The coastal temperate rainforest is one of the rarest forest types on the planet and also one of the most biologically productive.
The coastal temperate rainforest is one of the rarest forest types on the planet and also one of the most biologically productive.
A Magical Place
Imagine visiting a place where there are trees as tall as skyscrapers, the ocean roars like a lion, and giant bears the color of darkness, snow and gold bullion roam the land like kings. Well, there is such a place. It’s on the west coast of British Columbia, and it’s called the Great Bear Rainforest.
Reaching from the top of Vancouver Island to the tip of Alaska’s Panhandle, and jutting in from the Pacific Ocean to the Coast Mountains, the Great Bear Rainforest is one of the world’s last great wildernesses. It’s not like a park that you can drive or ride your bike through; it’s more like a jungle. A jungle where it rains—and rains and rains—that you can only get to by boat or floatplane. While aboriginal, or First Nations, people have lived in this maze of inlets, bays and fjords for over ten thousand years, it got its popular name more recently when people concerned about its future set out to tell the world about it. They called it the Great Bear Rainforest because of the great bears that live in it—the grizzly bear, the American black bear and the spirit bear, a rare kind of black bear with white fur. Bears are typically shy of people, but if you’re determined to find one, the Great Bear Rainforest is the place to look because thousands of them live there. Most are black bears, but there are hundreds of grizzlies too—great bears that need a great rainforest to survive.
What’s surprising is that most of the Great Bear Rainforest isn’t a forest at all. Although it covers five million hectares—an area almost as big as the province of Nova Scotia—only a small part is actual rainforest. The rest is made up of steep mountains, windswept glaciers, jagged ice fields and soggy, spongy bogs, all surrounded by a roiling, churning ocean where all sorts of interesting creatures live. If you look at the map on page v, you’ll see that the land is so broken up by rivers, streams, fjords, inlets and islands that it looks like a giant jigsaw puzzle that someone didn’t quite finish fitting together.
Springtime in the Great Bear Rainforest. Two subadult grizzly siblings have a wrestling match along a coastal estuary.
A rainbow breaks through a midsummer storm on a coastal estuary. Estuaries are where the ocean meets the rainforest; they provide important habitat for coastal bears.
But it’s in the forests where almost everything lives. There are insects so tiny you need a magnifying glass to see them, grizzlies the size of Volkswagens, and animals of every kind, shape and size in between. In fact, these forests support more living matter, what scientists call biomass, than the tropical rainforests in the Amazon. Put another way, even though the Amazon rainforest contains more different species, it doesn’t have as much living stuff in it overall. No matter where you look in the Great Bear Rainforest—from beneath the forest floor to the tops of the tallest trees—everything is alive. And while a few parts of the Amazon have bears, they aren’t like grizzlies. Grizzly bears are only found in northern ecosystems like this one. But just as in the Amazon, everything that lives in the Great Bear Rainforest—plant and animal, large and small—has a vital role to play in it.
The Web of Life
Biologists describe this living world as a “web of life” because all the plants and animals in it depend in some fashion on one another. Each thread in the web represents a kind of plant, insect or animal, so that no matter how small or seemingly insignificant, each and every living thing in the rainforest has an effect on every other living thing. Some plants depend on animals eating parts of them to spread their seeds. Think of birds that eat the fruit off trees, bushes and vines. Other animals, called carnivores, eat other animals. Think of wolves that catch and kill deer, and eagles, hawks and owls that hunt rabbits and other rodents. Sometimes part of an animal’s body will be left uneaten by a predator. When this happens, what’s left of it will be eaten by scavengers—everything from gulls to maggots to bacteria. Over time they will break it down into pieces too tiny to see with the naked eye. But even though they’re tiny, these microscopic bits have a huge impact on the rainforest because of how they enrich its soil. Think of salmon carcasses that lie along the riverbank after spawning. First birds eat them. Then insects. Then bacteria. But they never really disappear. Instead they fill the soil with nutrients, and it’s these nutrients that feed the rainforest plants—everything from the smallest weed to the tallest tree. Just as in a spider’s web, every strand in the web of life—in the rainforest—is important. If one or two strands are broken, the web can still hold together. But if too many are cut, it falls apart.
A rainforest wolf searches for salmon in one of the remote rivers of the Great Bear Rainforest. Wolves feed alongside grizzly and black bears in the fall when the salmon come to spawn. But in the spring and summer these species try to avoid each other.
What makes the Great Bear Rainforest so special is that it’s an old-growth forest. This means the trees in it have never been logged. In fact, some are over a thousand years old—older than the oldest castles in Europe. They can be as tall as thirty-story buildings and so big around that it would take a dozen people holding hands to form a circle around one. This is exactly the kind of forest bears like.
Rainforest bears rely on the forest for everything. The dens where they spend their winters are usually excavated at the bottoms of sturdy old trees. In the spring and summer they forage for berries and other plants under its broad leafy canopy. And in the fall they feast on the salmon that swim through its streams to spawn. The forest filters the rain that falls through it day after day, so the temperature for spawning is just right. And no matter the season, bears rely on the forest’s thick tangle of bushes, shrubs and trees for protection. That’s why when old-growth forests disappear, grizzlies disappear too. It’s one of the reasons why you have to go so far north in British Columbia to find significant populations of them.
But the forest isn’t just a place for bears. People have lived in the Great Bear Rainforest for a long time too. If you travel to any of the First Nations communities on the coast, you’ll find likenesses of bears carved on the corner posts of the big houses where dances and festivals are held. You’ll also find masks and other works of art that celebrate the bear as something to revere and respect. Coastal First Nations people have lived alongside the great bears for thousands of years and know them better than anyone else. So they have much to teach the rest of the world about them.
Heiltsuk First Nation grizzly bear mask.
More recently, the rainforest has become a destination for tourists. Visitors come to witness the wildness of the place and for the chance to see the rare and precious white spirit bear. But it isn’t easy to get into the rainforest because it’s so remote. Hardly any roads lead to it. That’s why if you do manage to get there, you’ll find that a boat is the best way to get around. But most important, if you are fortunate enough to visit one day, remember to bring rain gear. They don’t call it a rainforest for nothing. In the wettest parts it can rain as much as five meters (more than fifteen feet) a year. That’s the equivalent of a two-story house. But without that much rain, there would be no Great Bear Rainforest. And without the Great Bear Rainforest, there would be no great bears.
