(From Gabriolan.ca.)

It’s the same people who sometimes forget a handful of elastic bands here and there in the woods. The same people who hang branches of salal in trees as trailmarkers. Got it now? Yes, of course.

They’re salal pickers. The twine will be used to tie up one bundle of salal. See? Here’s the same kind of twine in use, tying up a huge bundle of picked salal.

(From Gabriolan.ca.)

(From Gabriolan.ca.)

1. Wasps here.
   I wondered about a wasp nest fragment a while ago. Now I’ve found the rest of that nest, and can see that it fell out of a tree when a branch came down. So glad I wasn’t underneath when it fell!
2. Wasps there.
   Last month I got a horrible wasp sting while hiking in a different part of the forest. Nasty aggressive wasps caused me days of pain, so we’ve been avoiding a half-kilometre area of forest since then.
3. Salal pickers there.
   Those salal pickers are ba-ack! Or maybe they never left. This time their truck isn’t in evidence, but pickers are in the woods. And you know, they’re in that area I avoid because of the wasp nest. Gotta wonder how that’ll work out for everybody.

(From Gabriolan.ca.)

How do you feel about these people and what they do? And what do you do when you notice them? Do you notice them? What should we all do about this, if anything?

In the last while I’ve noticed more signs of salal pickers on Gabriola. I find sections of rope (like that shown here) that pickers use to tie up bundles of salal. I notice where woods are suddenly trampled, where bunches of salal are
hung on trees, like this to serve as a temporary trailmarker for pickers. And then of course there are sometimes rubber bands. If you’ve been reading this blog for a long time you’ll remember that I once found found a salal thieves’ cache in the woods.

At the moment there’s a truck parked in the Gabriola woods; it drove up ferry hill with the ferry traffic this morning. I’ve been seeing the same truck parked in almost the same place for a couple of weeks now, but only this morning saw a few things that made me think aha! Salal pickers! instead of could they be campers?

Anyway. I wonder if I’m the only one who is bothered by this. Am I? Should I drink my tea and mind my own business?

(From Gabriolan.ca.)

Remembering the time when salal hanging in a tree led me to the salal thieves’ cache, I’m guessing that salal pickers were here.

(From Gabriolan.ca.)

Dear salal pickers: do not come to Gabriola to pick salal. Most of Gabriola is private property, and you can’t just go into somebody’s yard and pick the salal there. People will call the police if you do that.

Yes, there is park land and some crown land on Gabriola, but you’re not allowed to pick salal there. If you do that, people will notice.

You want to pick salal illegally and get away with it? Gabriola is not the place for you. Gabriola is a small island, and Gabriola Island residents know each other. We spot strangers and visitors, and your car or van will stand out as being Not From Here. People will notice your vehicle, and they’ll probably remember your licence number, too.

If you pick salal on Vancouver Island, you can pick and then drive away. You can’t do that on Gabriola — you’ve got to take the ferry to get off Gabriola Island. Did you know that there are three webcams watching the Gabriola ferry line-up all the time? The police watch those ferry-cams. All it takes is for one person to mention what your vehicle looks like, and the game is over. You’ll be spotted in the ferry line-up, and caught right there.

Or maybe the Gabriola RCMP will let you get back to Nanaimo, because it’s even easier to let the Nanaimo RCMP arrest you. This is from a recent article in the Gabriola Sounder newspaper:

Salal theft ends in Nanaimo

Gabriola RCMP received a tip from a person who noticed an unfamiliar pickup in the neighbour’s yard, with something being loaded in to it. Subsequent investigation found that the individuals with the truck had been cutting and loading salal plants in to the pickup.

BC Ferries was contacted, the truck was allowed to unload last off the ferry in to the waiting arms of members of the Nanaimo RCMP detachment.

So, really. If you want to pick salal, go somewhere else. Gabriola Island isn’t a good place for you.

(From Gabriolan.ca.)

• I like to eat salal berries. Yum!
• Dog likes to eat salal berries, too, and she picks her own. Watching her gently pull the berries off branches delights me.
• Lots of people don’t know salal berries are edible. All the more for us!
• Salal berries can be dehydrated for winter use. Note to self: must try this.
• Seeds in salal berries can apparently be used for planting salal – great news for those of us who would actually like more salal on our property.
• Salal berries can be made into jam. I did this once years ago, and it was fantastic. (If I had more energy in the summer, I would make salal jam every summer.)
• Did I mention about the dog? Oh, yeah, I did. My berry-picking dog is adorable.

(From Gabriolan.ca.)

Under salal I find plastic water bottles, juice bottles, and pop bottles. I suspect the salal-pickers leave these, because they appear in areas where I’ve seen salal being picked, or seen evidence that salal pickers have been in the area. (Salal pickers leave certain things behind, so it’s easy to see where they’ve been, even long after the salal they’ve picked has grown back.)

Anyway. Somebody else is finding this litter, too, and this somebody makes trail-markers out of the stuff.

(From Gabriolan.ca.)

Then we saw Mr Salal Harvester himself, picking away. (!) There were no vehicles parked anywhere nearby, so I guess the routine is to drop off pickers in the woods, then collect them — and their harvest — at the end of a day’s picking.

Based on what I’ve seen lately, I believe that several truckloads of salal are being illegally harvested from Gabriola’s forest every day. Much of this takes place in the woods off The Tunnel on North Road.

The Gabriola RCMP say that this happens all over the island. When they catch the salal-pickers, the usual refrain is but I didn’t know it was illegal, which doesn’t hold up so well when records indicate that the same vehicle has been used for salal-picking on numerous occasions, and the pickers have been told before.

When caught, the pickers aren’t allowed to abscond with their harvest; they’ve got to put it back even though it will die. The land owner decides whether to press charges or not.

The RCMP staffperson added that they’ve never caught a Gabriolan harvesting salal. The thieves’ vehicles are always registered to Nanaimo addresses.

So, great. We’ve got Nanaimo people coming over to steal Gabriola’s salal every day.

Now that the salal harvester guy is gone for the day, I can see exactly where he’s been and what he’s taken. The mess is depressing.

(From Gabriolan.ca.)

It’s a bunch of salal, held together with a rubber band — oddly enough, one just like the rubber bands I’ve been finding on forest trails recently.

What do you suppose this bunch of salal is doing up in a tree like this, in the middle of the Gabriola forest?

It’s a trailmarker, placed in the tree by a salal picker. He wants to see his trailmarkers from his current picking location so that he can find his way back out of the forest (or back to his lunch kit, or his cache of already-picked salal) with relative ease.

Some salal pickers hang bunches of salal as trailmarkers, while others hang just a single branch of salal.

(From Gabriolan.ca.)

Son Chau and his wife were all alone and deep in the woods when a man shoved a pistol into their truck and said he was taking it all: 20,000 stems of a shrub called salal.

Chau had spent the day as he spends most, snipping woody stems with shiny oval leaves from the forest. Any other day, he would have driven the plants to Shelton to be shipped to vast open-air flower markets in the Netherlands.

But that afternoon four years ago, Chau watched helplessly as bandits loaded his day’s labor into a minivan and drove off, making him another casualty in what has become a war in the woods.

Specialty products harvested from Northwest forests — including moss, salal and slender stalks called beargrass — once were a low-class sideshow to logging, picked by rural folks in need of extra bucks. It since has swelled to a mammoth industry that brings in at least a quarter-billion dollars a year — nearly one-fourth the size of the apple industry.

Along the way, simple wild greens have become such hot commodities that pickers like Chau have been beaten up, robbed and shot in fights over turf. Illicit harvesters make midnight raids to steal truckloads of greens from public and private land. Cops conduct stakeouts and sting operations in a never-ending battle against illegal picking. [continue]

I hope things aren’t that bad in our area. Are they?

Related article:

• Brush Rustling: A Desperate Life – And Death – In Forest — Salal Harvest Is Lucrative, Dangerous – Seattle Times

(From Gabriolan.ca.)

One of the things I wonder about is the effect that harvesting salal has on the forest ecosystem. A gardening friend points out that if you trim a bush, it just grows back … so is there anything to worry about when people come to Gabriola and take a truckload of salal here and there? Sure there’s the trespassing and property theft issue to consider, but what about the health of the forest? Is salal harvesting harmful to the forest?

As I read up on this topic, I’ll share some of what I find with you here.

Today’s interesting article is from the Georgia Straight: Marketing of Forest Floor Has Consequences. The whole thing is worth reading; go take a look. Here’s just a little bit:

…harvesters are starting to notice that plants once considered impossible to overpick are becoming harder to find. Salal is one of the most common plants on the forest floor of coastal B.C. and it’s picked commercially as a floral green. There’s little threat such an abundant species would be wiped out; however, people who make a living harvesting on Vancouver Island are finding that near the end of the season there’s not enough commercial-quality salal left to pick. No one knows the impact the removal of NTFPs is having on animals and other plants in the forest, as there’s been very little research done.

Shore says that in the days when only locals were harvesting from the forest, most people had a sense of stewardship and took care of the land. But with transient pickers moving from place to place, she’s seen problems with overharvesting and with people leaving garbage behind. Other veteran harvesters complain that [continue]

(From Gabriolan.ca.)

• 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

(From Gabriolan.ca.)