Elijah Washington pushes through wet ferns and branches left by logging, crossing the mossy forest floor on Haida Gwaii. He kneels beside a massive western red cedar stump.

The cedar was felled decades ago during the industrial logging boom that cleared swaths of old-growth forest across the archipelago off British Columbia’s north coast, leaving a hollow, decaying stump.

Its top has since been trimmed with a chainsaw to fit a plywood sheet, capped with weather-resistant roofing material and covered with thick green moss collected from the surrounding woods. Near the base, an opening roughly the width of Washington’s safety helmet leads into a sheltered hollow lined with moss.

“You just want it to be small enough for a mother bear to move in,” Washington, a stewardship technician with the Haida Nation, said. “So it’s got to be just right, just like the Goldilocks, [the entrance] can’t be too big, can’t be too wide.”

The retrofitted stump is one of seven the Council of the Haida Nation had modified this summer to provide winter shelter for the coastal black bear, known in the Haida language as taan. Found nowhere else in the world, this subspecies of black bear is among the largest in North America. 

A bear’s winter den may bring to mind a rocky cave, but coastal black bears in B.C. rely heavily on large old-growth trees and the hollow logs and stumps they leave behind. Decades of logging have removed many of those shelters, however — and the younger trees growing in their place have yet to develop hollows large enough for bears, said Helen Davis, a wildlife biologist working with the Haida Nation to identify and restore bear dens.

Cubs are born weighing about a pound, with their eyes still closed. They need a dry, protected place where their mothers can nurse them through the winter, and they stay there for up to 100 days. “The only place where bears can have babies is in a den,” Davis said. “And so these dens are critical to population sustainability.”

The old trees bears need for shelter are also sought-after by the logging industry. B.C. has expanded protections and temporary logging pauses, but old-growth tree harvesting continues. In August, B.C.’s then-minister of forests Ravi Parmar said stopping it altogether would shut down the sector.

Davis has heard that argument for years. People repeatedly suggested making shelters from melted tires or culverts instead of leaving old-growth trees for bears.

“People would just sort of throw that out somewhat frequently and since nobody seems to want to conserve old growth for them, I was like, ‘Well, fine, then let’s see if we can build them,’ ” Davis said.

Now, the first-of-its-kind program could set a model for bear conservation worldwide. But in providing an alternative to simply protecting old-growth trees, some worry building dens gives an easy excuse for logging to continue without pause.

Lisa White, a councillor with the Old Massett Village Council, said the sight of plywood laid over old-growth stumps was difficult to bear. “I actually cried,” she said. The plywood roofs, she said, showed how deeply the land had been damaged: bears now needed people to help provide their shelter. 

White said Haida people had needed wood long before commercial logging. Thousands used it for homes, canoes, clothing and heat, yet the forests appeared virtually untouched to the first newcomers, she said. People selected individual trees, used them fully and left the surrounding forest standing, so animals could continue living there, including northern goshawks, which are at risk of disappearing from the islands. The Haida also were known to pull entire planks from trees without felling them, leaving the tree standing.

White worries about how well the second-growth forests surrounding the modified dens will hold up through winter. She has seen extensive blowdown in those stands and is concerned about placing shelters among trees vulnerable to the islands’ storms.

“It’s also the forest around them that needs to be strong,” she said.

Building bear dens

Sometimes, loggers discover a bear den only after cutting into it.

Davis, who has been studying coastal black bear dens since the early 1990s, recalled stories from loggers: “They cut into trees and a bear popped out — or worse, they cut into a bear.” 

Those accounts led to a three-year provincial government study with forestry company Canfor to investigate whether black bears needed large trees for dens.

Davis tracked radio-collared bears to roughly 65 dens; her field research confirmed that bears were almost entirely dependent on large, hollow old-growth trees and that second-growth forests left them with virtually no options.

At the time, despite the rate of loss of old-growth forest in the province, the research didn’t set off alarm bells. “I don’t think they thought they’d run out of old growth,” she said.

But building a den meant manually crafting what a living cedar takes centuries to create. As a cedar grows, fungi can slowly rot the wood at its centre, creating a hollow large enough for a bear while the tree remains alive. Forests managed for timber are often logged again before those chambers develop, so the new trees do not replace the dens lost when old-growth trees are cut.

Davis began working with Taan Forest, the Haida-owned forestry company in 2019, teaching staff to identify natural bear dens and convert suitable stumps into new ones. The company was already restoring streamside forests damaged by earlier logging and adding den restoration became a natural extension of that work, Jeff Mosher, its chief forester, said.

“Protecting bears is a priority, even if it means a lower dividend,” Mosher said. 

Taan Forest has since created six dens across the Mamin River, Survey Creek and Ghost Creek watersheds on Graham Island, in northern Haida Gwaii, Mosher said.

Mosher said bears usually took about a year to start using the shelters, though they checked out one new den almost immediately. Signs of use at other modified stumps encouraged Taan to build more. Bears used one of the dens through the winter and spring of 2023 and have returned annually since.

Those results also encouraged the nation to expand the effort, Washington said. His crew spent the summer searching previously logged forests for stumps with a hollow large enough for a bear and an entrance leading inside. Davis helped the council secure funding from the Habitat Conservation Trust Foundation and spent a week in July teaching the crew to scout stumps, assess their suitability and turn them into dens using chainsaws, plywood and moss.

The crew is also trying to make the new shelters smell familiar. When the Haida crew comes across a bear that has died, they respectfully collect some of its hair to place in some of the modified dens, a trick Davis has tested elsewhere in the field with encouraging results.

By the end of October, the team plans to complete three more dens, bringing the total to 10 modified sites across Haida Gwaii ready for winter monitoring. The exact locations of the sites are being withheld to prevent exposing denning bears to hunters. 

Haida members remain concerned about black bears killed for their gallbladders, which contain bile sought for use in some traditional Asian medicines. B.C. bans possession of bear gallbladders or bile and prohibits their trade.

Washington said that while the nation’s presence on the land has helped protect bears from such hunting, the killings still occur. Haida members have reported seeing bears left dead on the side of the road with the paws cut off and gallbladder removed. 

What a stump cannot replace

Tracing his hand over a living western red cedar in a different part of the forest, Washington points to the distinct tool marks left by a traditional adze. Sometime in the early 1900s, he estimates, Haida ancestors cut into the tree to see if it could be used for a house pole. Finding rot at the core, they left it standing. Bears later widened the opening with their teeth and claws, turning the hollow into a natural den, its floor already lined with soft cedar bedding and green branches still growing above.

This den sits high in the tree, which is among the safest places for a female bear to raise cubs, Washington said. But his crew cannot recreate one at that height.

The modified dens also provide only temporary shelter. “They’re dead stumps and so they’re rotting and they won’t be there forever,” Davis said.

But shelter is only part of what a bear needs. Noel Bellis, an Old Massett member of the Haida Nation and a carver, grew up in a logging family and later worked in cedar forests. After visiting modified dens and attending workshops, he believes bears would move in but questions whether they would find enough food nearby. When bears come out in spring, they feed on green vegetation, including horsetail, fireweed shoots, salmonberry shoots and grasses.

But in the second-growth forests he has visited, deer have eaten much of the low-growing vegetation, leaving little for bears to forage. “It’s a moss lawn between trees,” he said.

Nearby salmon streams provide a seasonal source of food, but Bellis worries about what bears will find once those runs end each year. He wants den-building accompanied by efforts to restore food plants, using cages to protect young growth from deer until it grows beyond their reach.

“It will cost money, but that’s what the costs of clear-cutting are going to be,” he said.

Davis agrees bears need both shelter and feeding areas within their home ranges, where they generally remain to den. “They don’t just pick up and march off to some far-flung patch of remaining old growth and all den there together,” Davis said. 

Taan Forest is opening gaps in the canopy to encourage shrubs to grow, with at least two modified dens in or beside those restoration areas, Davis added. 

‘They’re our kin’

When Barney Edgars worked along Haida Gwaii’s creeks as a fisheries guardian, his crew carried air horns and flares but rarely needed them. The Elders who raised him had taught him to respect bears and speak to them when their paths crossed: “You go your way, I’ll go my way.”

“We were taught that everything we grew up with had a spirit,” said Edgars, a Haida Elder.

He recalled an older woman fishing for sockeye salmon when a bear and its cub approached her net. She threw the bear a fish and told it to leave the net alone. It never returned, he said.

Earlier generations ate bears and used the whole animal. His grandmother asked him to hunt one for her, though he never did. Travellers also followed bear trails through northern Haida Gwaii, finding routes between waterways on the journey from Massett toward Naden Harbour.

Neither Edgars nor his grandparents had heard of a bear attack on the islands, he said. But he worries that losing forests and feeding grounds will push bears into communities to rummage through garbage, increasing the possibility of conflict. 

Fears about conflict with bears are new to the Haida. “They used to sleep under the trees and there was never any fear of that. … I never learned any fear from my grandfather about bears,” White said.

Washington said Haida people want to know whether bears are healthy, have enough food and have places to live. Monitoring the new dens will help answer part of that question.

Cameras facing the den entrances will record activity year-round while their crew stay away from roughly October to April to avoid disturbing bears. After winter, the crew will review the footage to see which shelters bears explored and which they used as dens.

Hair naturally caught at den entrances can be tested for DNA to help show whether the same bears return year after year or others move in.

Even if bears take to the shelters, the crew does not plan to turn every suitable stump into a den. Once one is finished, workers move to another area, leaving space between shelters to limit competition for food and places to raise cubs.

“We don’t want to create a whole community out here,” he said. “We want to have like one bear that’s safe enough to come out here.”

The Narwhal’s reporters are telling environment stories you won’t read about anywhere else. Stay in the loop by signing up for our free weekly dose of independent journalism.

One of Turza Humchitt’s earliest memories is of her grandmother’s table, where family sat on benches on either side and shared from a large pot that might hold soup, clams, cockles or Dungeness crab.

Fresh clams were steamed with rice, fried in the half-shell or eaten with broth sipped straight from the shell. For Humchitt, they still taste like childhood.

“It reminds me of what’s always been there,” Humchitt, a Heiltsuk community member who lives in Bella Bella, on B.C.’s central coast, said.

Now, that food is harder to find close to home. Humchitt said her husband has had to travel farther in recent years to harvest clams — thanks to an invasion hastened by a disaster.

A decade after the tugboat Nathan E. Stewart ran aground and spilled diesel into the nation’s clam harvesting areas, Heiltsuk guardians — trained Indigenous stewards who monitor the nation’s lands and waters — say the damage is still spreading. In Gale Creek, near Bella Bella, guardians have found European green crab populations have increased dramatically since the spill. 

European green crabs are native to Europe and North Africa, but have spread widely in North America. Unlike native Dungeness crabs and the larger blue crabs commonly eaten on the U.S. East Coast, green crabs are small and carry little meat. They are edible, but often more practical for stocks, sauces, fertilizer or other products than as a crab people crack and eat at the table, Carolyn Tepolt, an associate scientist at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, said.

Tepolt said green crabs are unusually well-suited to spread and survive in new places because they tolerate a wide range of conditions, eat many different foods and may be able to withstand some polluted environments. 

“If you were going to design a great invasive species, it would probably have a lot of the qualities the green crabs have,” Tepolt said.

Crews are removing the invasive crabs as they eat young clams and show up in more parts of Heiltsuk territory — threatening clam beds that have sustained Heiltsuk food, culture and livelihoods.

Diana Chan, natural resource manager with the Heiltsuk Integrated Resource Management Department, said the possibility that an oil spill could be followed years later by a green crab surge was not something the nation had initially been watching for.

When a spill happens, the response often focuses on containing and cleaning up the oil, Chan said. “The long-term monitoring has really been lacking,” she said. “Heiltsuk was left to just do all of it on our own.”

A surge in green crabs

Green crabs were present in Gale Creek before the spill, but in much smaller numbers. Guardians usually caught 10 to 20 crabs per trap and commercial clam harvesters killed crabs they found on the beaches.

A July 2026 report prepared by Chan and Milène Wiebe — a PhD candidate at the University of Alberta — and reviewed by Canada’s National Observer determined the spill was “likely a significant contributing cause” of the crab explosion that followed. Green crabs are highly resilient to pollution and environmental disturbance and may survive those impacts better than many native species, it says. The spill also closed the commercial clam fishery, meaning the usual 40 to 50 harvesters were no longer on Gale Creek beaches for weeks each winter, killing crabs as they worked and detecting changes early.

By 2019, three years after the spill, some traps were regularly catching more than 50 crabs. In one three-month stretch in 2024, Heiltsuk crews removed more than 32,500 green crabs from about 20 Gale Creek clam beaches.

To protect clam beds, Heiltsuk crews need to drive crab numbers down. But as trapping increased, Chan said crews also began watching for another risk: adult crabs eat their young and if too many adults are removed from a contained area, more young can survive as predation drops.

Researchers call that the “hydra effect.” Edwin Grosholz, a distinguished professor emeritus at UC Davis, led a study documenting it in Seadrift Lagoon, a small California estuary, after an intensive eradication effort cut adult green crabs by more than 90 per cent. Within a year, the population rebounded more than 30-fold, from fewer than 10,000 crabs to about 300,000.

“This kind of thing can happen where adult animals in the population consume or cannibalize the young,” said Grosholz, who has studied green crabs since their early spread along the West Coast in the 1990s. “If you remove most of the adults, then the juveniles are free to survive and then the population suddenly explodes.”

Chan said Heiltsuk has not seen signs of that happening in Gale Creek. But crews now use traps that can catch smaller crabs too, including minnow traps and prawn-style traps, so they can track whether juvenile numbers rise as adult numbers fall. 

Winter catches often drop because crabs are less active, so summer catch numbers offer a clearer measure of the trapping effort. “When we see the numbers remaining low in the summer, we take that as a sign that the trapping has been working,” Chan said.

What the crab boom is costing Heiltsuk

The Nathan E. Stewart spilled about 110,000 litres of diesel and other pollutants in October 2016, contaminating some of Heiltsuk’s most productive clam beds. Nearly 10 years later, Heiltsuk has settled with Kirby Corporation, the U.S.-based company connected to the vessel, but key questions about long-term restoration and compensation remain unanswered.

The First Nation says current green crab removal efforts fall far short of what is needed. The report estimates a large-scale green crab response would cost more than $22 million over six years. It calls for scaling up to 10 vessels on the water each day, with 30 full-time green crab removal positions and the goal of achieving “functional eradication” within five years — reducing green crab numbers enough that they no longer cause major harm, so clam populations can recover. 

In the sixth year, trapping would drop to one or two vessels a day to prevent another population surge and determine what level of control will be needed indefinitely.

Chan said Heiltsuk currently has one dedicated green crab crew, though in some years, when additional funding has been available, it has had two. The nation now has six full-time employees trapping green crabs, with 300 traps deployed across the territory.

Gale Creek alone has more than 20 clam beaches. Crews can usually set about 40 traps a day, meaning they can only focus on a few beaches at a time. Some beaches are also difficult to reach because of the tides, Chan said.

The trapping effort has also had to account for other wildlife. Researchers have documented coastal wolves pulling up submerged crab traps to steal bait. Chan said crews now use only herring after wolves were drawn to traps baited with sea lions.

Heiltsuk has seen what it takes to make a dent. On one small beach in Gale Creek, crews trapped so intensely over the summer that crab numbers dropped and stayed lower than nearby areas. But the success was tightly contained: just metres away, traps were still pulling up 60 to 100 green crabs, Chan said. 

That makes the work a balancing act: crews need to trap hard in Gale Creek while also watching nearby areas where green crabs are appearing in smaller numbers.

The green crab response is also reshaping the guardian program. William Housty, director of the Heiltsuk Integrated Resource Management Department, said crews with limited capacity are being pulled between protecting clam beds and monitoring salmon habitat, shellfish safety, fisheries, wildlife and other species across Heiltsuk territory.

“It puts us in a really difficult spot to have to choose which is more important because they’re all very important for us,” Housty said. 

Chan said adult Manila clams are still present on some Gale Creek beaches, but juvenile clams have declined sharply. That means today’s adult clams may not be replaced as they die. “It’s really the smaller clams that are most vulnerable to the green crab,” Chan said. “That’s why we can go to beaches here and still find lots of adult clams, but not the babies.”

Housty said Gale Creek was known for “football fields” of clam beds and once supported a commercial Manila clam fishery that employed 30 to 40 people, along with shore workers. 

For Heiltsuk, clams are not only a commercial resource. Marilyn Slett, chief councillor of the Heiltsuk Nation, said they are a staple food, a winter economy and part of community life. Families harvest them, jar them, preserve them and serve them at potlatches and feasts.

“Our people rely on the ocean for our sustenance,” Slett said. “Clams [are] one of those keystone species that we rely on.”

Possible uses for green crabs

The crabs now being removed from Heiltsuk waters are frozen and taken to Bella Bella’s composting facility, where they are mixed with household compost for community use. The Heiltsuk are also exploring whether they could be used for food, fertilizer or bioplastics.

Chan said she is aware green crabs are eaten in some parts of the world, especially as soft-shell crab, but she has not heard of people eating them locally. The nation is in early discussions with Fisheries and Oceans Canada about whether green crabs removed from Heiltsuk waters could be put to use rather than discarded.

Across the coast, other Nations are also looking for incentives that could make green crab removal more useful.

Gaagwiis Jason Alsop, president of the Haida Nation, said their crews have been monitoring and removing green crabs as the species spreads into Haida Gwaii. But the work takes consistent labour and funding, while the crabs keep reproducing. Without a practical use for them, every crab pulled from the water remains a cost with no direct benefit.

“They are a challenging species to get control of,” Alsop said. “They are prolific. And I think we’re seeing that you kind of need some economic incentive, something you could do with them, that would hopefully motivate people to catch them and help keep their numbers under control.”

Hasheukumiss, also known as Richard George, hereditary chief of Ahousaht First Nation on the west coast of Vancouver Island, said he has pushed for green crabs removed from local waters to be used as food instead of treated only as waste. He said he and his mother experimented with cooking green crabs in a bisque and found them “very delicious.”

“There’s no reason why the government can’t sign a piece of paper over to myself and my nation to do good for the island and the mainland as well,” George said.

The department is developing a regulatory process for proposals to use European green crabs for purposes other than disposal, Renny Talbot, a senior fisheries protection biologist with Fisheries and Oceans Canada, told Canada’s National Observer. He said the department may be able to issue licences that allow people involved in green crab control to use or sell the harvested crabs, but said that would still be part of an invasive species response, not a commercial fishery. Fisheries and Oceans Canada would regulate the licence for catching the crabs, he said, but if they were used as food, harvesters would also need to work with other authorities, including the Canadian Food Inspection Agency and the province, on processing and food requirements.

“We don’t want to have it as a sustainable fishery. We want them gone,” Talbot said.

Talbot said European green crabs were first found on the west coast of Vancouver Island in the late 1990s and have continued moving north through ocean currents. They are now present on the west coast of Vancouver Island, parts of B.C.’s central coast and Haida Gwaii. Green crabs are Fisheries and Oceans Canada’s top marine invasive species priority and the department is working with Indigenous partners on management plans that focus removal efforts on key habitats and culturally important areas, he said, noting that the department expects to update Heiltsuk on alternative uses for green crab by the end of the year.

That might help the Heiltsuk in the future, Housty said. But it does not eliminate the need for a larger removal and restoration program now, as every season without enough trapping leaves the next generation of clams exposed.

Slett said the 2016 oil spill helped galvanize coastal opposition to oil tanker traffic. Nearly 10 years later, she said, Heiltsuk is still dealing with the consequences of that spill, even as governments continue to discuss major projects and marine shipping on B.C.’s north coast.

“That’s one of the reasons why we pursued upholding the tanker ban so hard,” Slett said. “It’s our lived experience with the Nathan E. Stewart and knowing that it’s still unresolved.”

The Narwhal’s reporters are telling environment stories you won’t read about anywhere else. Stay in the loop by signing up for our free weekly dose of independent journalism.