From the ashes a new forest emerges at Woodland Caribou

By Bruce Ranta, LOTW OUTDOORS Enterprise, July 24, 2004

Lil and I recently paddled into Woodland Caribou Provincial Park with Wanda and Eugene Halley, and Jody and Jon Ouellette. It was quite a wonderful, albeit too short, vacation. The weather was superb, the flies completely tolerable, the company was great, and, perhaps best of all, we didn’t see anybody else – except for Chris, Eugene’s pilot son, who dropped in one afternoon to check up on us.

Lil and I even saw a bull woodland caribou, although, technically speaking the caribou wasn’t in Woodland Caribou, the park. We saw it swimming to an island during an afternoon when we were doing some fishing on Chase Lake, which is part of a Conservation Reserve immediately adjacent to, and south of, the park.

A Conservative Reserve is, like a provincial park, a protected area, but it differs from a park mainly in the degree of activities allowed. For example, Conservation Reserves allow for hunting and trapping activities which are usually severely restricted, or prohibited, in provincial parks. Most of the islands on Lake of the Woods have recently been classified as Conservation Reserves.

Most of the area we canoed through in Woodland Caribou had been burned in 1983. This was a huge – tens of thousands of hectares – extremely hot fire that rolled into Ontario from Manitoba, on a windy, dry September weekend. Unlike most wildfires, which leave behind patches of unburnt forest, this fire burnt almost everything in its path. We went many kilometers without seeing a single tree that had survived the fire.

The new forest is made up mostly of jack pine. In some areas, black spruce is now regenerating beneath the pines. There’s very little poplar in the new forest. And, unlike other old burns I’ve been in, it was hard just to find a blueberry bush. There is also very little in the way of bird or animal life. It was eerily quiet in the morning. The only birds we heard regularly were loons, white-throated sparrows and the Swainson’s thrush. Moose, judging by their tracks and other sign, were uncommon, as were black bears. We only saw one of each. This led us to the logical conclusion caribou, moose and bear are equally abundant in and adjacent to the park.

Eugene, who was by far the most familiar with the area, said snowshoe hares, one of the few animals willing to subsist on a diet of jack pine, are quite abundant, as are one of their main predators, the lynx. However, we didn’t see either, so we questioned his authority on that one.

In the future, the burn on the south side of the park should be a good wintering area for woodland caribou, but that’s still a ways off. After a large burn, a forest generally doesn’t develop into caribou wintering habitat until it’s at least 40 to 60 years old. That’s how long it takes for the jack pine to thin out and for exposed, rocky ridge tops to develop lush stands of “caribou moss”, the ground lichen which is the caribou’s staple winter diet. Right now, the endless sea of jack pines – to use an old phrase – is as thick as the hair on a dog’s back. Even the one moose we did spot – it was along a section of creek with lily pads and other aquatic plants moose like to munch on – had a hard time bulling its way through the trees. I suspect it will be later, rather than sooner, before the burn is suitable for caribou.

It was nice, for a change, to get far, far away from other outdoor enthusiasts. Despite what one is led to believe, I suspect the appetite for wilderness canoeing isn’t nearly as big as the market for traditional, main base and outpost camp fishing excursions. And after the last day when we paddled over 30 km, including at least six portages, I can see why. Yes, there was pain, but it was a good pain.