Blacktop path hard on Nanaimo wildlife


MARK HUME

VANCOUVER -- The Trans Canada Trail, an 18,000-kilometre network of pathways crossing every province and territory, is supposed to help Canadians celebrate the country's natural beauty. But close to where it starts, on Vancouver Island, the city of Nanaimo has made a dubious contribution to this great project.

Right through the middle of a sensitive ecosystem known as Jingle Pot Marsh, the city has slapped a strip of blacktop, three metres wide, flanked by a wire fence. The pavement is ideal for motorcycle riders, who've been seen speeding through the marsh, and the fence, which apparently was meant to keep hikers from wandering into the bog and getting their feet wet, has turned out to be a good device for killing Virginia rails, rare marsh birds that congregate there in the winter.

"They are low-flying birds. They don't see the wire. Whap. They break a wing and then they die," said Rory Rickwood, chair of a small environmental group in Nanaimo known as Friends of the Cat Stream.

"My heart just dropped when I saw that trail," he said. "I was shocked. You stare at it and can just imagine the impact it's going to have on the wildlife you have been trying so hard to protect. And you have to wonder what's coming next. Will they propose putting lights in now because it's unsafe for people to walk through there at night?"

The marsh is part of a larger wetland complex that covers about 26 hectares within Nanaimo's city limits. Over the past century, it has increasingly been hemmed in by development. Recently, the city used the lands along the marsh's edge for an aquatic centre, a hockey arena and five playing fields.

The city has also been planting trees in the area, turning the damp, transitional zone around the marsh into forest land, which might look better but doesn't do anything for swamp creatures such as the red leg frog or the Virginia rail.

All of this has been done despite a Nanaimo community plan that calls for the city to identify and protect significant natural features and to develop land "in ways that respect ecosystems."

Mayor Gary Korpan doesn't think there's anything to worry about.

"Thanks for e-mailing your concerns," he wrote to Mr. Rickwood. "The City of Nanaimo consulted many environmental professionals and set aside 63% of the entire site for natural protection.

The sports fields were designed to minimize impact on the adjacent areas. We believe we have acted responsibly in balancing many demands."

What the mayor didn't say was that while 63 per cent of the site may have been protected, wetlands account for only 1.6 per cent of the land in the Greater Nanaimo Regional District. Allowing nearly half of that last little bit of marsh to be destroyed is nothing to boast about.

And just whose needs were "balanced" by allowing the last remaining marsh to be split in half by a fenced, paved path?

Certainly it wasn't the needs of the Virginia rail.

In a letter to Mr. Rickwood in 2001, when the environmental group was trying to stop the sports developments from going in, the Canadian Wildlife Service noted that the marsh was a "rare and fragile ecosystem" and said that "any further development within [the marsh] is not condoned."

The baseball fields, hockey rink and swimming pool went in, anyway.

When plans for a pathway through the marsh first came out, they showed a narrow boardwalk. There was no pavement. No wire fencing.

What was proposed was a nature trail. What got built was a dirt-bike throughway.

It came as a surprise, said Mr. Rickwood, because the city inexplicably did not consult with his group.

"We were not informed of any intention of putting in an asphalt trail and only discussed a narrow wooden boardwalk to give a soft intrusion into the marsh area.

"Putting a trail of that size and two long rows of fencing through . . . is a monstrosity and goes to show that a city land-use development will trump our sensitive ecosystems every time."

Mr. Rickwood said the "monster trail" should be taken out, the fencing removed and a boardwalk installed.

If that isn't done, his group is going to launch a campaign urging people to boycott the Nanaimo section of the Trans Canada Trail.

"If this trail remains, the federal government's Trans Canada Trail would be an example of environmental abuse," he said.

And that would be a heck of a way to start a hike across the landscape of this great country.

mhume@globeandmail.com

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