Features

The race to save the South March Highlands

Road construction is poised to slice through a unique and biologically diverse forest-wetland complex – unless a coalition of concerned citizens can slam on the brakes in time.

By Brian Banks

A walk in the woods with lifelong botanist and teacher Martha Webber is an education in plants, trees and ecology, in natural heritage and in the art of seeing. On this day, it also offers lessons in politics and the perpetual conflict between conservation and development. We’re hiking through a protected forest within the 1,100-hectare South March Highlands, a wetland and forest complex on the northwest edge of Kanata. A 2008 environmental assessment described it as the richest area of biological diversity in greater Ottawa, but it may be the most biologically abundant in all of urban Canada. Not only are 900 hectares of the property rated “provincially significant” habitat, but it’s home to at least nine endangered or threatened species, including the Blanding’s turtle, butternut tree and American ginseng – all protected under Ontario’s endangered species legislation.

For close to an hour, Webber, local resident Kathleen Riddell and I have been walking along well-worn paths on a heavily wooded rise of rocky terrain, laced with streams, pools and beaver ponds. We’ve seen old-growth sugar maple, oak, beech, pine, cedar, buckthorn, blackberries, lily pads and reeds, myriad ferns, mosses and fungi. We’ve passed forest-floor plants with such colourful names as ladies’ tobacco, dogbane, Canada mayflower, crinkleroot, bloodroot and Solomon’s seal. Webber has been repeatedly plunging off the path into deeper greenery in search of particular specimens. She does it again. “I would expect iris, arum, jack-in-the-pulpit,” I hear her say as I follow her into the trees, fending off branches and mosquitoes. “But it’s so dry.”

Then, success: “Here,” Webber shouts. “I’ve got an arum!” She crouches down to examine the cup-like white flower growing in some damp earth. “These are no longer common,” she says. “They’re so perfect.”

Since the 1980s, Webber has led classes and tours through the patchwork of tracts that make up the 400-hectare South March Highlands Conservation Forest – the last protected, largely intact portion of this unique area. But now, those visits have taken on a new urgency. In March, the city started clearing trees to permit construction of an arcing, four-lane arterial road that will cut through the middle of the South March Highlands, effectively slicing the forest in two. To stop it, Webber has joined with fellow area residents and interested experts to form the Coalition to Protect the South March Highlands.

They may already be too late. Some 500 metres from where we’re standing on this late May afternoon, bulldozers are cutting a swath through the trees. The city has also started dumping what is expected eventually to be 45,000 cubic metres of fill atop the Carp River flood plain, which the four-kilometre roadway – known as the Terry Fox Drive extension – will transect. Blasting and roadbed construction will follow. The city is on a tight schedule – the federal government’s stimulus program, which is funding two-thirds of the project’s $48-million budget, requires that all work be completed by March.

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Ontario Nature’s Writing and Art Contest for Youth

Our fifth annual writing contest for kids was a bit different this year. In addition to requesting essays about nature, we asked for artwork submissions, realizing that a picture can indeed be worth a thousand words. As in previous years, we were enormously impressed by the wealth of talented writers – and artists – among the Grade 7 and 8 students who entered the competition in response to the topic “Wild species and wild spaces: why biodiversity is important to me.” Through their writing and drawing, the winners showed us how much they care about our planet, how concerned they are about its degradation and how aware they are that we depend on a landscape that can support healthy and diverse ecosystems. We continue to look to them – the next generation of environmental leaders – for inspiration and hope.

The winning artists and writers received their awards at Ontario Nature’s first Youth Summit for Biodiversity. We deeply appreciate the support of the Toronto Field Naturalists (TFN) in sponsoring five participants at our summit. TFN has been promoting a love of nature in Toronto for nearly 90 years. This Ontario Nature member group stimulates public interest in natural history and works to protect and enhance Toronto’s ravines, parks and waterfront.

We also gratefully acknowledge the generous support of the Ontario Trillium Foundation and Mountain Equipment Co-op.

First Place: Sensing change

By Spencer McGregor

 

The noises are all intertwined. I hear trees swaying in the breeze, a bullfrog’s low croak by the water’s edge. An angry squirrel is chattering above me. Far off I hear the call of a moose. There are birds singing all around me.

Suddenly, I’m in a different place. The noises are deafening. I hear an airplane screaming past above me, I hear cars roaring by on a nearby highway. Up and down the street, I can hear doors shutting and the loud, yelling voices of people. I stand there listening. I can’t hear even one natural sound.

I’m standing in the forest again. I look around me – everything is breathtaking. I see a towering pine beside me, shafts of sunlight streaming down from between the gaps in its needles. I see the birds flitting from tree to tree. I hear a splash and turn around to see a beaver swimming towards its den. Everything here has an amazing beauty to it. I could stay here forever.

But again I’m in the city, drained of colour and life, the complete opposite of the forest. I look around me and see skyscrapers towering high over everything, blocking out the sun. I see the people, running around from place to place, always in a hurry. I hear a splash and look behind me. Somebody has thrown a plastic cup into a puddle on the sidewalk. What a horrible place! I want to run from here and never return. I close my eyes, trying to get away.

When I open them, I’m in the forest and I start to notice things I hadn’t noticed before. I take a deep breath through my nose. I can smell everything in the forest. I can smell the pungent rotting wood all around me and the skunky smell of a marsh close by. I can smell the trees, the sweet, tangy smell of pine needles. The forest is alive with rich, interesting smells.

I take another breath and almost choke. I’m in the city again. The stench is overpowering. I can smell the noxious fumes of the cars and factories everywhere. I can smell the chemicals, the toxic chemicals washing away into the storm drains unnoticed. I can’t stand it. My eyes start to water, the fumes burning them. How can anyone live like this, in this cloud of burning smog?

I return to the forest once more. I fall to my knees, grateful for the fresh air, clean water and vibrant colour all around me. I start walking, trying to get away from the memories of the city. I walk and walk and, eventually, far away I hear something, something unnatural. I go faster, moving towards it. When I finally get there, I’m horrified by what I see. Chainsaws ripping through trees, stumps everywhere, sawdust darkening the air, animals running to get to safety. I run to a worker to ask what’s happening. I’m crushed by what he says. I stand there motionless, unbelieving, until he shoos me away. “Go on, now, and have fun in the forest,” he says, “it won’t be here much longer.”

Second Place: A jewel of Ontario

By Alison Griffith

 

I am the blood and heartbeat of diverse life. Tall, majestic giants worthy of praise and young saplings of birch, oak, poplar, maple, fir and pine drink and thrive in my rich soil. Babbling bodies of water dance on my skin with sheer elegance.

Feathered grasses and frolicking wildflowers rely on my existence for life. Creatures great and small, all of equal importance, know life in my serene world, under my lush canopy, a true home.

I am always a grand symphony of sound. The wind breathes, cries and chants enchanting music. The birds seem to sing with pride. The tree spirits always chatter the most interesting things, and the tinkling waters and rainbows of angelic sunlight answer with glee.

On the afternoons of autumn I rival the splashing beauty of a vibrant tapestry. I am an alien fairyland of gold, crimson and orange, sparkling under the grins of sunlight and crisp, airy breaths.

In the tired light of spring, I am an enchanted wood of fair shades and mystical perfumes. I am brimming with new, essential lives waiting to add to my beauty.

On the clear, distant nights of gentle summer, crystals of icy stars shimmer above me and the wind woman’s whispering breaths flow through me, as my creatures whimper and cry out in solitary delight.

On the shivering mornings of winter, veils of golden sunlight send a delicate glimmer on the diamonds of snow resting on me. I am chilly in body, loving in spirit.

I bear the delicious pleasures of sugary syrups and plentiful, scrumptious summertime berries, worth more than the most precious jewels. They provide my creatures with the means of survival. I hold the power to cure ailments with my many barks and herbs of wonder.

I am uniquely beautiful and a magical, compassionate world on my own. I am a free spirit and a shimmering jewel of the earth. I give air and habitat, as well as a special sense of freedom, to my residents and visitors. I am irreplaceable.

I am an Ontario forest. I fear that someday the calls of the wind will no longer rustle through me, that my birds will cease to sing and the creatures not scamper over my nourishing earth, that my wonders will go from me. I worry that someday my calming and truly natural world will vanish, at the mercy of cruel development.

I am endangered and essential to life. I must be able to mother the creatures and tree spirits. You cannot exist without my existence. Biodiversity is truly the most wonderful thing of all and needs to remain a part of life on earth.

Third Place: The seed

By Tiana Colantonio

 

The elder birds are always telling us young birds, “Be grateful for what you have. You are very lucky to have a home and a family!” I was curious to know why. Today, my grandfather, Abram, who was sick and dying, would tell me everything.

“When I was only seven,” he began, “the greatest storm in history occurred right here on this island.” My talons clawed nervously as he spoke. Grandfather described the cracking sounds of the trees as they were stuck by lightning and how the flames from the trees were noticeable from miles away.
Fires roared across the entire forest. I pictured every scene in my mind, from the shrieking animals to the rising smoke and the last falling tree. Only my grandfather and a few other animals survived. I interrupted his story with a question. “Why do we need different types of animals?” He sighed and replied, “Oh, how little you know. Biodiversity, which means having many plants and animals in an ecosystem, is what has made us survive this long. When the forest fire occurred, there wasn’t enough biodiversity to support animal life on this island. Believe it or not, every species has a different role in the environment. For example, let’s say the mosquito became extinct. Then what would the dragonflies have to eat? They too would disappear and the same would happen to other species in their food chain until the entire food chain was extinct. With biodiversity, animals would have a better chance of avoiding extinction, because there would be different types of animals to consume. This is why biodiversity is so essential. Understand?” I nodded my head slowly as I realized the importance of what he said. He continued his story by describing how he built a nest in the ruins and had to go to bed hungry and alone that night. “As I lay in the nest, I thought that my agony would last forever. The forest looked bleak. But deep within me there was hope.”

“How to save the forest came to me in a dream,” my grandfather said proudly. I listened attentively as he described his dream of finding a magic seed in a foreign place. In his dream, he planted the seed and instantly a tree began to grow. Then more trees grew around him to form a new forest. Birds of all types made their homes in the trees. Bees, squirrels, raccoons, foxes and other forest creatures appeared. It was a wonderful sight.

My poor grandfather whimpered as he continued. “Oh, my dear granddaughter! The effort it took to convince myself to find the seed… But I knew it was my destiny.” Filled with adrenalin, my grandfather went in search of the magical seed. He soared over many islands looking for any distinguishing features. Soon he recognized the enormous tree from his dream. It was located in the middle of a lush forest on a small island. Abram noticed how great the biodiversity was on this island. There was a glow near the large tree and he thought that it might be where he could find the seed from his dream. “The flight was exhausting. And when I reached the tree there was no seed in sight. Then suddenly, there was a blinding flash of light and, to my amazement, a seed appeared in my beak! It began to rain, and memories of the forest fire flashed in my mind. My heart began to beat faster as I remembered my parents’ screams from the fire. I returned to our island, pushing those thoughts out of my mind.” I was weeping as he told the story, but my grandfather did not flinch. He continued, “I planted the seed and our island was transformed!” Within minutes, the forest grew green with trees. Flowers bloomed and animals of all sizes came. Birds filled the sky. Life happened miraculously. “I had fulfilled my destiny.” His voice trailed off as he finished the sentence, and his eyes slowly closed. He was only able to mutter his words, but he left me that day with a mission: to cherish and take care of life on our island.

Creatures of the night

By Tim Tiner

Wind turbines and disease are taking a toll on bat populations here and south of the border. Can a combination of innovative solutions keep these nocturnal mammals off the endangered species list?

In his more than 40 years of studying, teaching and writing about bats, Brock Fenton has never been more gloomy about their prospects in Ontario. “There is not much good news on the horizon,” says the usually amiable, bespectacled professor of biology at the University of Western Ontario (UWO). “It’s very depressing.”

Fenton is distressed by two phenomena simultaneously threatening Ontario’s eight species of bats – one a devastating pandemic, the other the deadly edge of a much-trumpeted green technology. One of Canada’s leading bat authorities, Fenton has made exhaustive studies of the physiology, social behaviour, navigation, diet and habitat of bats. Nevertheless, he maintains that much of bat biology remains a mystery and no one knows the extent of the threats to these species. Bat habitat has been lost, and human intrusion in bat caves is a long-standing problem.

Over the past decade, however, dead bats have also been turning up – sometimes in significant numbers – beneath the roughly 700 wind turbines that have sprouted across the province. Biologists worry that the plan to triple the number of such towers in the next few years could tip a delicate balance for the normally long-lived animals with low reproductive rates.

This past winter delivered another wallop to Ontario’s bats. In March, the province reported its first cases, in the Bancroft-Minden area, of an invasive new fungus that appears most prominently as a white ring around the muzzles of hibernating bats. Though not fully understood, the fungus thrives in the cool, moist conditions inside winter bat caves. It seems to rouse them from hibernation, causing their body temperature to rise from near freezing and burn up the fat reserves they need to survive until spring. Starving, many bats take wing in broad daylight on a futile search for flying insects in subzero weather.

By May, a time when the last bats leave their winter homes, or hibernacula, members of a veterinary organization had found the condition, dubbed “white nose syndrome,” at eight of 12 caves, abandoned mines and other locations they searched, in a band running from just north of Belleville to a little south of Timmins. In most cases, only small numbers of animals were affected, though hundreds died at one location in Timiskaming.

Across the border, the situation is dire. White nose syndrome has killed more than a million bats in the northeastern United States since the fungus was first detected at Howe Cavern, near Albany, in 2006. Of all the bats in affected caves and mines in New York State, Vermont, Massachusetts and Connecticut, approximately 92 percent died. In New York State, the world’s largest known colony of little brown bats (Ontario’s most common species) decreased from almost 200,000 animals to 3,000 in just two years. U.S. experts predict that the syndrome could extirpate the northeastern U.S. population of some 6.5 million little brown bats – representing 85 percent of the region’s hibernating species – within 10 years. As well, inventories in New York State and parts of New England found only 14 northern long-eared bats last winter, down from 742 two years earlier. “They are winning the race to the bottom because they started out at lower numbers,” says Alan Hicks, the mammal specialist with the endangered species unit of New York State’s Department of Environmental Conservation.

The fungus has also been confirmed in Ontario’s northern long-eared bats, the most abundant cave species here. The province’s three other hibernating species, which like long-ears are less concentrated and harder to find in mines and caves than little brown bats, also get white nose syndrome.

Fenton says the pattern is all too clear. “We can predict, with chilling accuracy, that if we go in the caves checked last winter next March, there are going to be thousands of bats dead on the ground.”

Ontario’s largest hibernacula are located in old mines. One near Renfrew has some 30,000 bats.

Another near Barry’s Bay has 20,000. But, according to Fenton, nobody knows how many of the flying nocturnal mammals are in the province or what their effect is on the ecosystem. Although all Ontario bat species catch insects – little browns eat equal to 50 percent and lactating females eat up to 120 percent of their weight in insects per night – as non-game species with no known economic value, bats in the province have never been closely monitored. In the United States, however, white nose syndrome was discovered in New York during an annual, federal and state funded inventory of hibernacula that started 30 years ago with the aim of tracking the threatened Indiana bat, which does not occur in Ontario. “They were able to blow the whistle likely in the first year that the fungus appeared,” says Fenton.

Bats themselves are probably responsible for spreading the spores of the previously unknown fungus (Geomyces destructans), which may have been carried over from Europe by someone, where the fungus was recently found, though its effect there has been less dire than in North America. Each year, about 200,000 people take commercial tours of the Howe Cavern system, where the condition was first discovered.

North American bats have no resistance to the fungus and researchers are at a loss as to how to stop it. They are looking at disinfecting caves with fungicides, rehabilitating infected bats or developing vaccines. So few bats are left in many caves in the northeastern U.S. that whole colonies could be vaccinated in a day, according to Hicks, although there is not yet a vaccine. He believes, however, that Canada could play the leading role in a more permanent solution. “You have a unique situation up there in that you have substantial land masses offshore,” he says, envisioning eastern islands such as Newfoundland or islands in the gulf of the St. Lawrence as places of refuge that could be used to repopulate the mainland.

The possibility that islands may be natural refuges for bats has been suggested as an area of further study by some academics and government officials from the Maritimes, Quebec and Ontario. Saint Mary’s University assistant biology professor Hugh Broders says DNA analysis and radio telemetry could be used to determine the interaction between island and mainland bat populations. “The genetics and field work could complement each other to see if the narrow ocean straits represent a barrier,” says Broders.

But any bat recolonization would be slow. Little brown bats can live up to 35 years but produce just one offspring a year. And studies in England show that 60 percent of young bats, lacking sufficient fat reserves, don’t survive their first winter. “It’s probably the same for our bats,” says Fenton.
“That makes them extremely vulnerable.”

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