The Final Frontier

This trip is a canoe journey, paddling the Voyageurs Highway on northern Saskatchewan's Churchill River—here less a river than a series of broad lakes linked by short chutes of rapids along the way to Hudson Bay. We're exploring a small pocket of Canada's boreal forest, the vast 1.4 billion-acre shawl of black spruce, aspen, paper birch, and larch that drapes from Newfoundland to the Yukon. Globally, 6.5 million square miles of boreal forest wrap Siberia, Scandinavia, and northern Canada. There is more intact forest in Canada's boreal than there is in the Brazilian Amazon. In fact, the boreal, named after Boreas, the Greek god of the north wind, is the largest intact terrestrial ecosystem in the world, and Canada's portion alone represents 25 percent of the world's remaining frontier forests. Scandinavia's boreal became a heavily managed industrial forest decades ago, and the Siberian boreal is rapidly being cut to fund the cash-starved Russian economy. In Canada, however, there remains hope that significant portions of the boreal forest can be preserved in something close to its unaltered state. Spurring concern over Canada's boreal forest is a growing understanding of the critical role the region plays in the life cycles of North American songbirds, including neotropical migrants. Nearly half of the regularly occurring birds on the North American continent use Canada's boreal forest either for breeding or as home habitat. Each spring, according to data compiled by Peter Blanchard when he was working for Bird Studies Canada, a nonprofit conservation group, up to 3 billion songbirds migrate to nest in the boreal. By midsummer, an estimated 5 billion birds start flying south. “We've done point counts where we've counted 19 or 20 species. Just standing in one spot,” Hobson says. He pssshhes at a bay-breasted warbler we can hear in a dark maze of evergreen branches. The warbler—a vivid, almost auburn stain spreading between its gray back and yellow breast—flitters down to check us out. We can see the bird has an insect tweezed in its bill. Bugs, Hobson thinks, the profuse hatches of flies, mosquitoes, and midges that cloud the north woods, have much to do with why the boreal remains such a productive breeding ground. “But also maybe it's because all the other forests are gone,” he says. “The southern Carolinian forest”-—which once covered much of the northern United States and southeastern Canada-—“probably was every bit as productive once, but it's gone.” http://magazine.audubon.org/features0509/forests.html [Proofreader's note: this article was edited for spelling and typos on August 31, 2005]

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