Date: Tue, 23 Sep 2003 12:38:19 -0400 Reply-To: Maryland Birds & Birding Sender: Maryland Birds & Birding From: Philip Webre Subject: Off Topic: Northern Bird Habitats Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=Windows-874 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit Content-Disposition: inline September 23, 2003 For Billions of Birds, an Endangered Haven By JAMES GORMAN t's autumn, and the vast boreal forest of Canada is spilling birds. Ducks and geese are pouring out of it, and songbirds in the billions. Some will winter in Westchester, some in Costa Rica. Some will stop at bird feeders, some will fly directly over hidden hunters. In all, three billion to five billion birds leave the Canadian boreal forest each fall, headed for warmer weather. As the birds fly south, many of the people most involved with the Canadian boreal, which makes up 10 percent of all the earth's forests and 25 percent of the intact, original forests, are heading for Quebec City. The 12th World Forestry Congress is convening there this week, and preservation of the boreal forest is a major subject of discussion. Conservationists hope to reach agreement with industry now on how to set aside some parts of the forest and agree on management policies for other areas. Three environmental groups ? Greenpeace, the Natural Resources Defense Council and Forest Ethics ? joined together last week to release a brief report on threats to the forest and to demand a moratorium on logging and development in the most endangered parts of the boreal forest until a conservation plan is developed. It is not that the forest is in immediate danger of disappearing. Just the opposite. But change is occurring fast because of industrial development like logging, mining and drilling for gas and oil. Farming also contributes to forest loss, particularly in western Canada. A study published in Conservation Biology in December 2002, by Keith A. Hobson of the Canadian Wildlife Service calculated that on the southern edge of the boreal in Saskatchewan, the amount of forested land was declining at 0.87 per cent per year, similar to some estimates for loss of tropical rain forest. Boreal simply means northern ? as the in aurora borealis, the northern lights. The great northern forest, as it is sometimes called, circles the globe, below the polar regions and above the temperate hardwood forests. It is not as familiar as the tropical rain forests, particularly the Amazon and the Congo forest of Central Africa, which includes seven different countries. But the boreal belongs in the same category. These three areas are the last places on earth where vast stretches of intact original forest remain. Marilyn Heiman, director of the Boreal Songbird Initiative, said the decline of songbirds had been a worry for years, as was loss of wintering grounds.But the nesting grounds are at least as important, she said, and there is a need to "refocus some of the conservation effort" on the boreal forest. "It's a forgotten system," said David Pashley, vice president for conservation of the American Bird Conservancy. "It's one that people take for granted. But over the course of the next 50 years it could slip away." There are no parrots in the boreal to capture public attention, no brightly colored tropical frogs, no monkeys. What the boreal has are two million square miles of woodland and wetland filled with black spruce, poplars, paper birch, aspen, tamarack and other trees ? and birds, birds and more birds. The land has different ecosystems, wet and dry, hardwood and evergreen. Particularly in the west, it is riddled with the water that nurses ducks and shorebirds ? "bogs, fens, wetlands, ponds, marshes," Gary Stewart of Ducks Unlimited in Canada said with a tone of awe and appreciation. Among the migrating birds of the boreal are millions of ducks, 100 million shorebirds, half a billion warblers and a billion sparrows. Dr. Fiona K. A. Schmiegelow, a wildlife ecologist at the University of Alberta, who has been researching the boreal forest for a dozen years, said that in the United States and Canada "one in three land birds owes its existence to the forest." It is as if the trees breathe birds, taking them in each spring and sending them back out in the fall spilling down the hemisphere all the way to South America. There are chickadees and mergansers, plovers and whooping cranes, scoters, shrikes, yellow rails, flycatchers and warblers and sparrows. In the East, bird feeders attract the white-throated sparrow and juncos, both boreal migrants. Birders who like a challenge will seek out and try to identify the many different warblers, indistinguishable to the uninitiated. And these are just the birds, not to mention the woodland caribou, the wolves, moose, lynx, the positive effects on the atmosphere of the carbon hungry trees, or the 1.5 million lakes. About 20 percent of the boreal is water. The new report from Greenpeace, the National Resources Defense Council and Forest Ethics states that since 1975, about 60 million acres have been logged. One step in toward the conservation plan these groups and others are calling for is a "planning framework" being developed by the Canadian Boreal Initiative, a group formed this year. The framework is expected to include a set of conservation principles, as well as actual percentages of land to be preserved and to be managed carefully. The goal is to have environmental organizations, government, forest product industries, oil and gas companies and the First Nations (Indians that have treaties with Canada) all sign on. Oil and gas exploration have become increasingly significant in making incursions into the forest. Mr. Pashley of the bird conservancy said that north of Edmonton, Alberta, oil and gas extraction had had major effects. "It's kind of a mess," he said. "Not miles and miles of unbroken forest." Mr. Pashley said he worried more about those industries than about logging. "The impact of forest products industry is much, much less," he said. The connection of the Canadian forest to the United States and countries farther south is strong in both ecological and economic terms. A report in December by Dr. Peter Blancher of Bird Studies Canada, one of the many groups dedicated to the boreal, reported that 30 percent of all land birds in the United States and Canada nest in the boreal, some almost exclusively. There are 186 species of land birds that are regularly found in the boreal, and 93 percent of them migrate south for the winter. Then there are the aquatic birds. Mr. Stewart of Ducks Unlimited said that the boreal had "huge wetland and water resources" and that "most people don't realize how much." In the western parts of the boreal, about a third of the area consists of wetlands of various sorts, where millions of ducks breed. As a waterfowl nursery, the boreal is second only to the United States' prairie pothole region in South Dakota, North Dakota, Montana, Minnesota and Iowa. At least 75 percent of all the black ducks in the world breed in the boreal, Mr. Stewart said. Birds are one significant connection of the United States to the boreal forest, but, there are others. Lafcadio Cortesi, of a small environmental group, Forest Ethics in San Francisco, said his organization tried to have retailers change purchasing habits to use, for example, more recycled content in the paper that they sell because much of the pulp is from Canadian forests. The group has just ended a campaign aimed at Staples. Mr. Cortesi said the company had agreed to change its purchasing practices related to protected forests, and to increase the content of recycled paper in its products. Forest Ethics now intends to go to Office Depot. He said his group "just sent out a letter to the top 100 catalog companies." Mr. Cortesi said mail order companies sent out 59 catalogs a year for every man, woman and child in the United States. The goal of Forest Ethics is not to stop logging, but to pressure retailers to pay attention to what the forest products companies are doing. One company that environmental groups like Canadian Boreal Initiative are working with is Alberta-Pacific Forest Industries, or Al-Pac, which has agreed on a conservation plan for one area with Ducks Unlimited and has concentrated on research in sustainable logging. The president of Al-Pac, Bill Hunter, said: "We have to have an operation that meets the need of a healthy forest and healthy economy. We're still learning. We will continue to learn. In 10 years, we've invested $25 million in scientific research." In addition to working with aboriginal people and groups like Ducks Unlimited, Al-Pac has agreements with oil and gas exploration companies that provide economic incentives if the effects of exploration are reduced on land where Al-Pac has logging rights. If a company makes a narrow enough road for its seismic tests, it does not have to pay Al-Pac for the trees they cut down. Otherwise, if the groups that have stakes in the boreal can agree on how to prevent a crisis that is not yet at hand, it would be a rare event in environmental politics. Dr. Schmiegelow of the University of Alberta said the most pressing issue now was that "the rate and scale of development is unprecedented." Although the boreal in Canada is a "relatively pristine system" compared with other forest areas, she said, the mining, oil and gas extraction, as well as logging, put it on the cusp of being radically altered. "I don't think people realize how rapidly it's being developed." ======================================================================= To leave the MDOsprey list, send e-mail to listserv@home.ease.lsoft.com with the following message in line 1: signoff mdosprey ======================================================================= =========================================================================