Who’s been doing what in the Gabriola woods?
It’s a real-life Gabriola mystery! These are the clues:
- On a much-overgrown trail not far from a clearing, a rubber band lies on the ground. A brand new rubber band. The next day, there are four rubber bands in the same area. The day after that, nine. In the space of five days, thirty rubber bands appear in this very short section of trail.
- The trail is near a convenient parking area. A vehicle parked there might not be noticed much by those who drive by.
- The trail is obscure, and not many people even know that it’s there. So almost nobody uses it. Mostly it’s just a certain Gabriolan and a certain dog, from what I can tell.
- Between the trail and the parking area, a scattering of individual salal leaves appear on the ground. A dozen here, five over there. They’re on the muddy parking area, or on a grassy area. In other words, the leaves are not right next to a salal plant, and haven’t just dropped to the ground on their own. And there are not so many that you’d notice, unless you were looking for this kind of thing.
- Here and there, a salal branch lies on the ground, in the middle of a grassy area of the trail, say. The trail in that area is quite wide enough, so nobody needs to trim plants there in order to maintain the trail. The branch hasn’t been cut from the plant; it’s been broken off.
- If you’re a curious and determined person, you might snoop around and examine the salal plants on the obscure trail, on the main trail, or in some slightly out-of-the way area nearby. And you might find that lots of salal plants are missing a branch here or there. A broken-off branch.
What do you conclude, Inspector?
To me it says that somebody’s been sneaking around in the forest, picking vast amounts of salal, and bundling the branches together with rubber bands. Then the salal gets piled into a van, and the pickers drive off, hoping nobody will notice. They go from the Gabriola forest straight down to the ferry line-up, and on into town. The salal branches are sold to the floral industry.
This, by the way, is a salal branch:
We’ve got salal all over the place on Gabriola.
More on this in a couple of days. But meanwhile — have you been finding stray salal leaves and rubber bands in your area?
Update: Found: the salal thieves cache
Filed in native plants,trails 8 Comments so far
8 Responses to “Who’s been doing what in the Gabriola woods?”
Island Blogger on 28 Mar 2009 at 9:09 am #
Last Saturday, an old pickup truck was last onto the 11.15 ferry, heaped high with something that looked very similar. The couple in the truck had not had time to cover the load, but proceeded to do so during the crossing to Nanaimo. Now this may be just a coincidence….
Gabriolan on 28 Mar 2009 at 9:15 am #
Or not, Island Blogger. I know the salal pickers were out of the woods by then, because I was in the forest finding rubber bands at 11:15 am last Saturday. Hmm.
specialk on 28 Mar 2009 at 2:15 pm #
I have been coming to/living on Gabriola for 15+ years and I’ve always wondered about this. I have seen probably over 1000 pickup truck loads of salal leave the island. I knew where they were going (floral industry Nanaimo) and I knew people were making money doing this. I imagine a vast majority of Gabriolans know about this as well.
Is this practice of taking Gabriola’s salal and selling it illegal? Does it depend on which land it is picked from?
While I hate seeing the trucks leave the island… should I be thinking, is this perhaps a good thing? Forest cleaning service? Or is this just another thing wrongly adjusting the balance of nature’s course on the island?
What I have always figured (rightly or wrongly) is that if it IS ILLEGAL to take from the island… then why don’t islanders say something to them in the ferry line?
Gabriolan on 28 Mar 2009 at 8:51 pm #
Wow, specialk! 1000 trucks of salal is a lot.
My understanding of the situation is this: it’s not illegal to pick salal on your own land (hey, it’s your salal) or on other people’s land IF the land-owner has given you permission. However, it is illegal for somebody to harvest your salal without your permission. And it is illegal for people to harvest salal from parks. I think it’s also illegal to harvest salal from crown land.
Next time you’re driving through the Tunnel, take a look at the signs the federal government has put up. Some of the signs say:
No camping, No dumping, No tree cutting or salal picking.
So it’s not ok to pick salal in the federal government lands along North Road, though I see evidence of frequent salal-picking there. And it’s not legal to pick salal in the Elder Cedars Nature Reserve, though I’ve found salal harvesters there.
I have some concerns about salal harvesting, and I don’t view it as a forest cleaning service. I’ll blog more about that soon.
As for why islanders don’t say anything to salal harvesters in the ferry line, I’ve no idea. Don’t want to get involved? Don’t care? Think it’s a great thing? If one were to say something, what would one say? I’m guessing that the harvesters would just lie and say ‘hey, we were picking on private land with the owners’ permission. Yeah, it’s my pal’s place…”
specialk on 29 Mar 2009 at 3:37 am #
Oh yes 1000 truckloads. I would think it reality it is much MUCH more over the course of the last fifteen years. I can only guess that there all ready exists documentation of some sort on this illegal harvesting of salal because it has been so obvious and so in our faces as islanders for many years.
Whether I am not visiting the ferry line-up as much as I used to… it really seems to me that the problem has largely died down from what I remember in the 90′s. I don’t think it was uncommon for there to be many families (read: ethnic groups) with multiple pickups ‘working’ the island and all going back on the ferry together with massively over-stuffed loads of salal in the backs of their trucks.
If June Harrison didn’t have knowledge on this matter I would be surprised. If anyone else can confirm the scale/duration/severity of this salal harvesting please share… even if it is just what you have witnessed.
Gabriolan on 29 Mar 2009 at 1:39 pm #
Update: more elastic bands and salal branches on the ground this morning. At this point I suspect that the salal harvesters are returning to the same area several times each week, or even daily, early in the morning.
feathered_gem on 20 Apr 2009 at 7:02 am #
Perhaps taking photos of people,their vehicles full of salal and license plates while in line for the ferry then making the report to the boys in blue might be useful? I have seen this also,overburdened trucks full of salal, not ‘often’ but every once in a while I do see it. It always pisses me off, I know it’s theft. I never really thought of what could be done about it before tho I did call the Nanaimo Band office and reported to them some people were stealing salal from their lands(back when I had some impression the crown land was transferred to them in treaty negos) but nothing was done, to my knowledge…maybe a few signs saying “you’re under surviellance”, “smile you’re on camera”, “hidden camera on site” just for fun…I wonder if it would encourage them to leave…
Gabriolan on 20 Apr 2009 at 6:52 pm #
Hullo, feathered_gem.
Your idea of photographing salal-laden vehicles and their drivers seems like a good one to me, although the salal is often out of sight in a van, in a truck with a covered back, or under a tarp in a pick-up truck. If salal pickers thought that locals were watching the ferry line-up and documenting evidence, that would either make them think twice about coming here, or it would make them more careful to hide their salal.
As for signs, big signs at the ferry terminals would make sense, I think. You know that giant sign GROWLS has at the Gabriola terminal in Nanaimo? Like that. Something like “SALAL PICKING IS ILLEGAL ON GABRIOLA, unless you have the landowner’s permission. Illegal salal-picking is a problem on our island. If you see people picking salal on Gabriola, please call the Gabriola RCMP.” This would tell the salal pickers (if they bother to read it) that somebody’s on to them, and would alert community members and visitors to the problem.
There are logistical difficulties with putting signs in the forest – to start with, one would need the land-owners’ permission. And salal pickers are covering a wide area, and are often in the places I call the middle of nowhere. So hmmm. Also, these guys already know that what they’re doing is illegal. They’re just pretending to be ignorant, and hoping nobody will catch them.
An annoying problem, this.