Clearcuts Came. The Martens and Lynx Left

A lot has changed in the 40 years that Don Wilkins has spent trapping in the forests of north-central British Columbia.

During an hour-long journey into the upper reaches of the Bowron valley where he plied his trade for years, the 79-year-old talks about the steady erosion in wildlife habitat he’s seen.

As more and more primary forests fall in industrial logging operations, marten, lynx and other species once easily caught by trappers are plummeting in number, losses that trappers have warned for years are a direct result of habitat loss and that scientists confirm.

Fisher and marten, two members of the weasel family, “like big branches where they can rest and watch for prey species — rabbits, mice, small birds, whatever they eat,” Wilkins says at one point. “You don’t get those resting areas in tree plantations after logging. The trees are too young and they’re so close together. You can’t see anything.”

Wilkins, who once worked in one of B.C.’s last steam-driven sawmills near Christina Lake, says he wants to be clear that he has never been opposed to logging.

“It's the extent of fibre extraction that bothers me,” he emphasizes as we head east on Highway 16, leaving his hometown of Prince George behind.

To underscore the point, Wilkins points to an oncoming logging truck. When he first started trapping, logging trucks and trailers had half the axles of today’s rigs, which can top out at eight, nine, even 10 axles, and which arrive in Prince George from every direction with double the logs of old and from great distances away, so depleted have the region’s primary forests become.

The reach of the logging industry has become so great, Wilkins warns, that the part-time work that he did and loved doing for decades is at risk of ending, and with it the valuable knowledge and insights that he and other trappers gained from decades spent in the bush. Change, he says, can’t come soon enough. And it should begin with no more logging on his trapline.

Logging’s long reach

The Tyee has confirmed through searches of a provincial government database that in 2024 logs from as far as an hour’s drive north of Fort Nelson were being hauled by truck all the way to Prince George, a distance of more than 900 kilometres. Logs have travelled even farther into Prince George from B.C.’s remote northwest corner, distances that have pushed driver safety into the danger zone.

Meanwhile, what little natural forests remain closer to home are getting logged too, and Wilkins says he’s had enough.

At the end of January, he joined guide outfitter and trapline owner Scott Pichette to urge Kevin Hoekstra, the provincial Ministry of Forests’ district manager in Prince George, to take action.

“Nearly 10,000 hectares of wildlife habitat have been clear cut in recent decades and hundreds of kilometres of roads now fragment this trapline. The subsequent plantations lack the habitat features required by small and middle-sized carnivores, not to mention the big timber for moose and deer during winter,” Wilkins and Pichette wrote in a letter to Hoekstra.

So extensive has that logging been that the forests no longer intercept rain and snow and moderate water flows as they once did. The result is often catastrophically intense water flows in the spring and almost no water flow in the fall.

“The fluctuation has just about decimated the salmon runs,” the pair continued.

Their request? That “no further logging activities be approved for this trapline... until cumulative effects are properly acknowledged.”

Cumulative effects — the combined impact on forests and other landscapes from multiple industrial incursions including logging, mining, and oil and gas operations — are something that the provincial government professes to care about but has so far not delivered on other than to commit to “considering” them in land-use planning.

Meanwhile, B.C.’s Ministry of Forests, and provincial agencies such as the BC Energy Regulator, were condemned in a landmark Supreme Court of British Columbia decision for wilfully ignoring how cumulative impacts in B.C.’s Peace River region violated the treaty rights of the Blueberry River First Nations to the point where most nation members have little or no opportunities to hunt, fish, trap or gather plants as they once did.

BC’s biggest clearcut

There may be no better example of cumulative impacts and their consequences for biological diversity than the Bowron River valley, where Wilkins has worked his trapline for decades.

In the 1980s — as Wilkins began trapping in the hours when he wasn’t teaching high school science classes or participating as a volunteer search and rescue worker — clearcut logging entered a high-extraction phase the likes of which had never before been seen in B.C. and ultimately resulted in what was then considered the largest clearcut in the world.

The intensified logging was justified on the grounds that the Bowron River watershed’s primary or natural forests had been attacked by spruce bark beetles.

The older, larger and most commercially prized spruce trees were dead or dying, the government and the companies said, and if they were not cut down right away they would lose their utility as sources of premium wood fibre for making lumber and wood pulp.

Living trees and dead trees started coming down in record numbers as half a dozen logging camps were built in the valley to house workers who essentially did not move off the site for weeks on end. A temporary sawmill was set up in the valley for a period of time, so rapidly were its forests coming down.

“Once it got rolling, the logging operation in the Bowron was simply incredible,” the late television show host and Kootenay-based broadcaster Mike Halleran narrated in The Biggest Clearcut, a half-hour report aired in 1992.

“Sixty trucks an hour, one a minute, were pulling out of the Bowron valley heading to Prince George,” Halleran continued, adding that at the peak of logging, “750 loaded logging trucks a day were leaving the Bowron with beetle-killed wood for the Prince George mills.”

The Bowron clearcut rapidly expanded to 50,000 hectares, equivalent to 100,000 football fields.

Species collapse

“You could sit up on a hill and watch the trucks rolling by,” Maury Drage, a former forest service worker, recounted to Halleran. “It was like something I’ve never seen before. It was a real beehive.”

“Harvesting operations accelerated starting about 1981 and lasted through till about 1987,” Drage added. “And during that time approximately 15 million cubic metres came out of here, which was enough wood to build about 250,000 average-sized homes.”

The logging was a bonanza for Prince George’s mills but it came at a huge cost: precipitous drops in wildlife populations that to this day have not recovered.

This has eliminated the viability of more and more traplines.

Wilkins learned the trapping trade from Dale Cannon, who in turn learned the trade from his father, who originally worked the line back in the period before intensive industrial logging. Cannon owned the trapline Wilkins would later take over.

“Dale’s dad used to operate the traplines on showshoes and he would take up to 200 marten per year. When Dale and I started we took up to 90 marten per year. Recently, I’ve taken only half a dozen to a dozen, because if we took any more we’d be harming the base population. And we don’t want to do that,” Wilkins told The Tyee.

“In a clearcut they clear everything. Every last tree. It’s levelled, levelled right down to the ground. Even bushes and small trees beneath the larger trees get squashed underneath the tracks of the big feller-bunchers and the machines that take the logs out of the bush — the forwarders and the processors,” Wilkins continues. “We’ve lost so much habitat.”

Wilkins is far from alone in seeing precipitous drops in fur-bearing species.

Over lunch at a food court in a mall in Prince George a couple of days later, Wilkins is joined by Wayne Sharpe, a veteran trapper who once ran four traplines and also managed the depot that trappers brought their pelts to for marketing.

The fit 81-year-old still traps but says the days of trapping large numbers of fur-bearers year over year are gone. He used to routinely trap 150 marten per year. That number’s down to 25. As for lynx, he says he rarely catches any now.

Like Wilkins, Sharpe says the Bowron clearcut signalled the beginning of an accelerated phase of logging that essentially never let up.

“The bigger the clearcut, the cheaper it was for them to log,” Sharpe says. The result, he says, is that today the primary forests that once blanketed his 400-square-mile trapline have been reduced by 80 per cent.

The best of times for wildlife are long gone, Sharpe says ruefully as he sips a cup of coffee. “It’s just getting worse, and worse. And First Nations and any government entities, they’ve got no control at all. Canfor and the other companies just do what they want.”

All of which has made trapping a less and less viable livelihood and source of income. Wilkins, who worked full time as a high school science teacher in addition to doing volunteer search and rescue work, only ever worked part time as a trapper and even then in conjunction with a partner. Between them, in the early days they netted about $15,000 a season. In more recent years, Wilkins as an individual was lucky to pull in $3,000.

But many other trappers were able to earn a living doing the job, Wilkins says.

All that began to change in the 1980s, partly in response to the rising power of the anti-fur movement, but also to the steady erosion in habitat, and trapping activities themselves, which can result in species declines if proper attention is not paid to using traps that are designed to catch only selected or specific species.

An unintended and yet-to-be fully appreciated consequence of all of this, Wilkins believes, is that people with a deep and unique appreciation of the land are disappearing along with the primary forests and the biological diversity they contain.

Biologists and trappers concur

Scientific studies back up what Wilson and Sharpe have seen on the ground.

In two peer-reviewed studies led by scientists at the University of Northern British Columbia, the knowledge of 10 biologists and 10 trappers was tapped to understand what habitat features specific wildlife species such as marten and lynx need to thrive, and what logging activities did to wipe out or alter such habitats.

The studies analyzed the years from 1990 to 2013 and looked at traplines in two areas, one to the east of Prince George and the other to the west.

The 2016 study, published in Ecological Applications, concluded that significant declines in habitat for marten, lynx and fisher — a species considered endangered throughout the central Interior of the province — had occurred particularly in the western portion of the study area.

For lynx, the loss of “good” and “very good” habitat amounted to 108,000 hectares in just 23 years, an area equivalent in size to 216,000 football fields. The corresponding habitat losses for marten were more than 72,000 hectares or 144,000 football fields, and for fisher, 107,000 hectares or 214,000 football fields.

While there were also notable losses of habitat in the eastern study areas, the losses were not as pronounced.

The authors of the study — biologists Michael Bridger and Chris Johnson and ecologist Mike Gillingham — noted that the difference was explained by the intense logging that had occurred more to the west of Prince George as logging companies once again ramped up activities in response to mountain pine beetles, which had killed significant numbers of lodgepole pine trees. The tsunami of additional logging activity they unleashed was even more prolonged than that which occurred in the Bowron valley.

“The rapid extraction of timber has resulted in younger and less diverse forest types across much of the interior of B.C. Forestry is the driving force for cumulative impacts in the region and the reduction in habitat for the three focal species,” Bridger, Johnson and Gillingham reported.

“Where the rapid extraction of timber results in large cutblocks and the loss of forest complexity, marten populations are likely at risk,” the trio reported in a followup study published one year later in Forest Ecology and Management, adding that wildlife and forest experts “must consider the cumulative impacts” of logging if there is to be any meaningful prospect of maintaining “large and widely distributed populations of marten as well as other old-forest dependent fur-bearers.”

The trees are standing no more

After pulling off Highway 16 and heading north up a logging road, Wilkins says that he believes he will find fresh logging activity on his trapline. He is soon proven right.

After about 20 minutes, as Wilkins moves higher and higher in elevation past densely stocked tree plantations, the road begins to cut through unlogged primary forest.

Then, not far beyond that, a tract of that forest has disappeared, logged from the roadside up to the top of a distant ridge and then down the other side. Everything, save a few lone trees left standing like totem poles to commemorate the forest that once was, is gone. Another tract of primary forest and the wildlife it once contained cleared to make way for a future fibre farm that may, if all goes according to plan, be ready to log again in 80 years but that will be a dead zone for species like woodland caribou for decades to come.

Even for Wilkins, who has seen more clearcuts than most, the sight is still a shock.

“The last time I was here all those trees were standing,” Wilkins says.

“I came to this junction just two weeks ago. The trees were there. No more! It’s going so fast. The animals can’t keep up. They’ve logged it all off. They’re just wiping out the caribou. The caribou used to come off the mountains in the winter and feed on the lichens. It’s all been wiped out.”

As Wilkins walks from one log pile to the other, two log processing machines steadily drone away in the background. The large machines move on tracks. Inside the glass and steel confines of their cabins, the machine operators guide bendable excavator-like arms outfitted with grapples to pick up individual logs.

The logs then shoot through the grapple, guided by rollers, and are cut into shorter lengths by a whirring saw blade housed within. The short log lengths then drop onto new piles where they await pickup by logging trucks for delivery to local mills.

After returning to his pickup truck to drive back home, Wilkins rolls down his window to ask the machine operators who have ended their shifts for the day where all the logs they processed will go.

He is told they are destined for Canfor’s pulp mills in Prince George. The men say they are working under contract to Tano T’enneh, a logging company owned by the Lheidli T’enneh First Nation.

The government’s response

One month after writing the Ministry of Forests urging that action be taken to deny further logging permits on the trapline, Wilkins and Pichette received a reply from the ministry’s district manager in Prince George, Kevin Hoekstra.

Hoekstra began by saying that the pair should file a more formal response to a letter they had earlier received from Canfor outlining the company’s intention to log numerous more tracts of forest within the already extensively logged trapline.

Hoekstra urged the trapper and trapline owner to meet directly with Canfor and Tano T’enneh to discuss their concerns and to formally file any specific concerns they had with the proposed logging directly to the government. Once filed, Hoekstra told Wilkins and Pichette, he would be bound to consider their requests.

Hoekstra noted that under the provincial Forest and Range Practices Act, logging companies “must manage for objectives set by the government including biodiversity, riparian, and wildlife,” through approved forest management plans.

Hoekstra went on to say that the province considered cumulative effects to be “an integral component of natural resource decision-making.”

“The provincial cumulative effects values include moose, grizzly bear, old-growth forest, forest biodiversity, and aquatic ecosystems, some of which you have raised as concerns,” Hoekstra wrote.

The Tyee filed questions by email with both the Ministry of Forests and Tano T’enneh, receiving written responses from both.

In response to a question about whether or not Tano T’enneh believed that logging activities on the trapline could have lasting impacts on biodiversity and in particular the loss of habitat for fur-bearing species, the company’s chief executive officer, Evan Salter, responded, “As a First Nations owned and operated business, Tano T’enneh operates to the highest standards and expectations. The Nation’s goals have been, and remain, safe and reliable resource extraction and development, and the protection of lands, water and air — which includes habitat and bio-diversity.”

Salter added that the nation’s objective is “to ensure that future generations can enjoy and benefit from the lands and resources the Nation has successfully managed for time immemorial.”

He added that the nation is part of a “joint stewardship committee” that is working to space out old-growth forests in the areas it operates in.

In its written responses, the ministry said that district managers such as Hoekstra can “apply discretion” when it comes to the issuance of cutting or logging permits and that they “are required to consider the management and conservation of forest resources in the decision-making process.”

It went on to say that the current Cumulative Effects Framework provides guidance and decision support to district managers to help them “identify and manage cumulative effects for provincial values including moose, grizzly bear, old-growth forest, forest biodiversity and aquatic ecosystems.”

But the ministry declined to answer a direct question about whether or not any district managers in the province had ever denied a cutting permit application by a logging company because of cumulative impacts.

In the meantime, Wilkins and Pichette must wait to learn whether their concerns translate to logging limits or more of the same on a trapline that is in danger of winking out like the forests that once supported it.