BC Magazine/The Deep Dive

THE ISSUES

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Cannery managers and their families once occupied the cabins that have been restored and renovated to accommodate tourists.

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ECOLOGY WEEK AT CASSIAR CANNERY OFFERS A TOP-TO-BOTTOM INTRODUCTION TO BC’S COMPLEX COASTAL ECOSYSTEMS—AND AN OPPORTUNITY FOR A DEEP LOOK INTO OUR RELATIONSHIP WITH NATURE

BY LESLIE ANTHONY

DESTINATION BC/ANDREW STRAIN

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rom a spruce tree, Dr. Darwyn Coxson plucks a wispy strand of Usnea—the lichen often referenced as old man’s beard. Spreading it between his fingers like some forest-elf’s game of Cat’s Cradle, he notes how the environmentally sensitive organism was wiped out in Sweden by winds carrying the spoils of Europe’s industrial revolution into Scandinavia. “Similarly,” Darwyn intones to our attentive group, “any new large fossil-fuel-burning project in Northern BC will threaten lichens for hundreds of kilometres in every direction.”

It’s a not-so-subtle allusion to a number of pending local developments: Ecology Week isn’t only about learning the intricacies of coastal ecosystems, but ground-truthing their vulnerabilities. It’s a chance to see and hear firsthand how the environment actually works from the only experts that count—independent research scientists and people on the land.

BACK IN 2010, Coxson, a vacationing botanist from the University of North-

ern British Columbia in Prince George, rented a waterfront cabin at an odd little end-of-the-road place called Cassiar Cannery. Last of the great salmon canneries to shutter on BC’s coast, the heritage buildings of the 122-year-old institution on Inverness Passage outside Prince Rupert were being incrementally restored by Justine Crawford and Mark Bell, a North Vancouver couple who’d purchased the property while seeking a more Eyes down searching adventurous life in the north. for edible plants, an Coxson liked the fastidiously appointed cottage, but he’d also liked Ecology Week group that it fronted a unique, relatively unstudied ecosystem packed with combs the lower organisms that piqued his interest—a diverse estuarine salt marsh salt marsh along grading into temperate rainforest rich with lichens, fungi and mossInverness Passage. in late May, I was interested es. He began to return annually to conduct research, opening a new chapter in the Cannery’s revitalization. to see how a field course set In 2016, Crawford had an idea to weave threads of Coxson’s work with in an historic milieu of fisheries exploithose of others in an “adventure education” tapestry she dubbed Ecology tation went about presenting a story of Week. The seven-day program would explore the Skeena River estuary and longstanding human connection to the nearby Great Bear Rainforest by land, water and air with experts in variforest-estuary-ocean interface. For Casous fields who’d lead participants through daily modules—everything from siar, repurposing infrastructure from a understanding the biodiversity and importance of salt marshes, old-growth troubled resource industry in service of rainforest, tidal mudflats and eel-grass beds, to the geological forces that reversing the hubris that led to its deshaped the landscape, how energy transfer works between freshwater, ocean mise had created a de facto ecological and terrestrial environments and the ways First Nations used and sustained field station with much future potential; the bounty associated with it all. Attendees would bunk in the cannery’s refor participants, the experience was an stored cabins, eat in its restored dining hall, and have nightly presentations opportunity to understand the intrinsic and workshops. The first Ecology Week was a raging success. natural values of a region almost univerJoining a group of nine from around the province for the 2017 incarnation sally overlooked in conversations about 58 • B C M

the cost of resource development—a lesson that was now as clear to us as a strand of old man’s beard.

This day, Coxson has already walked us up a salt marsh transect from low tide, passing through different ecological communities every few metres. At the upper fringe where we now stand one encounters the highest diversity of grasses, sedges, forbs and plants like Pacific crabapple and Nootka rose. The high volume of edible plants highlights why ancient coastal First Nations sites are often found on salt marshes—though it’s unknown whether the plants were LESLIE ANTHONY

already there and attracted humans, or occupation by humans increased their presence. Ecology, it seems, can beg archaeological questions as well.

The salt marsh is backed by temperate rainforest we’re only briefly introduced to after making Usnea’s acquaintance.

But we have a chance to explore it more thoroughly the next day on a hike along Butze Rapids Trail near town. Here, Coxson demonstrates how rainforest life is stacked four-to-five deep, with fully half the photosynthetic surface comprised of lichens and mosses, whose surreal three-dimensional structures we later

examine under microscopes.

Lichens represent a symbiotic association between a fungus (let’s call it the house) and an algae or cyanobacteria (the solar panels on the roof). The latter photosynthesizes and provides food and nutrients to the fungal infrastructure that protects it. The fungus represents around 95 percent of the biomass, and its main feature is longevity and tolerance to desiccation—an essentially “dead” lichen in a dried, inert state can begin photosynthesizing within minutes of being dunked in water, one of nature’s neatest tricks.

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WHEN CRAWFORD AND Bell fled Vancou-

ver’s urban crush to search out a new life in Prince Rupert, there was little of interest on the property market. That is, until they saw the “For Sale” sign on Lot 44, site of the Cassiar Packing Company—Caspaco in its heyday—one of four historic salmon canneries lining Inverness Passage.

Cleaning up the disintegrating cannery and remains of squatters to make the property habitable involved removing 250 metric tons of scrap metal. At first, it was the property’s commercial potential that interested them. Then, as they restored still-standing managers’ homes one by one, a touristic potential emerged. Soon sport fishermen were occupying the cabins much of the summer.

Programs like Women’s Week and Ecology Week evolved from a desire to fill shoulder periods as well as Crawford’s own growing interest in the North Coast environment, which remained little known in scientific circles.

These days, the cannery’s handful of bright, colourful cabins overlook the four- to five-metre twice-daily tides of the passage. An expansive pier that once supported most of the old cannery is now used by Bell, a shipwright by trade, to tie up his boats. Crawford is considering making a marine laboratory out of the one remaining buildings on the pier, though it’s unknown how much work is required to restore rotting pilings.

Stuff is always moving through the channel fronting the cannery, and many trees are just now coming down the 60 • B C M

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Skeena on this year’s late freshette— heading out to sea as the tide ebbs, reversing as the tide flows back in. The back-and-forthing affords Bell time to run his boat out to inspect the currents Beachcombers style (in a nod to the antihero of that long-running CBC series, his company is called Relic Salvage).

By the time we leave, he’ll snag a halfdozen decent cedars to mill on site for various projects.

This is the real-life human ecology of a coastal existence. And while it’s heavy going, Ecology Week, with its varied activities, brings a fun and interesting break for the family. “Sometimes I think I organize these weeks just so I can do all these cool things,” muses Crawford.

Why not? The opportunity to create a life/job that’s a continual learning experience doesn’t come around often.

ON A WANDER with Reo, a Swiss transplant and local bird expert, we identify robins, sparrows, thrushes, starlings, jays, flickers, geese, ducks, gulls and a welcome squadron of tree swallows divebombing the clouds of insects we attract.

Reo is a classic birder—knowledgeable, passionate, awkward. He packs bird books aplenty, each as confusing as the next, but as amateur naturalists we are each keen to learn more. All but me are armed with binoculars, and when Reo suddenly issues a kingbird alert— a rarely seen Interior species suddenly given to coastal vacations by climate change—the group swivels right in

unison, binos pressed to their faces, like some Monty Python skit. Watching people watch birds is as interesting as the animals themselves.

Birds are important agents of energy transfer between aquatic and terrestrial ecosystems, and the North Coast fauna contains widespread forms—like blue herons and mergansers—as well as those specific to coastal environs, like auklets and murrelets. Though it’s not a birding trip per se, when we join guides April and Chris that afternoon in a First Nations ocean-going canoe to circumnavigate Lelu Island, we see scoters dive, mergansers peel across choppy water, and clouds of gulls rise from stark, rocky outcrops decorated in the bright yellow flowers of salt-tolerant cinquefoil.

Paddling past banners and protest encampments on the far side of Lelu, we learn about adjacent Flora Bank, a sand deposit dumped at the mouth of the Skeena after the last Ice Age. More juvenile salmon use this area during their transition from fresh- to saltwater than any other habitat on the North Coast.

Flora is a unique, delicate and unlikely ecosystem that, in theory, should longsince have eroded away. Instead, this key to the Skeena’s salmon productivity is held in place by a fortuitous mix of tides, waves, river input and currents.

A planned suspension bridge and LNG terminal on Lelu Island would have disrupted this balance, leading to erosion and disappearance of the salmon nursery. In addition to physical disruption, constant noise, light and fuel spills, they would have had devastating consequences for BC’s second largest salmon river— a $110 million per year economic hit to an otherwise sustainable sector of the region’s fragile economy. Having seen the fragility of the area firsthand, we all breathed a sigh of relief when the project was cancelled later in the summer.

IN IMPACTFUL LANDSCAPES, you reach for superlatives to describe them; on the North Coast, where such landscapes are abundant, you find yourself discarding superlatives to find the right one. On a jet-boat mission up the pristine Kasiks River, we enter an indescribable glacial topography of sheer cliffs and peaks reminiscent of a Norwegian fjord, where dozens of icy waterfalls—Rapunzel’s silver braids let down over 1,000-metre faces—hang like tinsel.

As we wind upstream, harlequin ducks tuck into the bank and sandpipers skitter

over—naturally—sandbars. Stopping on one, we find old grizzly tracks and a moose skeleton in the shallows; on others you can find bear, wolf and beaver tracks. Knowing the Kasiks is but one of hundreds of similar watercourses feeding the Skeena emphasizes the wildness of the place.

The Skeena watershed is 54,000 square kilometres, with an average flow of 1,760 cubic metres per second. Suspended material creates the ecosystem of the Inverness Passage, where two to three metres of sediment has accumulated over 5,000 years. The finer sediment—OK,

mud—is where we shine our next ecological spotlight. UNBC’s Dr. Travis Gerwing (aka Dr. Worm) begins his module by giving us a sense of the relative good health of North Coast mudflats, noting how canneries that played a role in the collapse of salmon runs are now playing a positive role in their recovery—the abundant waste of these canneries historically fertilized salmon-rearing areas like Flora Bank.

Intertidal mudflats present a world of extremes to their inhabitants: high tide delivers a more constant environ-

ment where aquatic predators are the only concern; low tide brings hazards like hypoxia, desiccation, thermal stress and terrestrial predators like birds and bears. “Flats” is actually a misnomer, says Gerwing, as mud is a three-dimensional world dominated by the usual competition for food and space. “Meiofauna” (critters that live in the mud) are indicator species affected by any disturbance—canaries in the coalmine for animals higher up the food chain like salmon. Though the Skeena meiofauna is understudied, biodiversity here is

Dr. Darwyn Coxson of the University of Northern British Columbia discusses the environmental fragility of tree lichen of the genus Usnea.

This species is often called “old man’s beard.”

A flower collected in the salt marsh is examined in more detail back at Cassiar’s makeshift lab.

Weaving soaked cedar bark into baskets is no easy task; weaving it into something serviceable is even harder.

Crumbling piers and abandoned buildings recall the salmoncanning industry’s gold rush-like history of resource exploitation boom and bust.

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up after a few hours and head to bed, I persevere despite my ham-fistedness, coming away with a hard-won—albeit wonky—prize.

AS A WRAP to the week, all the elements of estuarine ecology come together on a trip to the world-renowned grizzly shockingly rich—some 40 species where bear sanctuary of Khutzeymateen Inlet.

10 might be considered high.

Khutzeymateen (K’tzim-a-deen or “Valley Gerwing leads us gingerly over the at the Head of the Inlet” in Coast Tsimsticky flats, demonstrating how marine shian) is a short 40-kilometre floatplane biologists conduct random substrate hop from Prince Rupert through a pass sampling with a portable grid. He then hemmed by soaring rock walls. Below, pushes a tin into the muck and sieves the mountain goats appear like grains of rice. contents to reveal a few tiny mollusks and crustaceans. Near the waterline, We land on the mirror-still inlet betubes of polychaete worms (marine relaside Khutzeymateen Wilderness Lodge, tives of terrestrial earthworms) protrude whose recent makeover by owner Jamie from the silt. Elsewhere we turn rocks to Hahn has created a coastal crucible of reveal young crabs and gunnions—small modern rustic chic. We lunch on moneel-like fish that attract herons to this ster sandwiches and chili, then take to an shore. A couple of days later, Gerwing aluminum viewing boat. Through binocwill dig up a 30-centemetre polychaete ulars, we watch a bear digging clams in species that has never been recorded the bay directly ahead of us. Hahn—who here, demonstrating how much is left knows them all—dubbed her Hot Chocto be discovered. “Who knows what’s olate, for mating with three different out here?” he wonders. “And who knows males that spring. In the next bay over, what’s already been negatively impacted one of these Romeos munches sedges or even disappeared?” alone. A kilometre north, gliding with an electric motor, Hahn is able to manoeuvre close to a large feANOTHER DAY, DR. Carla Boiled blueberries are spread on skunk male and three cubs doing the Burton discusses traditional cabbage leaves, same, abiding by strict rules of use of some 200 medicinal, dried and then rolled edible and spiritual plants. up to create highly She speaks of Traditional Econutritious, easily logical Knowledge—a body transported fruit leather. of expertise developed by indigenous communities over centuries of living as part of the environment. Carla is joined by her good friend Alice Azak, a Nisga’a matriarch of 90 years. Warm and generous, offering stories of foraging, harvesting and medicine-making, Alice supervises us in creating a salve from devil’s club. First, we strip off the spines and peel the bark down to the green stuff, shredding this layer into a crock pot and adding coconut oil (traditionally, eulichon oil or bear grease would have been used) to slow-cook for a day. In another exercise, we boil blueberries, let the mixture thicken and cool, then spread it on skunk cabbage leaves to dry. After a few days, you peel it off and roll it up: voilà—fruit leather!

That evening we’re joined by Grace Hamilton, a skilled cedar-weaver who introduces us to the practice. Soaked coils of redcedar bark are cut into long strips that we attempt to weave into baskets. It’s damningly difficult, requiring nimble fingers and consummate patience; while many eventually give 62 • B C M

engagement for non-disturbance.

Grazing sedges is only a warm-up for the big show in a few weeks—when salmon show up to breed in the inlet’s streams. As a keystone species, grizzlies depend on and contribute to a healthy, fully functioning ecosystem that support a variety of animals, fish and native plants. As they have for millennia, Coast Tsimshian First Nations also depend on these same resources for social, economic and cultural prosperity.

The Khutzeymateen’s protected areas are home to some 50 to 60 grizzlies—possibly the highest concentration of this iconic species in Canada. As we head up the estuary, we encounter bear after bear—11 in total—one of which tires of turning rocks for crabs and lies splayed out, belly down, on the beach for a snooze.

Seeing bears like this is startling, intimate, a privilege. We all come away with a singular feeling: the Khutzeymateen is an adventure learning experience extraordinaire, an ecotourism model for the future and, as the linchpin of Cassiar Cannery’s unparalleled week of ecological insight, a love letter from nature itself.

Ecology Week 2018: May 29–June 6 For information: cassiarcannery.com

LESLIE ANTHONY