Beneath the canopy, a wooden behemoth lies on its side. The rotten trunk of this giant plant, covered with moss, is more than a meter in diameter. Aged 450, it was already rising in the sky when Samuel de Champlain first set foot in New France.
This gigantic yellow birch was still standing when biologist Normand Villeneuve last visited the ancient forest of Mount Wright 10 years ago. A few meters further on, another colossus more than three centuries old dominates the undergrowth.
Hard to believe that these deans of the forest have escaped 400 years of frenzied cutting. In this country, we have for a long time raked, loped or burned anything that vaguely looks like a log. Decades of pitounes, log drives and clearcutting have razed most of the wooded areas in Quebec. The ancients nicknamed wood-burning stoves deemed too greedy “mange-pays”, a barely imaged figure to convey the voracity with which the forest was exploited.
So when Normand Villeneuve was given the task of finding Quebec’s ancient forests in 1994, he expected to find a needle in an endless sea of black spruce tops.
Make fire with all wood
“We have been pulling conifers out of the woods for 300 years. Natural pine forests 150 years old no longer exist in Quebec. White pine, red pine: all the light wood that floated was heavily exploited with the log drive. This is the most obvious effect of indiscriminate management of our forests,” he explains.
In southern Quebec, a few less prized hemlock and hardwood forests have escaped the sciotte frenzy. “When we started our research, we thought old-growth forests were either rare or extinct,” he says.
It was long before The boreal error de Desjardins, when the forest was only measured in terms of cubic meters of wood and two-by-fours. It was the time when environmentalists chained themselves to the giant fir trees of British Columbia to stop the bulldozers.
From the start of its mission, the Villeneuve team identified 770 hectares of ancient forest unaltered by man since colonization, near Lac de l’Écluse in the Papineau-Labelle sector. “We were moved by it, it was so exceptional,” he said.
Gallic village of the forest world, this survivor and its 450-year-old birches remain the largest expanse of ancient forest still known to date in Quebec. “Unlike coniferous forests, affected by fires and insect epidemics, those populated by deciduous trees have been developing continuously since the last glaciation. These ancient forests allow us to understand what the territory looked like before the arrival of the first settlers,” insists Normand Villeneuve.
Living like dead wood
As we tread the damp soil of the ancient forest, ceded by the descendants of the Wright family to the Town of Stoneham-et-Tewkesbury, our guide draws our eyes to the mushrooms and lichens that abound on the trunks. Nearby, huge snags, remnants of former colossi that once stood skyward, rub shoulders with trees of all sizes, between a few rare giants with feet of clay.
“A lot of these big trees are zombies. They are almost dead already. This is what sets the ancient forest apart, all that dead wood that ensures the survival of amphibians and insects, mosses and lichens that only thrive in this kind of environment,” explains our guide.
In short, here, death is life.
Very close to us, three-hundred-year-old trees are thriving, senescent old men but teeming with a hidden life, absent in exploited forests. The snag of a single hundred-year-old tree can serve as habitat for around thirty species, explains the biologist.
Very old forests have half as many trees per hectare as an exploited or “regenerating” forest, where several species of trees coexist jumbled together, but far fewer animal species.
“In Europe, there are sumptuous ancient forests, but cleaned like gardens. This is not the natural state of an old growth forest. A salamander can take 30 to 40 years to develop its offspring in a stump and is not suited to forests that are often disturbed,” he says. Deprived of veteran trees, essential links to maintain the diversity of their ecosystems, entire territories have become ecological deserts, recalls this researcher.
From the first months of its mission, 30 years ago, Normand Villeneuve’s team listed hundreds of ancient or rare forests to explore. But it will be necessary to wait until 2002 before the Ministry of Forests adopts a law which makes it possible to classify and protect these survivors.
In 2002, there was less than one for 300 hectares of old-growth forest at Lake Preston, near La Minerve in the Laurentians. “At the time, we were working in a hurry. It sometimes gave rise to epic encounters on the ground. We have already gone to meet teams ready to deforest, brandishing a letter from the minister in our hands! »
In two decades, 256 exceptional forest ecosystems (EFE), rare or old, have been classified. It’s a lot, but so little. The equivalent of a blade of grass in an endless horizon of chainsaw-managed conifers. “It represents 0.35% of the territory”, specifies Normand Villeneuve.
And half of these miracles of the cut survive on private land where their fate depends on the goodwill of the owners. Those that thrive on public land are fortunately often enclosed in parks, nature reserves or protected areas.
“Most are far from trails or forest access roads, and some are only accessible by floatplane or helicopter. It does not represent large areas. But so far from sight, it would be easy to lose them without even realizing it! notes the biologist.
“These forest enclaves were protected because the machinery of the time did not allow access to them. But today, inaccessibility no longer protects them. These forests are under high pressure. What do we keep and what do we exploit? Are we protecting enough? Surely not to everyone’s taste,” he says.
A few months before retirement, Normand Villeneuve still has 1,700 forest proposals deemed exceptional or rare in his files, 843 of which are considered unique enough to deserve protection. At present, only 391 are protected (including 256 EFE) or sheltered in a natural area or reserve.
Why save a handful of old birch trees in an ocean of spruce trees doomed to end up as toilet paper?
“Research on ancient forests is very important to help us better understand what the biodiversity of these forests was and how to minimize the impacts of forest management on fauna and flora”, he thinks. .
paradise lost
Last May, Chinese scientists discovered, in a gigantic 600-foot-deep sinkhole in the Guangxi region, a forest that has remained intact since the dawn of time. In this sylvan oasis, populated by trees 40 meters high and ferns at shoulder height, there could still be species that have disappeared from the surface of the planet.
To find a virgin forest is to travel through time. It’s back to a time when the advance of chainsaws had not yet turned the profile of forests upside down and tainted their biodiversity. Nearly 200 years before the threat of climate change, a famous adage was already circulating: forests precede people, deserts follow them. Perhaps it would be time to contradict him.