Old growth vital habitat for rare bird, group warns

Group warns forest critical to survival of rare robin-sized seabird in watershed

Birders and biologists are banding together to urge the B.C. government to protect old-growth forests on southwestern Vancouver Island in a bid to save the threatened marbled murrelet.

Around a dozen citizen scientists are documenting the rare robin-sized seabird, which raises its young nests in the old-growth forest found in tree farm licence 46, which includes the Fairy Creek region near Port Renfrew, said an avid birder, Royann Petrell.

The Fairy Creek region has been at the centre of old-growth logging blockades, with police making more than a 1,000 arrests at the site. The conflict peaked in the summer of 2021.

A team of birders led by Petrell has documented murrelets on more than 300 occasions in and around the Fairy Creek watershed, and recorded another 75 sightings in the Gordon and Camper Creek watersheds during the summer nesting season in 2021.

The citizen scientists, backed by four murrelet experts in Canada and the U.S. are pushing the province to protect swaths of old-growth trees from logging to enlarge or create new wildlife habitat area for the birds, which lay a single egg on large moss-covered branches of massive coniferous trees.

The proposal suggests adding eight square kilometres to an existing six square kilometre murrelet habitat area in Fairy Creek to protect nearly all the watershed as well as contiguous forests. The plan also proposes a new 1.7-square-kilometre habitat area WHA in the Gordon and Camper watersheds.

Petrell, a retired University of British Columbia scientist who lives in the Comox Valley, visited Fairy Creek out of curiosity in 2021 when the blockades were underway, but never participated in the protests. During her initial visit, she heard western screech owls on several occasions and was motivated to discover what other species at risk of extinction existed in the region. Over time and after she documented murrelets, more and more avian enthusiasts came on board, she said.

“We're birders, not blockaders,” Petrell said. “We started recording (the murrelets) for proof, and more and more people joined me in doing it.”

Petrell said she noticed the province's digital mapping system didn't include data on murrelets in Fairy Creek, so she decided she had better register her findings.

Forestry companies, such as Teal Cedar, which controls TFL 46, are supposed to determine what threatened species are present in their region when developing logging plans, Petrell said.

But wildlife surveys aren't actually required before logging gets underway, she added.

“That disturbed me,” Petrell said. “I said to myself, if surveys aren't required, I'd better do it because there is so little old-growth forest left.”

The province has confirmed it has received the proposal for murrelet habitat areas submitted by Petrell and her colleagues, but the government has provided no information on whether the proposal will be considered or when it will make a decision.

The marbled murrelet is considered to be vulnerable on a global scale, with all of Canada's population found only in B.C. It was first deemed threatened in Canada in 1990, and reconfirmed as such in 2000 and again in 2012. The bird was registered under the federal Species at Risk Act in 2003.

Yet, the little bird's plight has only worsened, not improved, Petrell said.

The fast-flying birds, which reach speeds over 70 kilometres per hour, spend most of their time on water and feed on small fish near ocean shores but travel long distances inland to nesting sites.

Murrelets are secretive and very hard to spot, given they tend to fly in and out of forests in the hours before dawn. They are largely detected by sound or radar surveys, Petrell said.

The global population is found along the length of the North Pacific coast, but it is estimated to be between 263,000 and 841,000 birds, at least 50,000 of which are in Canada.

They need tall trees greater than 250 years old because fledglings aren't great flyers and need a high jumping-off point and to be able to avoid other trees to remain airborne, Petrell said.

“They have just one chance,” she said. “If they touch the ground, they can't get up because their legs are not suitable for walking on land.”

The greatest danger to the birds is the continued habitat loss of oldgrowth forests, estimated to be declining by more than 20 per cent for the last three generations of the birds. Other cumulative threats include increased shipping in coastal waters, being caught in fishing nets and changing marine conditions.

The murrelets' most recent protection plan, created in 2021, now outlines the need to also protect critical marine and terrestrial habitats.

There is no valid rationale for continuing to cut old-growth stands on Vancouver Island, said Peter Arcese, a forestry professor at the University of British Columbia, in a statement.