Ottawa

Well said, great comment. Thanks for your perspective, I wasn’t aware of that. Down near Ottawa we’ve gotten a lot of rain since that dry spell back in the spring, we’re definitely hitting that emerald green shade you speak of but largely seem to be in the same situation. As long as we don’t get too much heat and keep on getting rain, we’ll be ok.

From what I can see in the forest down here, it’s only a matter of time. The logging industry’s reforestation techniques take fifty years or more to demonstrate whether they lower or raise the risk potential; a lot of the areas in the Ottawa Valley were heavily logged, often repeatedly, and the reforestation strategies have changed drastically over our history. We’ve now got a mix of forest that was logged and clearcut at various times and with different techniques; patches that range from freshly logged to more than a century since they were destroyed.

It’s difficult to find trees more than 150 years old around here, you have to hunt for them down in the nooks & crannies of the geography. To find them consistently you almost have to shift your mindset to a different time, squint your eyes a bit to see the spots where it was too difficult to hook chains to draft horses & haul the logs out to the river during the winter months.

The emerald ash borer has destroyed the ash trees, in some areas up to 10% of the forest is dry, standing deadwood. The Downy, Hairy, & Pileated Woodpecker populations are way up, Northern Flickers too, but it’s a serious liability unless we manage to avoid drought conditions for the next ten years or so while the ash tree corpses fall & decompose.

Up past Arnprior the forest has a short memory. There’s some stone fences here & there where the forest has reconquered territory, old plots of land that were abandoned long ago.

What stands out to me is the Boy Scout forests, though; have you ever seen those? Stands of red pine arranged in a perfect grid pattern, completely unnatural looking and far too close together for sunlight to hit the ground below. Odd dead zones where almost nothing grows on ground level, and the immediate layer of branches overhead create a spindly web of dry tinder between the trees.

Any one of these types of areas could hit a tipping point if we get consistent drought conditions. After that, the whole forest goes up in flames. It’s a tragedy in the making, Centennial Lake was just the beginning. Our forest management techniques basically need the slate to be wiped clean at this point in order to manage the problem effectively moving forward.