Letter to the Cortes Community Forest Cooperative

I read the 2024 Wildfire Planning Update on our Cortes Forestry website. It calls for further development of a fire break in the Gorge Harbour/Anvil Lake area, in block GH2. This would involve cutting “ an area infected with mistletoe Hemlock “.

I wondered if this little understood mistletoe plant deserves its villainous reputation, so I did a bit of research. Following is a bit of what I found.

Kevin Zobrist, WSU Extension Forester
Snohomish Conservation District, Washington State :

“What to Do if Your Tree has Mistletoe

What should you do? Not necessarily anything. Dwarf mistletoe is native, and it is a normal, natural agent in the forest. It has ecological benefits of providing some great structures for wildlife. “

And from the US National Center for Biotechnology Information :

“ Mistletoes provide structural and nutritional resources within canopies, and their pervasive influence on diversity led to their designation as keystone resources. We quantified the effect of mistletoe on diversity with a woodland-scale experiment, comparing bird diversities before and after all mistletoe plants were removed from 17 treatment sites…..Three years after mistletoe removal, treatment woodlands lost, on average, 20.9 per cent of their total species richness, 26.5 per cent of woodland-dependent bird species and 34.8 per cent of their woodland-dependent residents….. “.
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I realize that openings in the forest benefit young plants by letting in more sunlight. But I think that with increasingly extreme global heating, those same openings are more likely to just dry out and heat up. I think that adjacent wetlands and streams will suffer lower flows, more sediment, and higher temperatures.

Do we really want to cause a certain and significant loss of biodiversity, in order to gain a possible reduction in the severity of a fire ?

We need to shift our thinking quickly. We are going to need every drop of cool clean fresh water that we have on our island. The trees are our allies to that end.

There is wisdom in thinning the 3rd growth plantations. And we want to provide good wood for our local millers. I am not sure that either of those activities require more road building.

Apart from that, we need to leave every tree standing that we can.

With much respect,
Cec Robinson.