A tree climber stands on the limb of Big Lonely Doug

Castle Giant & Big Lonely Doug – The Tree Projects Documentary Shoot

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Ancient Forest Alliance Photographer TJ Watt has been working with photographer Steve Pearce and canopy ecologist Jen Sanger of Tasmania’s The Tree Projects. The amazing duo has been capturing portraits of giant trees, including the Castle Giant in the Walbran Valley and Big Lonely Doug near Port Renfrew in Pacheedaht territory, as part of a new documentary film.

Steve Pearce, Jen Sanger, TJ Watt, Joseph Nizeti stand at the base of Big Lonely Doug.

Steve Pearce & Jen Sanger (The Tree Projects), Joseph Nizeti (Film director), and TJ Watt (AFA) stand at the base of Big Lonely Doug.

Steve has perfected a unique method of photographing giant trees around the world. It starts with establishing a suspended rope system that runs parallel to the tree trunk from the ground to near the top. From there, he raises and lowers his camera, capturing a series of high-resolution images later stitched together to create one final Tree Portrait. Often, people are placed at varying heights of the tree to provide a sense of scale. The result is stunning images that highlight the immense size, beauty, and grandeur of some of the world’s largest and oldest living trees, helping to raise awareness of the need to protect them and the forests they’re found within. See examples of their Tree Portraits.

Steave Pearce of The Tree Projects ready to hoist his camera

Steve ready to hoist his camera

The first location the crew filmed at was the famed Castle Giant in the unprotected Central Walbran Valley. At more than 16 ft (nearly 5 m) wide near its base with a massive candelabra-like canopy containing roughly two dozen spires, the Castle Giant is like a living fortress. It grows within the Castle Grove, perhaps the grandest remaining unprotected old-growth redcedar stand in Canada.

The Castle Giant tree in the Walbran Valley on Vancouver Island, BC

To create his unique Tree Portrait, Steve needed a subject tree with a clear view from the bottom to the top – a challenging thing to find in the dense rainforest! The Castle Giant, however, was the perfect fit. With some ninja-level climbing and rope work, the team got the system in place.

Instead of using a drone to capture photos, which is more susceptible to wind, rain and mist, Steve uses a cable and gimbal system with a high-resolution camera attached for better images and control. The professional climbers also use techniques that allow them to ascend the ropes themselves rather than the tree. No spurs are needed, and the few ropes that are used are removed after the climb, leaving the tree as it was. This blending of art and science is an amazing way to highlight a hidden world that humans rarely ever get to glimpse, with the ultimate goal of inspiring people to learn about and help protect endangered old-growth forests.

 

The push to protect the Walbran Valley, located two hours west of Lake Cowichan in Pacheedaht territory, has been ongoing for over three decades. Thankfully, the core of the Central Walbran Valley is currently under temporary logging deferral, providing time to help secure a long-term conservation solution for this spectacular place. Hopefully, the forthcoming film and Tree Portrait add a unique and powerful voice to these long-standing efforts.

The next location shoot was Big Lonely Doug, Canada’s second-largest Douglas-fir tree, which grows in the Gordon River Valley near Port Renfrew. Doug stands 66 m or 216 ft tall, is nearly 4 m or 13 ft wide near the base, and is likely around a thousand years old.

The sheer size of this tree always blows us away. You truly feel like an ant on a log when you’re beside it. For this Tree Portrait, TJ was positioned as a tiny person on the branch for scale. Best to not have a fear of heights when looking down from here!

A tree climber stands on the limb of Big Lonely Doug

TJ looking over a hundred feet down from a giant limb of Big Lonely Doug.

 

Despite dealing with windy weather, washed-out roads, and heaps of rain, the gentle fog that Steve needed for the perfect shot arrived and the project was ultimately a success. A huge thanks goes to climbers Ryan Senechal, Ryan Murphy, and Matthew Beatty for their expert planning, climbing, and rigging work.

Hats off  to the amazing film crew as well: Joseph Nizeti, Rob Innes, Fraser Johnston, Momme Halbe, Dan Batchelor, and Matt Maddaloni. It was impressive to see you pull this shoot together under challenging conditions.

We’ll be sure to share a link to the documentary film and the final Tree Portraits once they’re released!

Notes From the Field: Western Screech-Owl

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The forest around us is dense with accumulated life. Big ancient cedars are almost completely obscured by towering salal, huckleberry, and hemlock saplings, and every surface is a tiny emerald garden of moss, liverworts, and lichens. Above the canopy of the forest, the sky is blue and the sun is shining with no hint of rain, but here we are, soaked in the dripping understory of the old-growth rainforest. Jeremiah and I might as well be inside a green cloud. 

Somewhere in all this exuberance of green, we think there is a threatened species of owl. These birds are nearly impossible to locate by day, so we are deploying automated recording units to passively record all the sounds of the forests for the next few months. When we recover these devices, we will scan the recordings to see if they detected the calls of the owl we are searching for. Our work here is urgent: this ancient rainforest is inside a proposed cutblock, and it is at imminent risk of being turned into a barren stump field. 

The owl we are looking for is called a Western Screech-Owl. The coastal subspecies of this bird are considered federally and provincially threatened, with its numbers having plunged catastrophically in recent decades. This enchanting little owl, and its curious bouncing song, have become vanishingly rare across much of the coast. Surprisingly, in the not-so-distant past, the Western Screech-Owl was actually the most commonly encountered owl in Vancouver and Victoria, found in city parks, golf courses, and even home gardens.

Ancient Redcedar Grove where a screech-owl was detected.

Many people attributed their subsequent decline to the arrival of the Barred Owl, an opportunistic, highly successful eastern species that had managed to cross the prairies and colonize BC. The role of Barred Owls in the decline of their little cousins remained murky, especially because their presence in BC was a part of a larger story of native ecosystem disruption and alteration that had enabled the Barred Owls to dramatically expand their range. Concurrent with the rise of Barred Owls has been the destruction of BC’s native old-growth forests.  

Whatever the reason for the screech-owl’s collapse, the trend has been overwhelming. In a few short decades, screech-owls declined by over 90% in the Lower Mainland and south island. Like little candles flickering out, their voices went silent in the parks and forests that once harboured them. By the mid-2000s, it was far more common in Vancouver to encounter a Snowy Owl wandering down from the Arctic or a vagrant Great-Grey Owl from the boreal forest than to catch a glimpse of what had formerly been coastal BC’s most abundant owl.

Occasional sightings continued to trickle in from up and down the coast, suggesting these owls still held out in isolated pockets, but research on them was woefully lacking. Things changed in 2016 when an undergraduate student at Simon Fraser University named Jeremiah Kennedy set out to solve the mystery. In the forests around the community of Bella Bella, in the territory of the Heiltsuk people in BC’s Great Bear Rainforest, he surveyed for screech-owls. His results were stunning. Though screech-owls were indeed absent from the upland second-growth forests in the region (though Barred Owls were common there), in the old-growth cedar forests that grew in the lowland bogs, screech-owls were abundant! It was like he had gone back in time. 

Subsequent surveys suggested that screech-owls were also hanging on in the old-growth cedar forest of northern Vancouver Island. Then in 2020, screech-owls were detected in the contested old-growth forests around Fairy Creek, creating a media firestorm. An owl that had declined by 90% in core parts of its range was suddenly being detected in old-growth forests across the BC coast. A research organization called the Pacific Megascops Research Alliance (Megascops Kennicoti is the scientific name of the Western Screech-Owl), led by the same Jeremiah Kennedy, started to engage government groups and non-profit organizations to work together to understand the habitat needs of this threatened bird.

Ian and Jeremiah deploying automated recording units to see if Western Screech-owls can be detected in this forest.

Intrigued by the potential link between screech-owls and old-growth forests, the Ancient Forest Alliance (AFA) reached out to the owl researchers to see how we could collaborate with them on their work. We helped them identify old-growth study sites, contributed our own knowledge about forest structure and ecology, and offered to participate in some of their projects. Because the AFA is so familiar with the Port Renfrew area, we were able to contribute our local expertise about potential screech-owl habitats in this region. We identified a large block of old-growth redcedar forest that we believed represented the best potential habitat for screech-owls. Unfortunately, further research revealed that this block of the forest was riddled with proposed cutblocks. If there were indeed screech-owls holding out in these forests, they were in imminent danger of losing their habitat.

We discussed our ideas with the owl researchers and together we decided to deploy automated recording units into these threatened forests to assess whether screech-owls were present. And that brings us full circle as to why Jeremiah and I were clambering through dense, damp shrubs and criss-crossed deadfall to deploy these recorders. Nothing is more therapeutic than a challenging bushwhack through an old-growth forest: slithering, crawling, climbing, and tumbling through a world so overstuffed with living things energizes the soul while it exhausts the body.

Our pleasure was always tempered though by the cutblock flagging ribbon that popped up everywhere we went. Ancient redcedars were marked for logging and there were lines of flagging ribbon showing where roads would be blasted right through delicate streams. At one big old cedar, we came across the opening of a bear den. We could see the trampled salal leading to a crack in the cedar where a black bear had spent the winter and maybe even given birth to cubs, warm and safe in the hollow heart of this ancient tree.

Passed through this second-growth plantation to access the final study spot looking for Western Screech-Owls.

To access our final study site, we had to cross through a second-growth plantation. This bleak forest was typical of the young forests that now cover much of coastal BC: a plantation of densely stocked young trees with almost nothing growing in the understory. Such forests tend to be near-biological deserts, lacking the species and forest characteristics that define intact old-growth ecosystems.

We pressed on through the gloom of this forest until a green glow ahead of us gave advance notice that we were approaching old-growth again. Everything changed as soon as we set foot in the unlogged forest. We went from the sullen gloom of the second-growth plantation into a green prism of shrubs, ferns, and saplings growing under the thick pillars of old silver firs and hemlocks that combined to create a fully functioning forest community. 

 

Old-growth forest oasis.

 

 

 

We passed deeper into this green oasis and reached the bottom of the hill. Here in the poorly drained flats, the tall, stately hemlocks gave way to twisted old cedars with huge ragged crowns of forking spires. In damp patches, sphagnum moss and fern-leaved goldthread attested to the forest’s boggy character. This spot greatly resembled the old-growth bog forests of Bella Bella where Jeremiah had first found such high numbers of these elusive owls and both of us felt that this place had all the ingredients for ideal screech-owl habitat. 

We had been bushwhacking through forests since early that morning and night was starting to fall. After we deployed our automated recording unit, we decided to see if we could detect an owl right then. We crouched on the moss at the foot of a giant cedar and played a recording of a Western Screech-Owl song. After a few minutes of silent listening, we heard our answer: the soft, but distinctive “bouncing-ball” of a singing Western Screech-Owl. Here, in the heart of this ancient grove, was one place where BC’s vanishing owl hadn’t yet vanished.

 

Western Screech-Owl in the Tsitika Valley.

Those recorders are still out there, quietly documenting the springtime sounds of the forest. Soon we will recover them to analyze the sounds they detected. In the meantime, we have continued to survey for owls in ancient forests on Vancouver Island, finding them in the Tsitika Valley and in the protected refuge of the Carmanah. All of these individual data points will go towards understanding the habitat needs of these threatened birds and what steps are needed to protect them. 

Our hope is if we detect screech-owls in proposed cutblocks, we can act quickly to ensure that critical forests are set aside rather than logged into the ground.

The AFA is excited to contribute to our understanding of these rare birds, and we are dedicated to advocating for Western Screech-Owls and all the diverse living creatures that depend on our vanishing old-growth forests for their survival.

Notes From the Field: Powell River Trip

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In September 2021, Ancient Forest Alliance visited the city of Powell River to explore the region’s remaining old-growth forests, and meet with local community members and the Tla’amin First Nation to hear their views on the conservation of old-growth forests in the region.  We experienced awe-inspiring landscapes, stunning ancient rainforests, and fascinating perspectives on old-growth conservation.

The area around Powell River has been stewarded since time immemorial by the Tla’amin and shíshálh First Nations. Since its founding, the town of Powell River has been deeply defined by the forest industry. Its valleys of monumental forests were easily accessible, and industrial logging has been ongoing in the region since the 19th century. Long dominated by its huge pulp mill, Powell River is a growing destination for ecotourism.  

I (Ian Thomas) and TJ Watt were invited by the local qathet Old-Growth group to highlight some of the remaining old-growth forests in the Powell River region. We were joined by filmmaker Robin Munshaw to film a second community spotlight video about old-growth conservation in this magnificent area. We were generously hosted by local advocate Rachel Sherstad, who invited us to stay at her beautiful organic farm just outside the city of Powell River.

Massive granite walls, popular with local rock climbers, tower thousands of feet into the air in the Eldred Valley.

The towering granite walls of the Eldred River Valley.

Mt. Freda

On the first day, we went up Mt. Freda with Erik Blaney. Erik is a member of the Tla’amin First Nation and has been a strong voice for old-growth conservation in his territory. Recently, the Tla’amin requested that Western Forest Products pause all old-growth logging in their territory. One of their paused cutblocks on Mt. Freda is 21 hectares (52 acres) in size and is located at over 1,100 metres (3,609 feet) above sea level. The steep, winding road that snaked up the mountain to this paused cutblock was a powerful reminder of the extreme lengths that logging companies are going to in order to carve out the last vestiges of old-growth forest from the landscape. Stands of sub-alpine rainforests like these represent the most ancient forests known in Canada. Members of the qathet Old-Growth group found that some of the trees logged on Mt. Freda were over 1,200 years old. If these trees were artifacts or buildings, they would be treasured in museums or protected by law; but in 21st century Canada, it’s completely legal to blast a road through sensitive mountain wetlands, cut down a tree well into its second millennium, and leave behind a stump field where an ancient forest once stood. It is hard to find the words to capture the antiquity of these forests when the trees themselves are older than the English language as we know it.

Erik Blaney of the Tla’amin First Nation between two ancient yellow cedars on Mt. Freda.

During our interview with Erik, we learned that, twenty years ago, when the Tla’amin nation was seeking a tree from which to carve a traditional ocean-going canoe, they searched their vast territory and could only find six suitable trees. Out of the thousands of usable old-growth trees that would have been present a century ago, only six remained.

A giant old-growth yellow cedar within an approved cutblock, now temporarily deferred

After interviewing Erik, we explored the still-standing portion of the approved cutblock. We found giant yellow cedars, likely over a thousand years old, towering over slopes that glowed with blue-green blueberry shrubs. The soft forest floor was braided by little creeks meandering through mossy beds, filling the woods with constant music of falling water. Few forests anywhere have such a sense of timeless peace as these primeval sub-alpine groves. Nearby, picturesque alpine tarns were glowing with soft reds and golds as Autumn began its slow creep down the mountainside. High in the mountains and locked in by snow for much of the year, these forests are incredibly slow-growing, delicate ecosystems. For this reason, it’s more accurate to call the clearcutting of them a form of “tree-mining” rather than forestry, as it will be many generations before such forests ever recover from the destructive clearcutting that is BC’s standard forestry practice. 

It’s sobering to think that without the leadership and initiative of Erik Blaney and the Tla’amin First Nation, this timeless forest we were exploring would’ve been completely erased. Without any action by the provincial government to help transition communities away from old-growth logging, this site could still be logged. Erik explained the economic challenges that the Tla’amin nation faces in protecting their remnant stands of valuable, ancient trees. Erik emphasized that he believes vast tribal parks are necessary to protect Tla’amin culture and that the province of British Columbia needs to provide significant funds to realize that goal.

Eldred Valley

The next day we headed to the Eldred Valley. This majestic valley is revered among rock climbers across Canada for its magnificent battlements of towering granite. We were joined in our exploration by Dr. Andrew Bryant, an ecologist with a lifetime of experience researching wildlife in coastal British Columbia. The lion’s share of Andrew’s work has been in saving the endangered Vancouver Island marmot from extinction. He has also done research on the old-growth-dependent marbled murrelet and led pioneering work on how forest-dwelling birds respond to different methods of logging. His decades of experience studying coastal ecology provided a fascinating perspective on the ecological importance of old-growth forests.

On our way into the Eldred, we stopped at Goat Mountain. Andrew told us that in the fall, the local natural history club comes to this spot to watch mountain goats foraging on the sheer cliffs. Though iconically associated with the treeless expanses of ice and rock that dominate the forbidding peaks of British Columbia’s mountains, this monarch of the alpine realm is actually dependent on the rainforest for its survival. The Coast Mountains experience extreme winter snowfall, and mountain goats here must retreat to forested winter ranges to access the forage that will keep them alive through the winter. The BC government’s own conservation plan for mountain goats identifies the loss of old-growth forests as a key threat to their survival. The mountain goat then is a crucial reminder of the way in which old-growth forests sustain a huge variety of creatures that seem only tenuously connected to them: from coho salmon deep in the Pacific Ocean to a mountain goat perched high on a granite slab

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As we entered the Eldred and saw on all sides its soaring granite walls, we immediately understood the reason for its legendary status in the climbing community. There was an indescribable majesty in watching the clouds drift through the valley; the peaks looked like huge islands washed by foaming surf, and we were mesmerized by the always-shifting pageantry of cloud and stone, broken by sudden windows of dazzling sunlight. Contrasting with the primeval wildness of these monumental stone faces was the heavily exploited forest of the valley. It was like the entire valley floor had been gouged with an enormous ice cream scoop, with the only remaining old-growth forests hanging on in tenacious little slivers of dark green on the very fringes of sheer rock. Despite driving for over three hours up the Eldred on rough logging roads, we still couldn’t reach any accessible old-growth to showcase in our interview with Andrew. Eventually, we settled in front of the castle-like stump of what had once been an ancient redcedar and listened to Andrew explain the critical ecological importance of ancient forests.

After interviewing Andrew, we were determined to see any scrap of remaining old-growth that we could, so we set out in search of the shreds of old-growth still clinging to the upper walls of the Eldred. We hiked up through a gloomy second-growth forest where the closed canopy of young trees blocks out the necessary light for understory dwelling shrubs and forbs. Such barren forests are deserts to foraging deer and for the wolves and cougars that depend on them. We had driven three hours deep into the Eldred and, though we hiked further and further up, we still couldn’t find a single old-growth tree. As we climbed higher, the ground fell away on all sides until we were walking a narrow ridge, only wide enough for us to continue in single file. This slender bridge led directly into a remnant stand of ancient forest

Conservation Biologist Andrew Bryant beside a massive cedar stump amongst second-growth in the Eldred Valley.

Dr. Andrew Bryant beside a giant cedar stump in second-growth.

Unprotected monumental redcedars can still be found at the base of of some of the climbing walls in the valley.

The moment we set foot in the old-growth grove, we passed through a threshold into another world. After the dark, lifeless gloom of the logged-over second-growth, suddenly there was light and green and life. We’ve had the privilege to explore many ancient groves in BC, and still, we were stunned by the beauty we’d stumbled into. The glade was split by a stream of clear water overhung with devil’s club, blueberry, and sword fern. The forest floor was a gently sloping garden of oak fern and queen’s cup. Rising above it all, were the magnificent trunks of enormous redcedars; ancient monarchs still ruling this quiet glade as they had for centuries. As we wandered through this garden of giants, we found the daybeds of animals nestled among the roots of the colossal cedars, and on their bark, the claw marks of bears. This grove was clearly a precious oasis for the wildlife of the region. We could easily imagine them creeping up, just like we had, through the vast wasteland of second-growth forest, so they could rest or feed in this far-flung refuge, nestled against the granite teeth of the Eldred.

From this vantage point, we could see the popular climbing wall of Amon Rudh and its dark green beard of remaining old-growth. Amon Rudh is named after a mountain in J.R.R. Tolkien’s world of Middle Earth. In Tolkien’s legendarium, this mountain is the refuge of the doomed hero Turin, who takes shelter there from the conquering forces of Tolkien’s primeval dark lord. Tolkien was a pioneer in the way he linked the traditional struggles of good and evil – expected from fantasy – with vivid imagery of ecological devastation. It’s not lost on anyone who knows the story of Amon Rudh, a symbol of heroic resistance to the forces of destruction, that the Eldred’s Amon Rudh holds some of the last remnants of healthy forest in a valley nearly conquered by clearcut logging. In recent years, the local climbing community of Powell River has been actively opposing plans to clearcut this last, tiny trace of the Eldred’s ancient rainforests. 

Local advocate and qathet Old-Growth member, Jill Marie Bronson.

On our third day, we interviewed Jill Marie Bronson, one of the founders of the qathet Old-Growth group. She’s been doing fantastic work documenting and advocating for old-growth forests in the Powell River region. Jill Marie defies the stereotype of your average old-growth forest advocate. Deeply connected to BC’s logging industry, Jill Marie’s father works as a tree-faller and she herself has worked in laying out cutblocks. Educated in forestry, Jill Marie provided a fascinating and insightful perspective on the old-growth forest issues in the region.

That afternoon, we headed out of Powell River, reflecting on our fascinating three-day adventure. We interviewed people with diverse perspectives on biology, forestry, economics, and First Nations culture. Yet, despite these varied backgrounds, the consensus was clear: things need to change. The Powell River region is a perfect microcosm of the issues facing First Nations and forestry communities across British Columbia. How can they transition away from old-growth logging? Despite a history deeply steeped in forestry, community members from all different backgrounds are increasingly sounding the alarm on the destruction and unsustainable future of old-growth logging. They’re asking for leadership and financial support from a provincial government that still seems unwilling to act.