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Roosevelt Elk

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Autumn is the season of romance for the magnificent Roosevelt elk of the coastal rainforest. Males “bugle” for females, and, wielding their massive antlers (which can host six or more pointed tines branching out from the main beam), contend with each other for access to mates. The Roosevelt elk is Vancouver Island’s largest and most charismatic land mammal, weighing up to 1100 lbs/500 kg! Both sexes of elk are easily distinguishable from other ungulates by a thick dark brown mane on their head and neck and beige body and rump. These large mammals are an important food source for wolves, cougars, and many First Nations people.

, Roosevelt elk spend winters browsing for woody plants such as devil’s club and elderberry along the banks of rivers in rich, valley-bottom forests. With their abundant shrubs and huge trees that block out the falling snow, old-growth forests provide Roosevelt elk with critical habitat, especially in the harsh winter months.

It is fitting that Vancouver Island’s largest land animal is drawn to the habitats that produce BC’s biggest trees: the nutrient-rich floodplains of coastal rivers. The sight of a herd of elk browsing in an old-growth riparian forest full of towering Sitka spruce and ancient moss-draped maples is the pinnacle of rainforest beauty and majesty: charismatic megafauna combined with charismatic megaflora!

With only around 3,000 Roosevelt elk on the island, they are considered a species of special concern by the province. The number one constraint on their population is the destruction of their old-growth wintering habitat, making the protection of our richest-valley bottom ancient forests an essential step in ensuring these magnificent creatures continue to roam our forests for generations to come.

 

Scouler’s Corydalis

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Beautiful and extremely rare in Canada, the Scouler’s corydalis is found only on southwest Vancouver Island around the Nitinat, Carmanah, and Klanawa valleys in Ditidaht and Huu-ay-aht territories. With delicate pink-purple flowers and bright feathery leaves that look like stylized green flames when first emerging, this relative of the bleeding-heart flourishes in the rich soils along the banks of the rivers as well as disturbed areas.

Scouler’s corydalis has some interesting strategies for distributing its seeds. When jarred, the elastic seedpods will hurl the seeds up to 2 metres away from the parent. Fascinatingly, the seeds of the corydalis are sheathed in a lipid-rich layer (called an eliaosome) that contain proteins, sugar, and vitamins, which is not believed to be for feeding the baby plant, but for ants!

Ants are thought to harvest these seeds and take them back to their nests, where they strip off the fatty, nutritious coating to feed to their offspring and toss the seed onto their rubbish heap. This nutrient-rich substrate provides the infant seed with ideal growing conditions and the new colony of corydalis gets a headstart in the ant colony’s waste management site. That same seed coating that is so delectable for ants is believed to taste repulsive to deer mice, a handy way to deter these rodents which might otherwise eat the seeds.

Scouler’s corydalis is provincially blue-listed with only 24 known occurrences in Canada. Not only are they rare, they’re also ephemeral, with the plant dying back in the summer after seeding. The beauty of this unusual plant is present for only a few short months in spring, one of the countless wonders of our incredible coastal rainforest. If you see it, savour the experience!

Nurse Logs

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Life and death are inextricably linked in the old-growth forest and nowhere is this more evident than in the important role of nurse logs. A nurse log is a fallen tree that serves as the growing site for young plants. Nurse logs are especially important for western hemlocks and Sitka spruce as they provide an elevated platform for the seedlings to grow free from the dense competition of shrubs and forbs already established on the forest floor. In fact, seedling densities may be nearly five times as high on nurse logs as on the ground and nurse logs may support nearly three times as many species of moss as the surrounding forest floor.

The influence of nurse logs continues for centuries after they rot away, you can often find “colonnades” of immense Sitka spruces growing in a clear line deep in the rainforest. These enormous rows of pillars appear to be more the product of human architecture than natural occurrences. This is because centuries ago each of these spruces would have germinated on a fallen tree. Though the original log has long since rotted away, the positions of these giant trees still reflect the straight beam of that long-ago nursery.

It’s not only trees that these nurse logs support, but also a huge range of rainforest creatures: fungi mine the dead wood for nutrients, insects burrow under the bark, pacific wrens nest in the huge upturned root-wads, and salamanders take shelter under the logs. These incredible forest nurseries are a hallmark of the old-growth forest, where the slow death of ancient trees is the mechanism of forest renewal and rebirth.