The huge runways at the Long Beach airport were built during World War II.

7. War Comes to Long Beach

IT’S EARLY morning in the bog, and as always the landscape here has a fairy-tale feel, part sombre, part fanciful. Wafting mist gives the yellow-cedars the look of gaunt watchmen lording over the bog’s more diminutive neighbours, and the tufted shore pines, resembling supersized heads of broccoli, add to its whimsical nature.

I’m alone on my walk here today, which is usually just fine, but thoughts of Sasquatch, said by some to roam this area near Radar Hill and close to the golf course, stick in my mind like small burrs. In one year, there were eight sightings, all from people very serious about what they saw. While there is not much hard evidence of the 225-kilogram (500-pound) animal standing more than 2 metres (6 feet) tall, some west coast residents are sure that the Sasquatch exists. Artist and author Emily Carr, describing Tsonoqua, a “wild woman of the woods” in First Nations mythology, wrote, “Half of me wished that I could meet her, and half of me hoped I would not.” That pretty well sums up my feelings about the Sasquatch. It’s the bog I’ve come to explore today, however, and I step carefully along the mucky trail trying not to look too hard for giant long footprints.

Like the mudflats, bogs are the misunderstood beauties of the west coast, relegated to backstage while all those centuries-old cedars, leaping whales, and vast expanses of fine sand bask in the spotlight. The dank bog reveals its beauty far more subtly and only to observers willing to look closely, possibly on their hands and knees.

All around me, I can see sphagnum mosses growing in pillowy profusion. If I sit down, the seat of my pants will be soaked through in short order. Moss’s structure, with large empty cells, makes an ideal conduit for water. Some species can absorb twenty times their dry weight. It’s for this reason that native people used sphagnum moss as absorbent pads, as did soldiers on Europe’s battlefields to blot up everything from water to blood.

Not only do these mosses thrive in this saturated bog, but they also secrete organic acids that create the bog conditions. (Coastal streams are often the colour of tea. This is caused by tannic acid, one of the naturally occurring acids released by sphagnum.) An acidic habitat might sound like an unhealthy place to exist, but an entire complex of organisms is perfectly adapted to the boggy life. The yellow-cedar and shore pines stand highest here, and some individuals can grow for centuries. Still, these twisted and stunted trees only ever achieve a fraction of the size of their forest-dwelling relatives. Beneath the trees, Labrador tea, bog cranberry, crowberry, and bog laurel sit atop the mossy hummocks where they gain slightly better drainage. Lowest to the ground are the bog jewels: the tiny sundews and butterworts, whose petite daintiness belies their carnivorous appetite, as they lure and trap insects with sticky fluids. In the nutrient-poor environment, being a carnivore is a perfect way to get a meal.

No west coast bog is complete without the brilliant yellow of skunk cabbage, which grows in clumps in the muckiest part of the bog. Most flowers in the forests near Long Beach are relatively small and understated. Not so the skunk cabbage. In the spring, just when I start thinking the rains have gone on for far too long, the appearance of these brilliant yellow “swamp lanterns” rising out of the mire gives me hope that warmer days are on their way. The yellow “flower” of this plant is really a bract that partially hoods a spike covered in tiny greenish-yellow bumps, the actual flowers. The bract acts like a cloak around the spike of flowers, trapping whatever warmth the plant generates. This warmth also hastens diffusion of the skunk cabbage’s distinctive funky odour. While other plants evolved sweet scents to attract pollinators, the skunk cabbage favoured putrid as the best scent to entice its preferred suitors, beetles and flies. More intriguing still is the evolutionary refinement effected by the plant, which releases not just one putrid odour but a range of them, each scent triggered for release by different temperatures and each known to be the best lure for the particular pollinator out at that time of day.

The acidic environment means that little decays in the bogs. The living mosses are actually the green tip of a layer of moss that could be several metres thick, with the compressed moss on the bottom (the peat) being several centuries old. This also means that bogs are perfect history books, trapping and preserving pollen and seeds in layer after layer that scientists can later “read” for clues about past climate and environment conditions. And who knows? Maybe deep down in this acidic, anoxic moss lies the preserved body of a Sasquatch, our own west coast bog man.

I carry on down the trail toward a drier spot where I’ll stop for some lunch. Not far from here is the spot where Canso A 11007 crashed on February 10, 1945. The survivors spent hours nearby waiting for rescue, no doubt grateful to be alive and thanking their lucky stars that the plane sputtered and crashed near the relatively open landscape of a bog. The plane, locally referred to as “The Bomber,” still sits where it ended its last flight over sixty years ago, its nose against a rocky outcropping and tail suspended metres above the forest floor. Its presence is a striking reminder of the big changes that the World War II era left on the Long Beach landscape.

The First Ripples of War on Long Beach

A romantic holiday cut short was Long Beach’s first casualty of World War II. A young couple was staying at Singing Sands for their honeymoon. The groom had a small radio and was listening on September 10, 1939, when the announcement came that Canada had declared war on Germany. Being a naval reservist and fiercely loyal to the cause, he prepared to leave immediately. Resort owner Peg Whittington tried to talk some sense into him, suggesting he at least finish his honeymoon. She could only convince him to stay a few more days, though, as his patriotism exceeded his passions.

In the early months of World War II, Long Beach residents passed the days much as they always had. Coming out of the Depression was a slow business for west coast communities. Work was scarce and intermittent, but with a bit of effort, food was plentiful. Clams, crabs, fish, waterfowl, venison, the bounty from backyard gardens, and perhaps a cow or coop of chickens all kept food on the table.

At the time, the population of this coastal area, including that of the native communities, was still well below one thousand. Forming a large part of the population of both Ucluelet and Tofino were Japanese-Canadians who had first arrived to fish in the early 1920s. By 1923, about ninety Japanese families had settled on the west coast: twenty-five in Tofino, six at Clayoquot, fifty in Ucluelet and the rest in Bamfield down the coast. (For a time, there were a few families near Long Beach, too, living in houses at Grice Bay.) By the 1930s, they were well established in all the communities.

Even before Canada entered World War II, the military had been present in the Long Beach area. Although much of the activity was focused on the Atlantic, the need to ramp up military presence on the west coast became evident as well. In October 1936, Ucluelet was chosen as the location of one of a series of “flying boat” stations along the Pacific coast. From a defensive standpoint it was an ideal choice. Ucluelet Harbour was relatively protected and situated near the entrance to Barkley Sound; it was close to the United States; and it helped protect the vulnerability of the Alberni Inlet, through which any successful enemy invader would gain a straight shot from Port Alberni over Vancouver Island to the mainland.

By late spring 1940, servicemen in the #4 Bomber Reconnaissance Squadron were relocated to their new base in Ucluelet. Living conditions at the time were grim. The construction crew arrived barely ahead of the squadron, essentially building the station around them.

The Enemy, Weather

As the war progressed, concern over a seaborne invasion of the west coast grew and establishing airfields rose on the priority list. Air force officials began searching for locations to build airports that could support land-based fighter and bomber aircraft squadrons. After a lengthy reconnaissance and surveying, the Burnt Lands adjacent to the Lovekin home was chosen as the site of the new Royal Canadian Air Force Station Tofino. (The Lovekins donated land for a military hospital, and some Tla-o-qui-aht families living near Esowista were also asked to lend their land for the cause. The Lovekins’ land was returned to them after the war. The natives’ land was absorbed into the airport.)

A more challenging building site could hardly have been picked. With no road access from Port Alberni, construction equipment and the huge number of skilled tradesmen required to build the base had to come by water. Just housing and feeding the crews would be a logistical challenge. Still, the air force forged ahead, determined that Long Beach was the best spot. Engineers inspected the proposed airport site in May 1941, and just five weeks later, two barges arrived at Ucluelet loaded with heavy equipment and lumber for the new airport.

It was clear from the start that the toughest enemies on the coast were going to be the weather and the geography. The wet days of winter were on their way, and much of the airport site selected was boggy and poorly drained.

The first order of business was to improve the road from Ucluelet to the Long Beach site and to prepare the airport building site. The successful contractor, Coast Construction Company, wallowed in the mud for weeks trying to clear away a sizeable patch of forest and scrub. With understaffed crews and bulldozers that bogged down repeatedly in the saturated land, progress was exceedingly slow—until December 7, 1941, and Japan’s attack on the American base at Pearl Harbor. Practically overnight, the Long Beach air base project shot to the top of the RCAF’s to-do list. Local workers, contracted to prepare a camp for the airport construction crew, cleared the long-abandoned homestead of August Arnet at McLean’s Point in Grice Bay, even reclaiming the house and boathouse from thickets of salmonberry and alder.

Within a few weeks, the area thrummed with activity as construction crews moved in to occupy the site. The first task was to build a wharf at Grice Bay for gravel barges and then to push a nearly two-kilometre (one-mile) road through from the bay to the airport site. Tofino’s Walter Guppy later recalled the activity in Grice Bay in the spring of 1942: strings of barges were towed into Grice Bay, filled with gravel dredged from the Cypre River. From there, a fleet of trucks hauled the gravel inland, where “bulldozers were stirring up a sea of mud in an attempt to remove the forest cover and level the area where the airport would be constructed.” To the rescue charged Gordon Gibson, self-professed “Bull of the Woods.” Coast Construction Company subcontracted Gibson to clear the land of all trees, stumps, and brush. He was well acquainted with clearing land on the west coast and transferred this logging knowledge to the airport site, using spars and donkey engines to remove the trees and shrubs. With that done, Coast Construction returned to level the ground, and airport construction began.

Before they pulled out, though, Gibson’s crew was hired for one more job. Fears had arisen that Japanese planes might use Long Beach as a natural landing strip or as a place to launch a land assault. As a defensive solution, the RCAF contracted Gibson and his crew to drive lines of pilings into the sand from the high tide line all the way to the water’s edge, down the entire length of the beach. Barbed wire and cables strung between the pilings in each line completed the deterrence.

Pilings driven along the length and width of Long Beach, and linked with barbed wire, were erected as a deterrent against an enemy invasion from the sea. Years after the war ended, the pilings were used as impromptu rally courses for drivers on the beach.

Farewell to Friends

December 7, 1941, was a turning point in the war but also a pivotal point in the history of the Long Beach area. As soon as news of the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor hit the airwaves, Canada was considered to be at war with Japan, and RCAF Station Ucluelet went on active war alert. Security was heightened at the base with blackout conditions at night and dawn-to-dusk patrols. Air force personnel carried steel helmets and gas respirators at all times. Within days, Western Air Command sent 67 men to guard the Ucluelet base, and they were soon joined by 190 soldiers from the Royal Canadian Army. The influx of men strained the already-crowded base, where construction crews were still scrambling to finish building the facilities. By the end of that year, less than a month after the attack at Pearl Harbor, 32 officers and 400 men of other ranks called the RCAF Station Ucluelet home.

Meanwhile, the political climate for the area’s residents of Japanese descent began to strain. On January 14, 1942, the Government of Canada declared all Japanese in Canada to be enemy aliens. On the west coast, rumours began to circulate: the Japanese school held on Saturday mornings was really military training; a Japanese man was just a bit too chummy with the airmen in Ucluelet; secret messages were being sent from basement hideouts or fishing boats. The truth was clouded by fear and confusion. Sadly, that made no difference in the end to the fate of the Japanese-Canadians on the west coast.

In January 1942, more than two dozen military and provincial police officers arrived and went door to door removing the telephones of Japanese residents. In March, the Canadian government ordered all people of Japanese descent to prepare to leave their homes within twenty-four hours. The station diary at RCAF Station Ucluelet recorded that on March 19, 1942, the Maquinna took away the last of the area’s banished Japanese residents. Practically overnight, dear and longtime friends were supposed to have become enemies.

Forty years later, Islay MacLeod of Tofino reminisced about the departure: “Time seemed to stop for me that day... There were my friends, Emiko and her sister, Sachiko... and there was the Japanese boy who had won a place in my heart forever by helping me with my Arithmetic. And there were all the others milling about on the Government wharf... I had never seen so many Japanese adults and children together at one time. It seemed to my young eyes that half the population of Tofino was leaving. And there we were, the other half... watching as our former friends gathered their pitifully few belongings together.”

RCAF Mudville

If clearing the RCAF Tofino site hadn’t been difficult enough, constructing the airport buildings and fifteen-hundred-metre- (five-thousand-foot-) long runways notched up the challenge several times over. To build the runways, for example, a concrete plant had to be built first on the airport site. Even basic services such as water and electricity had to be established from scratch. The airport project was supposed to be top secret, but local residents could hardly ignore the hundreds of men flooding through their communities en route to the construction camp near Grice Bay. By now, the number of work crews living in a vast sea of shacks had ballooned, and the camp formed one of the largest villages on the coast.

While the construction crews worked maniacally, the RCAF was busy preparing squadrons for its newest base. Both #132 Fighter Squadron and #147 Bomber Reconnaissance Squadron trained on the mainland throughout the summer, waiting for their orders and assignment to the Tofino station. Finally, on October 14, 1942, Coast Construction sent word that the base was ready to receive the airmen.

The christening of the first of the three runways to open was not an auspicious beginning. The single-engine Lysander circled above Wickaninnish Bay, aimed at the airport, and began its descent over the beach logs. The plane touched down, veered out of control, and skidded off the runway. No one on board was injured, but the plane had to be barged to Vancouver for repairs.

Performance improved the next day when the #132 Fighter Squadron landed, but the euphoria of that success wore off almost before the engines had cooled as it became apparent that the reports of the base’s state of readiness were wildly overblown. No buildings were ready to accommodate or feed the airmen, so they had to bunk in with the construction crew or live in tents. Then, when they were finally sent to their new barracks, they found a two-storey shell of a building with no interior partitions, no electricity, and no water (and thus no toilets, washing facilities, or showers). For heat, the men relied on a few wood-burning stoves whose chimney pipes were poked out a nearby window. The officers set up their quarters in an unfinished washroom that still had the piping for the toilets and sink protruding through the floor and walls. It was not a happy introduction to the area’s wet and windy climate.

The situation with the airport facilities wasn’t much better. Only the east-west runway had been completed. The other two were still riddled with tree stumps. There were no hangars for the planes or crew buildings. Planes sat at the edge of the runway, and ground crews shivered in small tents trying to stay out of the persistent rains.

Within two weeks, RCAF brass conceded the snafu. Desperate to speed things along, they issued orders for the airmen to be assigned to construction duties. As one of those men, Les Hempsall, later recalled, “From then on, fifty airmen of varying skills and experience in cooking, accounting, administration, stores, armament and aircraft maintenance reported daily to the construction superintendent with hammers and saws but with no knowledge of how to use them.” Add to that the fact that the men had not been relieved of their regular jobs, and it is little wonder their efforts only added to the chaos. When the unionized construction workers rebelled and went on strike, the plan was quickly shelved.

Progress was, nevertheless, being made in staggering steps. On October 31, 1942, Hempsall wrote how there was “joy in Mudville” that night when Coast Construction Company finally hooked up two electric lights, one for the airmen’s mess and one in the officers’ mess. A month later, he wrote that the barracks had at last got hot and cold running water, “just in time for the pipes to freeze.” By year’s end, 6 toilets were newly installed, a bonus for the 387 men celebrating New Year’s Eve at RCAF Base Tofino that year, if each man didn’t mind standing in line with about 63 others to take advantage of the new luxury.

When spring came and the weather improved, Coast Construction accelerated operations in a final drive to get the job finished, bringing in five hundred more workers. Finally, by mid-1943, the barracks, mess hall, and a recreation hall were completed, and construction of the first hangar began.

So Little to Do and So Many to Do It

The Lovekins’ guest book during the war years provides a glimpse into just how much activity was going on at Long Beach. Men from the Winnipeg Light Infantry, #4 Bomber Reconnaissance Squadron, 33rd Anti-Aircraft Battery, 1st Dufferin and Haldimand Rifles, 2nd Canadian Scottish Regiment, and even the Canadian Dental Corps all dropped in for a visit and a cup of coffee, hosted by the Donahues if the Lovekins were not in residence. No doubt these visits to a comfortable home were a welcome break to the men’s monotonous routine. Air force squadrons patrolled the coast on twelve-hour flights reaching eight hundred kilometres (five hundred miles) out to sea, searching for submarines and monitoring activity in the shipping lanes.

The air force squadrons were soon joined by army personnel tasked with protecting the base. Four army camps were positioned between Tofino and Ucluelet, including one at Schooner Cove. The soldiers worked out of bunkers hidden among the beach logs and covered by sand. Over at McLean’s Point, on Grice Bay, another contingent guarded the fuel-storage tanks, and gun positions were scattered throughout the area. A corps of Royal Canadian Engineers wired the airstrip for demolition in case of attack.

Training for both the air force and army was ongoing and helped break the monotony of waiting for an enemy that, in the end, never arrived. A rifle range and survival school was set up in the Long Beach sand dunes; an obstacle course was run along an abandoned road cutline near McLean’s Point; mock attacks were staged; and men practised their survival skills in the bush, fashioning shelters from driftwood and parachutes and hunting and fishing for food.

Still, they often had time on their hands. For many, this was a posting to a remote, muddy hellhole, and amazingly there were some men who only ever flew over Long Beach and never set foot on it during their whole time stationed on the coast. Others, however, wandered down whenever they had the opportunity to take a quick dip, hike along the rocky headlands, or join in a game of baseball or rugby. Because there were no married quarters on the base, the Whittingtons, and the Donahues to a lesser extent, rented cabins to wives and families of servicemen for about $15 a month. Both the Whittingtons and Donahues also allowed a few of the men to build cabins on their properties, providing the men with the materials in return for their labour and a place for their families to live while they were posted to the coast. Other servicemen housed their wives and families in shacks moved from the air base construction camp to Schooner Cove in a makeshift community called Pacific Heights. With outside toilets and no electric lights or running water, these accommodations were very basic, but the setting more than made up for that.

The wooden shacks at Pacific Heights, or “Dog Patch,” changed hands for about $75 as servicemen and their families came and went from the makeshift community.

The flood of people, mostly young men, brought change and excitement to the area. “The boys,” as Peg Whittington called them, “cheered things up a lot.” There were dances and picnics, whist drives and other fundraisers for the war effort both in Ucluelet and Tofino.

At the end of the summer of 1944, Secret Order #304 closed RCAF Station Tofino less than 2 years after the first plane landed on the runway. At its height, the station housed more than 1,100 personnel, and hundreds more lived in the army camps surrounding the station. To anyone who had been absent for those 2 years and only returned to the area then, it would have looked as though a town had fallen intact from the sky into the old bog-and-forest landscape below. Almost 50 buildings of various sizes were left at war’s end, including 2 airplane hangars, a 128-bed hospital, a 2-chair dental clinic, a recreation hall, a canteen and 13-bay garage, bomb and pyrotechnic stores, barracks, and mess halls.

The air base at rcaf Base Tofino dramatically changed the landscape of the Long Beach area, literally and figuratively. During its short operation, the base was the largest community on the west coast. This photograph shows #147 Bomber Reconnaissance Squadron ground crew on a Bolingbroke Bomber. Note the impressive hangar, one of two at the base.

The base didn’t completely shut down, however. In November, it became a Signals Unit with fewer than two hundred personnel. No aircraft or aircrew remained, but pilots from other bases flew out to the coast and used the airstrips to practise takeoffs and landings. The airport was serving in that function when RCAF Canso #11007 from Coal Harbour on northern Vancouver Island landed at Tofino on the afternoon of February 10, 1945, for a short stop to practise on the runway and test repairs on their port engine.

At 11 P.M., with 12 people, four 250-pound depth charges, and a full load of fuel onboard, the plane departed. Shortly after takeoff, the port engine spluttered and died. The pilot, Ronnie J. Scholes, tried to turn back to the airfield to no avail. With the plane quickly losing altitude, Scholes pulled the plane into a full stall to slow it down. It hit near the bottom of a hill, breaking through trees and standing almost tail up before finally crashing down. All the lights were out, and one crewman later recounted hearing a crackling noise over the dead silence aboard. Looking forward, he saw the port engine on fire and a waterfall of gasoline pouring from the ruptured left wing tank.

Miraculously, all twelve passengers survived. Scholes had a fractured forehead and a broken nose, eight people had minor cuts and bruises, and the remaining three were unhurt. They all crawled out of the wreck and hiked down to the flats below. Help wasn’t long in coming. When the Canso hadn’t arrived at Coal Harbour as scheduled, a search plane set out to look for them. Once located, the crew was hiked out.

After the downed crew’s rescue, a second RCAF team went to the crash site to retrieve the radios and machine guns. They also removed and detonated the depth charges a few hundred metres from the wreck. Today, a perfectly circular pond about ten metres (thirty feet) across fills the crater blasted out by explosions. Every spring, the pond grows thick with the egg masses of Northwestern salamanders, each a grapefruit-sized ball of clear jelly.

If the leading edge of the cloud that was about to sweep over Long Beach during World War II was signalled by a truncated honeymoon, perhaps it was fate that saw the need to mark the cloud’s departure with another casualty of the heart.

In March 1946, a large mine floated onto the beach near Dick and Peg Whittington’s Singing Sands resort. They reported it to George Redhead, the provincial policeman stationed in Ucluelet, who in turn sent word to the Canadian navy. Although Redhead advised them to land at Ucluelet, from where he would drive the detonation crew out to the beach site, the navy insisted on proceeding by sea straight out to Green Point and sending the men ashore in a small boat. Redhead and the Whittingtons knew this was a foolish decision—launching and rowing through the surf was risky at the best of times and even more so in the late winter’s high seas—but they had little say in the matter.

Offshore, a skiff with five men was lowered, and they headed in. They made it safely to the beach and set about exploding the mine. The plan went awry, however, when the men tried to return to the base ship. As they strained at the oars to propel the small boat through the breakers, they were flipped over into the churning surf. Dick and Redhead raced in to help while Peg ran to the house for rope. When she got back, she could see three of the navy men struggling in the surf as another clung to the overturned skiff and the fifth was trying to gain purchase on the rocks off the beach. Eventually, three of them were rescued and brought to shore, and Peg and a neighbour drove the shaken men to Singing Sands to warm up.

Dick, meanwhile, had with great difficulty made it onto the rocks of Green Point to help the stranded sailor still in trouble there. Whether Dick was swept into the water by the wave surge or pulled in by the man he was trying to save is not clear, but Dick disappeared. Only later was his body found down the beach toward Sandhill Creek. One of the naval men also drowned in the incident.

Dick Whittington (L) and George Hillier (R) with an unexploded mine Whittington discovered on Long Beach. The navy expedition sent to detonate the mine ended in tragedy.

Dick was posthumously awarded a medal for his part in the rescue. Peg chose not to go to the ceremony; instead his mother accepted the medal.

“Everybody thought I should leave the beach after that,” Peg said years later, “and I thought I shouldn’t.”

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Shifting Seas of Sand

Tucked just above Long Beach, the rolling sand dunes at the south end of Long Beach have always been a draw. First Nations people came here, a place they called tl’atl’athis, to gather the glossy red fruit of kinnikinnick, or bearberry, that grows from the bush’s long thin branches snaking across the sand. They usually stored the berries for later use, for instance, stirred into fermented salmon eggs. The grey beach peavine, an extremely rare plant with significant populations only in the dunes at Long Beach and on Graham Island in Haida Gwaii, also grows here. Other rare plants, such as the beach carrot and beach morning glory, add dashes of colour to the buff sandscape.

When I come here, I like to scramble up the steep bank at the back of the dunes. It rises to a knife-edge ridge, the back sloping to the forest below. Not that the bank is all that visible on this side. The salal is so thick you can hardly see the ground. One misstep could send you tumbling like Alice into a Wonderland tunnel of green. From the safe position atop the ridge, however, the view seaward is panoramic. This is a great spot for watching spouting grey whales in the spring. And sitting tall about a kilometre offshore is tukwnit, or Sea Lion Rocks. Native people used to paddle out there to hunt the seals and sea lions that haul themselves up onto the rocks to rest.

At the base of the dunes, the wind sometimes fingers away the sand to expose shards of metal, litter left from the firing range set up here during World War II or even from the New Year’s Day trap shoots once held annually on the dunes by Long Beach locals. Military survival camp exercises, motorcycle antics, impromptu target practice by those sober and drunk—the dunes have endured much pernicious use over the last half-century. Today, they are quiet, visited only by the occasional hiker and serving as an important travel corridor for animals, including wolves, cougars, and bears.

In the past, conventional thinking was that dunes needed to be stabilized to be preserved and to protect coastal buildings and infrastructure. Today, restoration science suggests the opposite is true. Sand and the dunes they create are naturally mobile because of the wind; by encouraging and allowing that mobility, we can better preserve these vulnerable ecosystems.

It is the dynamic nature of dunes that keeps them complex and richly diverse. As their very substrate moves about, so do nutrients and plant communities. If the sand stops moving, plants on the dune’s edges—mosses and trees such as spruce and cedar—can gain a foothold and start encroaching on the dune, ultimately ruining the habitat and its inherent “dune-ness.” In the Long Beach sand dunes, national park biologists are working to remove a different problem: invasive European beach grass. This species of dune grass was commonly planted elsewhere in the 1940s as a way to anchor dunes. Although not purposely introduced at Long Beach or even on Vancouver Island, partial plants, with roots intact, found their way here anyway, carried by the wind and ocean, and today European beach grass has a stranglehold on the dunes. Removing this grass by hand and by backhoe helps restore the natural cycles of change on the dune.

During World War II, training exercises broke up the monotony of life on the base. As part of the men’s training, the air force held survival camps in the sand dunes at the south end of Long Beach. Dune ecosystems are rare in British Columbia, which makes Long Beach’s dunes especially significant.

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Splat

While the improved highway at Long Beach may have made travel easier for humans, it did just the opposite for the area’s frogs, salamanders, and newts, whose travel corridors took them blindly across the highway during their migrations. Thanks to the work of local volunteers on a project affectionately referred to as SPLAT (Society for the Prevention of Little Amphibian Tragedies or Some Poor Little Amphibians Trampled), the extent of amphibian carnage has been greatly reduced. Today, small fences erected along the Long Beach highway in several locations bisect migratory routes of the local amphibians, stopping them before they reach the treacherous road surface and directing them to a tunnel under the highway.

The damp environment of the west coast is perfect for frogs and salamanders, including tree frogs, the rough-skinned newt, the Northwestern salamander, the Western red-backed salamander, the wandering (cloud) salamander, and the red-legged frog, which is a federal “species of concern.” The bogs, ponds, and ditches of the Long Beach area are excellent amphibian breeding patches. Add to that endless moist terrestrial habitat well stocked with decaying logs and forest leaf litter, and amphibians have the perfect homes-away-from-water, with an abundance of insects and other small invertebrates to feed on.

The presence of amphibians helps biologists assess the ecological integrity of the area, since these small animals are some of the first to be affected by changes in the environment, including air and water quality. They are the west coast’s “canary in a coal mine” and are monitored by counts of adults (alive and dead) and their egg masses, which can reach impressive size. A female red-legged frog can lay more than a thousand eggs at a time in a jelly-like mass that looks like a cluster of grapes. The Northwestern salamander’s egg mass holds dozens of pea-sized eggs.

Listening to calls is another way to monitor amphibians. No one at Long Beach, human or native amphibian, ever wants to hear the bwum, bwum, bwum of the American bullfrog, whose accidental introduction to habitats on southern Vancouver Island has spelled catastrophe for indigenous species. It’s truly a bully of a frog, eating other amphibians and out-competing them for habitat. To date, the Long Beach area has remained bullfrog-free, and the hope is that it will stay that way.

Northwestern salamanders are common residents of the forests and wetlands of the Long Beach area. They breed and lay their eggs in water and spend their adult lives in the forests, often underground or in decaying logs.