Publications
This page will have more articles or links to articles related to this project as I get them up here. Please see below for Briony Penn’s article: Notes from the Field: Coastal Crane Study: C’idawai
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Counting Cranes: The beauty of bogs on the central coast
Monday Magazine, Victoria, Oct 10 2007 http://web.bcnewsgroup.com/portals/monday/
July 29th was International Bog Day, and I celebrated by searching for Sandhill crane nests in a bog complex above the forested shoreline of Hunter Island on B.C.’s outer coastal lowlands. Sporting chest waders and a bug jacket, I stepped off a hummock of wine-red Sphagnum moss and coastal Reindeer lichen, and immediately sank up to my armpits in bottomless rust-brown muck and buckbean roots, the mud and bogwater oozing into my suit. I had to slip and swim to reach a little islet of mosses, dwarf cypress and juniper, and then slither my way up to get a good look. Bog Day meant another day of fieldwork for a study on the summering Sandhills that breed on wet and lonely islands in Heiltsuk Nation territory.
Very little is known about Sandhill cranes in B.C., which are listed as a vulnerable species by the ministry of environment. In 2006, Briony Penn worked with Heiltsuk researchers on the first study of Sandhill cranes on the central coast, and we are continuing this year with support from MOE and Raincoast Conservation Foundation. The study area is part of the Great Bear Rainforest, a name given to B.C.’s north and central coast. In 2004, a team of conservation biologists working with coastal communities recommended that 44-70 percent of the area would require protection from all industrial activity in order to avoid biodiversity losses (for example, species extinctions and loss of salmon runs).
Last year the B.C. government, industry and representatives from certain first nations governments and environmental groups agreed to protect 28 percent of the GBR from all resource extraction and allow “lighter touch” logging in 67 percent of the total area. The terms of the agreement do not take effect until 2009, and some people are saying they have never seen so much logging on the coast as they have in the past two years. Under these circumstances, it is critical to gather baseline data on the cranes in order to advocate for protection of their breeding territories.
Standing about a metre tall, with a wingspan of over 1.5 metres, Sandhill cranes are thrilling to watch as they fly, with quick downbeats and slow, arcing upbeats of their wings. Their elegance, beauty and size set them apart from the geese and gulls. They walk on long legs, gracefully picking up their feet and bending down their necks to forage, then up to look sharply around with keen orange eyes. Local people are all too familiar with their unmistakeable and powerful call, which can carry up to five kilometres.
It took me a while at first to learn to track cranes to their boggy nest and roost sites; I had to tell inquirers that Sandhill cranes haven’t survived as a species for nine million years—making them one of the oldest birds in existence—because their nests are easy to find. Hunting nearly wiped them out until they were given protection under the U.S. migratory bird treaty act of 1918, and some people here in Bella Bella remember the return of the cranes about 30 years ago. Now they are the most abundant species of crane globally, with an estimated 600,000 birds spread between six subspecies across North America, Cuba and Siberia. The cranes that summer from the north end of Vancouver Island up to Alaska overwinter on the Lower Columbia River and in California’s Central Valley, where their habitat is under pressure from human encroachment.
Here on the central coast we’ve watched cranes feeding on quiet sheltered beaches and estuaries with lots of rockweed, using trails and eating berries in old-growth forest fringes, and nesting and roosting in upland bogs with good forest cover nearby. These bogs are magical places, with stunted pines and cypress and Labrador tea growing out of multicoloured hummocks of mosses and lichens reminiscent of a Dr. Seuss story, with the detectable presence of wolves.
To many human cultures, the noble cranes are symbolic of longevity, loyalty and untrammelled wilderness. Breeding pairs of Sandhill cranes may use the same territory throughout their reproductive lifespan—which may be up to 20 years or more in the wild—and once they’ve bred successfully, they generally mate for life. But they are highly sensitive to disturbance; even when quietly moving on foot or by kayak it’s hard to be unobtrusive around the wary and wily cranes. The latest “Ecosystem-Based Management” directives from the ministry of agriculture and lands for the south-central coast, which are supposed to lay out rules for logging, mining, and tourism that protect ecological values and biodiversity, leave bogs out altogether, although the bogs of the outer coast are home to globally rare types of vegetation. The resurging threat of offshore oil and gas exploration, new pipeline and port projects, and the proposed increase in tanker traffic all put coastal waters and their myriad forms of life at risk of a deadly spill.
Ironically, the biggest development proposals threatening the central coast bogs right now are “green” energy projects in the form of wind farms. North Coast Wind Energy Corp’s plans for its future wind farm development require putting roads and a permanent settlement on Banks Island, and transmission lines overland all the way to Kitimat, which would create the biggest new clearcut ever seen on this part of the coast and a hazard to migrating birds. Banks Island is a place where evolutionary processes have never been interrupted by industrial development, home to wolf packs that fish in creeks, huge intertidal and estuarine systems, and extensive bog habitat. If the project goes ahead as planned, the majority of the power produced will be sold to California.
Yet we don’t need to produce more energy, especially when it involves putting a massive human footprint on wild islands to power the lights of Los Angeles. We just need to stop wasting precious energy on frivolities, luxuries and inefficiencies, and leaking it from our aging transmission systems.
As wildfires burn in Indonesia’s peat bogs, sea levels rise and ancient forests are destroyed here, I wonder how much longer the cranes will keep coming back, before the changes which we have wrought become too extreme for this nine-million-year-old species to adapt.
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Submitted to the online newsletter of Raincoast Conservation Foundation June 1st, 2006
Notes from the Field: Coastal Crane Study: C’idawai
by Briony Penn
In 1916, populations of sandhill crane were pushed to the verge of extinction from overhunting in the United States prompting the introduction of the US Migratory Bird Treaty Act. In Heiltsuk memory, c’idawai, that typically arrived in mid- April from their southern wintering grounds in the lower Columbia River and featured in Heiltsuk traditions, were disappearing. Twelve years later, a young BC biologist Ian McTaggart-Cowan , accompanied naturalist/collector Tom (TT) McCabe to document and obtain specimens of the fauna of the central coast of British Columbia for University of California Berkeley. Dr. McTaggart-Cowan, almost 80 years later, recalls seeing sandhill cranes on that collecting trip on the offshore islands. He also noted them exhibiting significantly different behaviour than that of the populations in the interior. “I remember they crouched and ran like rabbits through the forest and nested up in the boggy areas. They looked and behaved differently than what I had observed in other sandhill crane populations. I believed at that time that they might be different from the interior populations.” Since then, there has been no scientific research in British Columbia on this unique population of sandhill cranes, called the Canadian sandhill cranes or Grus canadensis rowani, their recovery or their use of the coast habitats for breeding. In the recent definitive volumes of Birds of BC, that Dr. McTaggart Cowan co-edited, it states virtually nothing is known of this coastal subspecies population. Researcher Tom Hoffman of the West Coast Crane Working Group (WCCWG) in Washington, inspired by Ian McAllister’s presentation in Seattle, encouraged and supported Raincoast to initiate a two week pilot study in May to determine the scope and potential for a larger comprehensive study that would fill in some of the gaps in the scientific community’s knowledge for this magnificent bird.
With financial assistance from the WCCWG and Robert Bateman, (reknowned craniac and artists of cranes who donated his Canadian Geographic award to Raincoast for this pilot study), helicopter time donated by volunteer Raincoaster Don Arney, and guidance from Dr. McTaggart-Cowan and Dr. Paul Paquet, not only did we observe some breeding and nesting behaviours never documented before in cranes but got an insight into the critical role of the unlogged islands of the Great Bear for one of the world’s oldest and most beautiful birds—what other cultures have named the Birds of Heaven and the Heiltsuk call C’idawai.
In a two week study, Jessie Houstie, Larry Jorgenson and Doug Brown of Bella Bella and I with assistance from Don Arney and other volunteers, followed up leads from local knowledge about where the birds are observed and went to these areas in boat, kayak, foot and helicopter. We sat and watched through ‘dawns ’til dusks’ and overnights through rain, hail and the odd splash of sun to do, what Dr. Paquet described as “introducing yourself to the cranes.” Introducing oneself to a large but perfectly camouflaged bird with uncanny ability to detect strangers in their territory is no easy task. Our attempts at observing these animals secretly through an assortment of hides, built a good body of data on how not to do it. But we did introduce ourselves—albeit loudly—and filmed/observed over 50 birds in a variety of habitats and social groupings. We observed what we called ‘adolescent hangouts’ as well as breeding territories for pairs and pairs with their adolescent hangers-on in the first stages of nesting. We identified 15, possibly 18, probable nesting sites for further study in an area stretching from Spider Island in the south to Dowager Island in the north. Even more significantly, we identified important questions about population distribution, habitat preferences and the role of the complex and unique mosaic of estuaries, forests and bog habitats for providing the essential requirements for nest sites. We discovered that cranes do indeed run and crouch, and they run through well-defined trails between their foraging areas on the shoreline to nesting areas in the bogs. We observed distraction behaviours ranging from plaintiff bugling and limping to what we called ‘spyhopping’ and circling around the trail head or bog nesting sites. We observed them feeding in a range of different habitats and collected scat to determine feeding preferences. We discovered that Denny Island, where Raincoast office is located, is possibly the epicenter of cranes on the coast with some of the finest habitat anywhere and that Raincoast inadvertently located itself within a couple of kilometers of some of the finest natural history in the making in the world. Mostly, we fell in love with these wonderful birds who deserve every effort to protect them after their long climb back from extinction a century ago. Stay tuned for plans on where Raincoasters might take this exciting pilot.
