West Coast Forests – It’s a matter of scale
One of the stories I like to tell…Ok it’s not really a story in that there’s no beginning, middle and end. It’s like a narrative story or voice-over…. One of the stories I like to tell people from outside BC is about the scale of the vegetation in the rainforest here on Vancouver Island. Everything is bigger!
A great illustration is the alder that grows back in Ontario, where I’m from. Speckled Alder, in eastern Canada, is the common alder you see everywhere. At most, it gets 10m tall (American translation is 30 feet). On Vancouver Island, it can be almost two-and-a-half times taller. Same with cedar: the eastern species is two-and-a-half times smaller, in general. Hemlock also: but the proportional difference isn’t quite as much.
This even extends to the understory of the forest. In eastern Canada, blueberry bushes are seldom taller than your knee. On the Island, they are often taller than a man or at least chest high. Raspberry bushes also are bigger, only we call them Salmonberries. Different species, same genus. On the outer or west coast, of Vancouver Island, I have crawled through stands of Salmonberry that were 3 meter or 20 feet high!
And so when you are walking a trail in a west coast rainforest, you may find that you can’t see very far through the forest as you would in an eastern coniferous or deciduous forest back east.
Learn more about western rainforests at RainbirdExcursions.com