VANCOUVER -- Myles Mana and other members of one of the most unusual law enforcement teams in the country have learned that often the best way to find a crime scene is to follow the drag marks.
After all, when the victim is some 30 metres tall it is not easy to move the body without making a mess.
"We look for slide tracks," says Mr. Mana, an enforcement officer with the British Columbia Ministry of Forests and Range.
As part of his duties with the special investigative unit, Mr. Mana cruises the West Coast searching for timber thieves who routinely plunder the forest of its most valuable trees: Old-growth cedars that are worth $6,000 a piece or more.
The increasingly rare old-growth cedar is highly valued because the straight grain and rot-resistant qualities make it a prime source of shingles and shakes in North America. The trees, which grow more slowly after about 200 years, have a tight-grained wood that also makes it ideal for furniture making.
"There's big money in it. We know they can make $100,000 a month," says Mr. Mana, whose team busted one man who liked to race along the coast on a water scooter, marking prime trees with surveyor's tape before going back to steal them.
The man, James Darwin, was a marine log salvor, or beachcomber, who was supposed to be collecting trees that had drifted free from forest industry log booms or that had been washed into the ocean by slides or floods. He had 200 logs when he was approached by investigators who suspected 90 per cent of his trees were stolen.
Mr. Darwin claimed his trees were all legally salvaged, which left investigators with the difficult challenge of proving at least some of the trees had been cut illegally.
The Forest Appeals Commission recently upheld fines of $42,500 against Mr. Darwin, finding him guilty of two incidents of unauthorized timber harvest on Crown land, near the Bella Coola Valley. The case dates back to 2001, but took until this month to end.
Mr. Mana hopes the conviction will help slow down a crime wave that has been sweeping the central coast, where hundreds of old-growth cedars have been stolen in recent years.
The timber thieves work in remote areas, often under cover of darkness. "They'll work at night. They'll be out at 2 a.m. with a spotlight," Mr. Mana says.
By taking one tree here and one there in a vast forest, the timber thieves are often able to make off with giant trees without anyone noticing. They disguise the freshly cut stumps with moss or ferns.
Once the trees are in the water the thieves strip the trunks of branches, bundle them up in booms, and tow them to mills where they sell them intermingled with logs that have been legitimately salvaged. It is an easy scam because all the logs look the same.
Call it the dark side of The Beachcombers.
"Most log salvors are honest, hard-working people, but there are a handful that are cruising the coast just taking out these big cedars," says Mr. Mana, who describes the remote central coast as "the Wild West" of log stealing.
Enforcement officers on the central coast have a vast area to patrol, stretching from just north of Vancouver Island to near Bella Coola. In a direct line that's only about 150 kilometres, but there are several hundred more kilometres of shoreline in deep inlets and curving bays.
Investigators focus their work on the shoreline, because timber thieves have to drop the trees close enough to the water to be able to reach them with a cable from a boat.
Even in the wilderness, law enforcement officials depend on tips from the public.
"We get a lot of help from first nations. They know the area and they don't like to see those big cedars being stolen," Mr. Mana says.
When they have zoned in on a specific area, enforcement officials begin to search for the stumps.
"We work along the waterline, usually at low tide so you can get down and look up under the [overhanging] trees," he says.
Usually when they find slide tracks, the path leads back in the bush to the stump of a giant cedar.
"The oldest one we found was about 600 years old," Mr. Mana says. "They'd cut it down, but left it [on the forest floor] because it was just too big to move."
While that particular crime went unsolved, the case against Mr. Darwin was made when investigators matched the butt end of logs in his boom to stumps they had found in the forest.
"You take a photo of every butt, of every log and then you catalogue them on your laptop," Mr. Mana says. "Then we collect stump photos, shooting them from above, and then we sit around at night on the boat looking at them side by side. It's always a good feeling when we get a match. A big 'yahoo!' goes up."
Cedars have an irregular, fluted shape to their trunks, which makes it easier for investigators to match the distinctive shapes of the outside edges.
When investigators went through photos of Mr. Darwin's boom logs, they got nine matches to stumps they had found in the wilderness.
Although Mr. Darwin complained at his hearing he was being harassed by the Ministry of Forests, Mr. Mara says enforcement officials targeted him after he had been seen blasting along the shoreline on a water scooter and his tug, the Naskeena 7, was seen near a spot in the forest where trees had recently been cut.
Mr. Darwin claimed in his hearing that he'd found the logs floating in the water and that others must have cut the trees and dragged them from the forest. But the Forest Appeals Commission did not buy that story.
Mr. Darwin has left the beachcombing business, but Mr. Mana knows there are other log thieves out there. In one central coast inlet, investigators have found more than 100 sites where trees have been stolen, and almost all the stumps were from big cedars.The Globe and Mail
