Victoria Times Colonist

Wednesday » August 8 » 2007

Wild Island marmot is already extinct
Good-news reports about endangered rodent don't tell the whole story

Ingmar Lee
Special to Times Colonist

Wednesday, August 08, 2007

Environmental activist Ingmar Lee, seen here being ejected from a political rally in 2005, says the Vancouver Island marmot remains endangered, despite reports to the contrary.
CREDIT: John McKay, Times Colonist
Environmental activist Ingmar Lee, seen here being ejected from a political rally in 2005, says the Vancouver Island marmot remains endangered, despite reports to the contrary.

Recently the Times Colonist announced the 'thumbs-up" news that Canada's most endangered species, the Vancouver Island marmot, has been brought back from the brink of extinction and now numbers more than 200 animals.

Over the past few years the Vancouver Island Marmot Recovery Project, currently funded by taxpayers and TimberWest and Island Timberlands, has received bad press for its clumsy efforts to save the marmot.

These have included the scapegoating of predators, which resulted in years of controversial wolf and cougar culling and the scandalous shooting of golden eagles (authorized by the Campbell government), which embarrassed British Columbia before the world.

So why not celebrate this news that Vancouver Island marmot populations are now finally on the increase?

First, the public needs to know that wild-born Vancouver Island marmots are now totally extinct, having passed away into oblivion several years ago. All of the 200 marmots that are alive today are laboratory-bred specimens born and raised in captivity.

These lab-born animals are slated for release onto the empty former sub-alpine colony sites with a hope and a prayer that they might somehow make themselves at home again, re-occupy a cold and lonely burrow and reproduce.

For this purpose, the marmot project has managed to secure some of the naturally treeless meadows and ridges around the final Green Mountain redoubt where wild Vancouver Island marmots made their last stand. Every year, the distribution of lab-bred marmots over the extinct colony sites offers much-coveted PR photo-ops for government and logging industry officials.

The second thing that the public needs to know is that the protection and restoration of critical Vancouver Island marmot habitat is not part of the recovery project.

Aside from several small sub-alpine colony sites above the tree line that have been protected, the forested connectivity corridors that once provided essential safe access for marmots between their many mountain-top colony sites are unprotected.

Wild marmots once traversed the thickly forested valleys between their colony sites to spread out their gene-pool to avoid inbreeding. Not any more. These areas of marmot habitat are now dedicated as perpetual logging zones, where, having cleared the old-growth forests, the logging companies are now stripping away second-growth.

The cutting has been so voracious that the companies are now hacking into stands of timber as young as 30 years old. One can see truckloads of these "pecker-poles" any day on the Trans-Canada Highway, headed for the ocean log dumps and export to feed American sawmills.

The lab-bred marmots are now being released into a single complex of colony sites along the Green Mountain/Gemini Ridge and will never be able to fulfill their wild instinctual imperative to disperse across the mountains. Without restoration of connectivity in the region, the Vancouver Island marmot will be forever dependent on human intervention and captive breeding.

This is the same management ideology that has been revealed in the Campbell government's scheme for the spotted owl, under which it plans to capture all of B.C.'s 16-or-so remaining owls for captive breeding while its remaining old-growth habitat is destroyed by logging. The government has proposed a similar solution for the imminent logging-caused extinction of B.C.'s mountain caribou: A massive predator cull while allowing the logging destruction of its habitat.

And it follows the practice of allowing the destruction by logging of natural salmon-spawning habitat, which is replaced with occasional fish-breeding hatcheries.

The logging corporations have enjoyed significant tax breaks on their private lands and pay nowhere near the rates that ordinary landholders on Vancouver Island do. This presumably was so that they would continue to manage the land base for forestry purposes.

But now TimberWest and Island Timberlands have sprouted real estate arms and are selling off massive chunks of their denuded stumpfields for subdivision and development. This, of course, pays higher quarterly dividends for their shareholders. But it does nothing for the wild creatures that depend on those forests.

In the wake of southern Vancouver Island's logging spree, we are left with a legacy of despoiled drinking water supplies, erosion, invasive species proliferation, extreme fire hazards, massive log-jams, sprawling subdivisions and, of course, extinctions.

The annual distribution of lab-bred marmot pups into their extremely degraded habitat may offer some photo-ops, but without habitat protection and restoration, the Vancouver Island marmot will remain entirely dependent on artificial means such as captive breeding for survival.

Ultimately, after the companies have logged and flogged all of their remaining forest lands they will disappear too. The beleaguered taxpayer will ultimately be responsible for the enormous costs of cleaning up the mess.

Ingmar Lee planted trees on Vancouver Island for 21 years and has seen the scale of devastation firsthand. He now works to protect what's left of the forests. He can be reached through his website: www.ingmarlee.com.
© Times Colonist (Victoria) 2007