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In Canada, an alliance of industry, First Nations and conservation groups is working to set aside half of the largest intact forest in the world before it is logged over, mined or drilled. That is, if plans for a massive new pipeline don’t outpace protection efforts.
By Scott Weidensaul
Photographs by Garth Lenz
Even though it’s barely daybreak, Jeff Wells is moving as though he’s late for something important. Bundled against the cold, with a spotting scope over his shoulder and binoculars around his neck, he walks briskly along the waterfront in Déline — a small aboriginal village on the shores of Great Bear Lake, about a hundred miles shy of the Arctic Circle in Canada’s Northwest Territories.
It is only the first week of August, but already the wind, which shakes a shaggy musk-ox pelt hanging on one backyard line, carries the chill of impending autumn. The village, home to 600 members of the Sahtu Dene, one of six major First Nations groups in the territories, is still mostly asleep, except for the ravens perching on the eaves of the houses.
Wells, senior scientist with the U.S.-based Boreal Songbird Initiative, is in a hurry because every year at this time Great Bear comes alive with one of North America’s most impressive migratory pageants. As Wells sets up his scope by the lake and begins to scan, the sun’s low light touches the ancient and modern: the fanned lodge poles of backyard tepees and an abundance of satellite dishes.
Great Bear Lake is, at more than 12,000 square miles, the eighth-largest lake in the world. Yet it is swallowed by the immensity of the landscape in which it sits. Around it — stretching east to Newfoundland and west across Alaska — is North America’s boreal forest. Encompassing about 1.4 billion acres in Canada alone, these trackless stands of spruce, tamarack, jack pine, aspen and birch, flecked with innumerable rivers, lakes and wetlands, constitute the largest intact forest left on the planet, bigger even than the Amazon.
Named for Boreas, the Greek god of the north wind, the boreal forest still functions much as it has since time immemorial. Char, salmon and grayling still thrive in its rivers; hundreds of thousands of caribou still migrate across its plains and mountains; and it is home to some of the healthiest remaining populations of wolves, moose, wild sheep, wolverines, lynx, grizzlies and other large mammals.
For an ornithologist like Jeff Wells, what sets the boreal forest apart is its role as North America’s premier bird nursery. “A lot of the birds we think of as common are common only because there is this enormous, intact ecosystem up here,” he says, his binoculars constantly roving. Some 300 species, including whooping cranes, rusty blackbirds and dozens of species of warblers, return each spring to the boreal; for almost a hundred of them, this region holds more than half their entire breeding population.
“This is the other duck factory up here,” says Shannon Haszard, the Northwest Territories manager for Ducks Unlimited Canada. The boreal forest, she says, is at least as important as the more famous duck-breeding ground far to the south, the prairie pothole region of the Great Plains. More than half the breeding populations of 15 waterfowl species, including black ducks, trumpeter swans, scoters and scaup, nest in the boreal.
Ornithologists like Wells are united in their recognition of the boreal’s importance. Whether it’s long-distance songbird migrants like blackpoll and Cape May warblers heading for Amazonia and the Caribbean, or white-throated sparrows and juncos that winter at feeders across the United States, the starting point for most North American migrants is that vast blanket of forest across Canada.
The birds of the boreal forest touch almost every American, says Wells, for their migrations carry them across virtually every corner of the lower 48. No one knows exactly how many birds there are in the boreal. Wells says a conservative estimate is 3 billion.
Nature picture credits: Photo © Garth Lenz (Mackenzie Valley, Northwest Territories)
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