Dear Dear Deer, Thoughts on Unintended Consequences

Dundas Island, BC 15-JUN-2018 – At Windy Bay, the Watchmen are two men named David and Tory. David is all teeth, practiced at dealing with visitors in his sixteen seasons, and is an eager talker.

Tory is handsome, tall, muscular with black hair streaked with gray. Between twenty-eight and thirty-two years old, Tory has been working in the Alberta oil fields for ten years. While Jennifer was speaking to David, he told me that he missed family; family was part of who he was. In the ten years he’d been gone, he’d only come back twice. He was home now and did not intend to live away again.

 As we walked from the watchman residence, we saw a couple of deer walking out in the open, grazing. Tory told us he hadn’t asked what equipment he could bring with him onto the island: he would have brought his compound bow; he intended to kill all of the deer on the island.

The deer were brought into Haida Gwaii as a source of protein. No one ever told us who brought the deer to Haida Gwaii. There had been elk at one time, but they had been killed off in the early 1900s. In ice age times, there had been brown bears, and even domesticated dogs.

As Jennifer, Tori and I walked through the woods we looked at the very large trees. This part of the island had never been logged. It was an easy walk with no underbrush, just large, widely spaced trees.

It wasn’t like the other woods Jennifer and I have walked through, but it is the only woods we’ve walked through the has never been logged. We asked Tory about the open space between the trees. He told us that this wasn’t natural. It is the deer. They eat everything that grows. They have no predators.

We noticed the deer all look mangy. Tory commented they spend a lot of time scratching like a dog, and when they scratch the leave tufts of fur on the ground. We passed a fallen tuft as we walked.

“This should all be completely choked,” Tory explained. “These are the last trees. There will be no more trees here because there are no young trees growing. Look around, there is nothing growing on the ground.”

Looking around, we could see how right Tory was. There was nothing growing that was taller than our ankles: no saplings, no shrubs, no bushes. Where a tree had fallen over, and this is quite natural, all sorts of berries and other bushes were growing on the top edge of the turned up roots. Tory pointed bushes out and said those grow there because the deer can’t get up to them.

We talked for a moment about hunting the deer. Tory said the deer don’t run away, if you don’t walk directly towards them. We asked what he would do with the venison. He told us the first thing you need to do is cut open the deer and feel its lungs and internal organs. “A lot of the deer are sick. You can’t use the meat.”

I came to believe the deer are suffering from malnutrition.

Tory knows, and I know, that even if he kills all the deer on this island, others will swim across from other islands. But if he can keep the population low enough, young trees will start to grow and these large trees on the island won’t be the last ones to ever grow here.

When we were in Alaska, we read about abandoned homesteads where people imported whatever animal was popular for fur coats at the time. In Haida Gwaii, they imported raccoons.

Unlike mink, the raccoons have prospered. One morning in a cove just outside the park, Jennifer counted twenty raccoons coming down to the water at low tide to hunt for food.  Besides seafood, the raccoons eat the eggs of the nesting birds. You can fill in the blanks.

We see this type of thing over and over again.

Last year, while we were waiting out weather in Taku, we spent some time talking with a commercial fisherman also on the dock waiting out weather.

In 2016, we were thrilled to see large mats of sea otters floating in the inside passage.

Earlier in our trip last year, we had a conversation with Walter from Hydaburg*who told us that his cousin asked him to come diving in a cove where there was abundant shellfish. Between when the cousin had made the invitation and he and Walter got there, the sea otters had moved through. The floor of the cove was dead. There was not a single shellfish left.

This is what we learned from the fishermen in Taku:

The sea otters that are in Alaska now are not the sea otters that were driven to extinction by the fur trappers during the nineteenth century. These are a different, larger sea otter from Southern California that was moved in to fill the niche. They had, he said, started on the outside islands and are now inside working their way through killing everything off. The problem he said is manifold: by killing everything living on the bottom, they have killed off all the filter feeders, so there is nothing to eat the decaying matter that sinks to the bottom.

The problem is compounded by “terminal” or ‘‘hatchery’’ salmon. The terminal salmon are the reason that he was in Taku. Terminal salmon are salmon raised in a fish hatchery until they are fry. Then they are released in a place like Taku. When they are adults they return Taku to spawn, but there is no stream for them to swim up. They are, instead, harvested by fishermen.

The compounded problem, the fishermen told us, was that they didn’t catch all the salmon, and those that they didn’t catch just swam around the cove until they died and sank to the bottom to decay. But without filter feeders to clean the water, the bottom turns to an organic-matter ooze. He didn’t see any way that this bottom could ever recover because there is no oxygen there anymore.

In the case of the sea otters, they are protected. They can’t be harvested or killed off.

There are other examples, but it is a frustrating paradigm that we have created.

I know it’s the law of unintended consequences, but I can’t find a way out of it.

Human beings from the beginning of time have driven species to extinction. Before Europeans came to North America numerous species, including horses, were hunted to extinction.

I think that sometimes, in a perverse way of trying to make ourselves separate from other peoples who came before us: We believe that we are the only people who have driven species to extinction, taken slaves and been ruthless to other peoples.

Our only distinction seems to be that we can do it on a larger scale.

When I was in college, there was a lot of discussion about nuclear winter and radiation fallout. One of the topics was ‘‘mean dead earth.’’ How much radiation would it take to kill everything that lived above the ocean’s waters? It was an interesting academic discussion. But when all is said and done, the professor who was a man, in probably his late 30s early 40s, summed it up this way: the Earth will survive and life will go on. We [humans] might not be here, but the Earth will go on and life will continue.

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*Walter, and Hydaburg, are a recurring thread that connects many of my images and lessons traveling between Seattle and Skagway. I promise I will start to write about Walter, small communities, and the ties that bind.