As lumber prices soar, timber poachers armed with chainsaws are cutting down trees across Vancouver Island, in British Columbia, Canada. The poaching is going on in a municipally-owned 5,000 hectare (12,355 acres) swath of woods known locally as Six Mountains.
And the poachers are not particular, as CTV News Canada reports. Big, small, and even dead trees are disappearing. The softwoods and hardwoods have all become valuable targets as timber prices hit record highs.
Since January, at least 100 trees, including firs, red cedar, and maple trees have been cut down in the region. Journalist Larry Pynn first suspected poaching was going on when he came across freshly cut red cedar tree stumps, along with a set of deep tire tracks that ran for nearly a kilometer in the mud before terminating at the main road.
“I immediately suspected that this is the work of poachers,” said Pynn, who lives nearby, according to The Guardian. “These are clearly valuable trees and they were likely cut because of that.”
Flynn has found additional evidence of poaching in the area, which is also home to the endangered coastal Douglas fir ecosystem that’s on the verge of disappearing due to years of logging and urban development.
B.C. lumber prices are sky-high
According to Flynn, the two poached cedar trees he came across would fetch close to C$1,000 ($824) each for the raw wood. But the current fine for removing wood from the forest stands at C$200. “It’s the same fine if you litter – there’s no deterrence,” said Pynn.
In B.C., recent prices for softwood lumber reached $1,600 for 1,000 board feet compared with about $300 a year ago. “It’s an economic motive for sure,” said Matt Austin, a B.C. Forests Ministry assistant deputy minister. “These trees can be pretty valuable.”
The Hill is reporting that prices across the U.S. are up 308 percent since the beginning of the pandemic, according to an analysis by industry trade magazine Random Lengths. Kevin Lee, CEO of the Canadian Home Builders Association, told CBC in April that a 2,500-square-foot home could see more than “$30,000 in additional costs for lumber.”
Mason also points out that sawmills on Vancouver Island won’t take in logs without “timber markings.” This system is widely used to track the provenance of wood – and as a rule, mills won’t accept timber that hasn’t been marked. If the wood is milled down into boards, tracing its origins is nearly impossible.
“It’d be illegal, but if someone had a sawmill set up on their property and someone said, ‘Hey, if I could get some cedar, would you mill it for me?’ You know, obviously, it’s not on the up and up, but it definitely could take place,” Mason said.
