By John Francis
The all-candidates meeting that BPEG hosted at the Rotary Hall featured a lot of discussion about forest fire risks. This is a particularly important discussion, given that the peninsula burned down to bald rock in 1907.
A hundred years ago, you could stand at Dyers Bay corner (where Dyers Bay Road turns off what is now Highway 6) and you could see Georgian Bay in one direction and Lake Huron in the other.
But, as incumbent Councillor Smokey Golden told the audience, “there’s been a lot of misinformation about the cause of the 1907 fire — we need to think this through”.
I’d like to frame that discussion a bit.
When the colonists arrived on the Saugeen Peninsula it was what we natural history enthusiasts call a “climax” forest, that is, a place where nature had been essentially undisturbed for long enough to develop an equilibrium. A climax forest is not a stand of old trees, rather it is a mixed-age stand in the process of constantly regenerating.
There are a lot of very old trees in a climax forest, but there are also seedlings and saplings filling in the newly vacated spaces formed when old trees die. The dead trees just fall down and rot, building up a thick layer of organic material on the forest floor. The transition to “climax forest” isn’t complete until that organic layer is so thick it doesn’t change much.
That thick layer of organic material on the forest floor (much like the peat that forms on the forest floor in permafrost areas) stores carbon. It is a “carbon sink” — a place where nature will store a whole bunch of carbon if we give her half a chance.
There aren’t a lot of climax forests left in Canada, which is a shame on multiple levels. Climax forests are the habitats that all the wildlife evolved to live in — the birds, the reptiles and amphibians and all the smaller creatures that are their food sources.
A paper given at a long-ago Sources of Knowledge Forum at Tobermory studied inventory records and sawlog sales receipts from 19th century timbering operations. The researchers found that the original forest on the Saugeen Peninsula (as it was then named) was not a pure stand of White Pine as previously thought.
White Pine, it turned out, was a minor component of that forest. But as central Canada’s lightest, tallest, straightest tree species, it was in high demand for ships’ masts, and as such, was the highest value tree. So White Pine was what everybody cared about and hunted for. But the largest numbers of sawlogs shipped from the Saugeen Peninsula were Sugar Maple and Hemlock.
We know that the alvar areas of the Saugeen Peninsula were prone to fire — Jack Pine is a fire waiting to happen and the heat of a fire opens their cones to spread the seeds onto the newly-burned ground. Regular fire is Jack Pine’s idea of a climax forest. The tendency of alvars to become bone dry during summer droughts ensures that excellent tinder is available when lightning strikes.
We also know that despite regular fires on the alvars, most of the peninsula was old growth forest. It didn’t burn.
So how is that possible?
Have you noticed that they don’t have a lot of forest fires in Southern Ontario? That’s because hardwood trees — which are the main component of Southern Ontario forests — don’t burn very well unless they’re cut and split and dried.
And the Saugeen Peninsula was dominated by Sugar Maple.
The thick layer of organic material on the forest floor also stores a lot of water, which helps to keep the trees from drying out during periods of drought. So rather than posing a danger of burning, that thick organic layer actually retards fire.
It would appear that the alvar fires just burned up to the edge of the old growth forest and then petered out.
Until the colonists came in and cut down all the trees, which exposed the thick, organic layer to direct sunlight, which dried it out. Then the colonists left the slash in piles on the ground where they could dry out into kindling. Then they wondered why the peninsula burned down to bald rock.
Until the colonists cut down all the trees, the Saugeen Peninsula didn’t have a forest fire problem. I’m pretty sure those problems would go away again if we could return it to Sugar Maple (the Hemlock will come back later on its own).
How would we do that? Would it work?
Maybe we could ask the Saugeen Ojibway Nation. They’ve been living here for ten thousand years or so. I’ll bet they’ve learned a thing or two.
