trees were all blown down here ( in Queens County) by a hurricane about 80 years ago, which was followed by a fire next year, after which the young growth which now covers the ground, came up,” wrote Titus Smith, a surveyor, philosopher and arguably Nova Scotia’s first ecologist in 1801.

All those mounds and humps we tromp over in older stands of forest are what remains of the upturned roots of previous blowdowns.

By coring trees and counting growth rings, foresters have been able to tie many of this province’s old growth stands to historic hurricanes. Threecentury-old

red spruce and hemlock stands in southwestern Nova Scotia are believed to have originated from a 1676 hurricane that devastated forests and made widows of many fishermen’s wives.

“Hurricanes are our dominant disturbance regime in Nova Scotia, so we’ve got to understand them and we’ve got to understand how they’ll change with climate change,” said James Steenberg, senior research forester with the Department of Natural Resources and Renewables.

“Disturbance regimes” are as much a force for renewal in forests as death and generational churn is in our own societies.

For the spruce and fir dominated boreal forests of central Canada it’s fire and waves of insects and fungal infections are the primary disturbance.

While our more complex Acadian forests get those, their diversity makes them less prone to huge stand replacing events. Until, of course, a hurricane sweeps through.

Steenberg moved into Fenwick Tower, Halifax’s tallest building, in September 2003 as a young forester to begin his master’s research.

On Sept. 29 hurricane Juan, with its 160 km/h winds gave him a front row seat to disturbance regimes.

“First time I walked through Point Pleasant Park was after the hurricane and it struck me that all the spruces were down but the pine were still standing,” said Steenberg.

Hurricanes don’t typically wipe the slate clean so a new forest can start – they can benefit some species that have evolved to survive.

White pines with their strong arms and flexible needles do well. So do longer lived hardwoods like sugar maple, yellow birch and red oak, with deep taproots anchoring them to the earth.

The goal for Steenberg and other Natural Resources staff as they work to implement the Lahey Report is to develop management guidelines that see our harvesting replicate as closely as possible the impact of natural disturbances like hurricanes.

“It will help preserve biodiversity at the landscape level,” said Steenberg.

DOLLARS AND CENTS OF STORM DAMAGE

During the first four months of Bannerman’s investment of putting a rookie operator into a harvester to learn controls that more closely resemble the cockpit of a fighter jet than a piece of heavy equipment, Trooper would have been good background to the work’s rhythm.

MacPherson grabs a tree, saws it off at the butt, flips it horizontal and uses the big toothed wheels in the cutterhead limb it.

Then it's decisions to make everyone money – good 16 or 12 foot spruce sawlogs go for the highest price at mills like Williams Brothers in Barneys River. Shorter, smaller diameter lengths go to stud mills in Scotsburn and outside Truro. Lowest quality softwood goes for pulp at Port Hawkesbury Paper. If there’s enough good hardwood logs for a load they head to the Groupe Savoie mill in Westville.

It’s in the cab of the harvester where the plans for ecological forestry meet financial imperatives.

The mills and harvesters of this province compete an eastern North American marketplace.

When the work gets bogged down in toppled stands an already tight margined industry becomes less viable.

Next Generation Forestry alone has a list of 30 blown down woodlots in northern Nova Scotia to harvest for their owners.

As of last week Bannerman’s crews had finished work on two.

“Many (of the landowners) count on their woodlots to be there for their children’s education or their own retirement,” said Bannerman.

But if the woodlot is flattened, the costs of harvesting can exceed the value in what would come out – meaning Fiona emptied many rural savings accounts in one windy night.

As the company’s name suggests, Bannerman is all for progressive forestry.

But in those wrecked woodlots he also sees where good intentions can go awry.

In 2019 they did a pre-commercial thinning in a large lot in Country Harbour, Guysborough County.

Planted with spruce when he was just a child, Bannerman’s harvesters cut paths 18 metres apart.

The harvester was able to reach into the standing forest on either side and remove about 30 per cent of the spruce.

The harvest made some money for the landowner, made room for the remaining trees to grow larger and left habitat for wildlife.

Then Fiona came through and, thanks in part to the disturbed canopy, blew it all down.

Or at least most of it down – where the paths run East to West the trees are all flat but where they run north to south, they’re still standing.

“The (northerly) wind must have been able to funnel right up those trains,” said Bannerman.

“It’s not something you could account for everywhere but there are some sites on which you could make decisions that might protect them better in the future.”

BEST LAID PLANS GO ASTRAY

The Department of Natural

Resources and Renewables is planning for what it calls a ‘triad’ approach to Crown land management.

The first leg is a protected area and won’t be touched, the second leg is ecological forestry where progressive harvesting regimes that promote the return of longer lived species and the third leg is high production forestry.

The market wants spruce logs to build houses out of and low-grade spruce/fir for pulpwood. For the last half century we primarily managed for these species.

“Those are also the species most vulnerable to blow down,” said Anthony Taylor, an associate professor of forest management at the University of New Brunswick who has been researching what bigger storms mean for the Acadian forest.

They’re even more susceptible when the forest canopy is opened up by partial harvesting techniques.

“If you’re trying to protect industry and spruce and fir, an idea would be to avoid partial cutting on spruce fir stands if you can,” said Taylor.

“Either don’t touch it or if you’re going to cut it, clear it all at once.

“You could also try to manage so there’s more mixed wood content – more pine, more hardwood (mainly the maples and the birches).”

The more windfirm longer lived species, like yellow birch, sugar maple, hemlock,white pine and red spruce, don’t want to grow everywhere – they want the better soil.

About a third of the province is a natural home for black and white spruce, balsam fir and colonizer species like white birch, poplar and red maple.

The high production third of Crown land, which will see softwood plantations and clearcuts to feed industry, is a better fit for those constrained lands.

It’s the ecological leg, where it gets complicated.

“There are areas across province we can restore to tolerant hardwood and mixed wood,” said Steenberg.

“And there are areas where that can’t happen – almost a quarter of province that are constrained by soil nutrients, moisture. There still is going to be a lot of areas where that regime is getting flattened by hurricanes.”

Which is to say, no matter how much we learn about our forests and well-intentioned our management, sometimes it’s going to end in a mess like the one confronting young Alex MacPherson on Fraser Mountain.

Though not typically accused of it, maybe Trooper had some wise words of counsel on forest management as it blared from the harvester’s cab:

“And every year, has its share of tears

And every now and then it's gotta rain.”

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2022-12-01T08:00:00.0000000Z

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