Big Lonely Doug

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The second tallest Douglas fir in the country is known as Big Lonely Doug in Canada , as the Times Colonist reported in 2014. It's on Vancouver Island . The 66 m high, 'large lonely' tree, which has a diameter of 4 m and a circumference of 12 m, should be cleared for felling in winter 2011, together with the 12 hectare surrounding Cutblock number 7190 on the north bank of the Gordon River at Port Renfrew . This was part of the Edinburgh Mountain Ancient Forest . But Dennis Cronin, who is responsible for marking future logging roads and the trees to be felled - who died on April 12, 2016 in his home in nearby Lake Cowichan - instead marked the huge tree so that it was not felled. The ribbon that he wound around the tree, which was rarely used in his forty-two year woodcuttering, said “Leave Tree”. All other trees in the cut block were felled so that the tree remained completely isolated.

Douglas firs in Vancouver, 1887. Douglas fir, which dominated the 19th century, disappeared on Vancouver Island, except for extremely small stocks, mainly for house building.

Since the 1990s there have been campaigns against the large-scale felling of trees (logging) in western Canada, so-called anti-logging campaigns , in the course of which protesters chained themselves to the trees. This also happened in the nearby Carmanah Valley north of Port Renfrew. In 1990, the province paid British Columbia the timber company MacMillan Bloedel 83.75 million dollars for the end of logging in an area of the same year, the Carmanah Walbran Provincial Park emerged. Similar protests took place at Tofino , which was about to be felled in Clayoquot Sound , an argument known in Canada as War in the Woods that resulted in 800 arrests. In 1995 the sound was placed under protection and since 2000 it has been a biosphere reserve .

At first, Big Lonely Doug stood unnoticed for a year before he was photographed by nature photographer and employee of the Ancient Forest Alliance TJ Watt in early 2012. He estimated the giant's age to be a thousand years. A press release dated March 21, 2014 said, “Canada's Most Significant Big Tree Discovered in Decades!” Closer inspection revealed that there was a deep notch in the trunk that was caused by chains that were used to pull the wood out of the forest , and that a large branch had been broken off by a storm. Cronin contradicted the Alliance's assumption that the lack of protection from the surrounding trees was responsible for the latter damage, because he had already seen the branch when it was marked in the undergrowth. It soon turned out that the surrounding trees were comparatively small hemlocks . You were maybe 150 years old. So once before a storm had knocked down all trees except Big Lonely Doug . This made assumptions obsolete that the giant could not withstand storms on its own.

The San Juan Spruce , Canada's tallest Sitka spruce

The Ancient Forest Alliance recognized the symbolic power of the tree and gave it its name. Globe and Mail , Canada's second largest daily newspaper, called it the "loneliest tree in Canada". The number of visitors grew so enormously that a clothing company in Victoria agreed to build a platform. Port Renfrew, which had been dependent on logging for decades, now called itself “Canada's Tall Tree Capital”, brought out a map of the largest trees in the area - with a photo of the giant on the back. There are other giants in the area, such as the one hour eastward Red Creek Fir , the largest Douglas fir in the world, or the San Juan Spruce , Canada's tallest Sitka spruce , and finally The Carmanah Giant , Canada's tallest tree, which is only 2 km away from the West Coast Trail .

In May 2012, the BC Chamber of Commerce , which represents 36,000 companies in the province, called for the remaining old trees to be protected (old growth) in order to use the tourist resource. By 2016, the number of visitors to Port Renfrew had doubled. The Ancient Forest Alliance began in February the protection of a 40  ha large Old Growth Management Area through, known as Avatar Grove . Since then, wooden path constructions have been built to reduce the impact of thousands of tourists visiting. The logging in the neighboring regions continued, however.

For the First Nations on the island, who had been fighting back against deforestation for decades, Cronin's work was not only ecologically significant, but also culturally significant. He had discovered a 10 m long, more than 100 year old canoe that had been cut from felled cedar 2.5 km from the Pacific (cf. Culturally Modified Trees ). He also discovered stone tools from pre-European times, as well as the remains of longhouses. He also found an Avro Anson that had disappeared on October 30, 1942 , a bomber that had been lost.

In 2018, Harley Rustad, the author of a book publication on the tree, called in the Globe and Mail for a provincial park to be set up under the name Big Lonely Doug Provincial Park .

literature

  • Harley Rustad: Big Lonely Doug: The Story of One of Canada's Last Great Trees , House of Anansi Press, Toronto 2018.

Web links

Remarks

  1. ^ Sarah Petrescu: Vancouver Island Douglas-fir may be Canada's second biggest , in: Times-Colonist, March 21, 2014.
  2. ↑ Big Lonely Doug should become Canada's next provincial park , in: The Globe and Mail, September 7, 2018.

Coordinates: 48 ° 38 '46.3 "  N , 124 ° 27' 2.2"  W.