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A double review with Sea Otters of Haida Gwaii: Icons in Human-Ocean Relations

The heft of The Natural History of Canadian Mammals is comforting — much weightier than my laptop computer. The loving work of over a decade, this encyclopedia commands respect and offers the old-fashioned security that at any moment I can look up any Canadian mammal.

Remember: A mammal is a warm-blooded creature with hair and mammary glands. Flipping through this book with my son, we start with the only primate in North America, Homo sapiens, followed by the only other mammal whose impact on the land is visible from space: the North American beaver. Next come another 213 species in ten orders. Each creature is described in four dense pages that include the animal’s range, abundance, ecology, biology (diet, reproduction, behaviour, vocalizations), and signs of their presence. Beautiful illustrations, skull diagrams, and footprints are helpful for identification.

The book includes mammals with naturally occurring populations in the wild in Canada until recent times, as well as skull and print diagrams of introduced species with currently self-sustaining wild populations (think pigs, rats, and horses). It provides a great overview of the biology and taxonomy of the mammals of Canada and gives an inkling of their fascinating histories.

I zeroed in on the largest of the mustelids, Euhydra lutris, the sea otter, to complement my reading of Sea Otters of Haida Gwaii: Icons in Human-Ocean Relations. The encyclopedic The Natural History of Canadian Mammals offers great context for this more in-depth book on the sea otter, hinting at its tumultuous history of abundance and its near extinction.

The story of sea otters in the Pacific Northwest is an old story, and it is familiar. Sea Otters of Haida Gwaii offers insight into a classic humans-and-nature story. The intention of the authors is clear: to document the tale of this species and to offer perspective and hopefully foresight for current and future human-nature relations.

The book begins with a poem by Guujaaw, the iconic former president of the Haida Nation, and continues on to strike a good balance between science and narrative with diagrams and explanatory boxes. Its first chapter outlines the basic biology and ecology of the sea otter. Far from the cuddly creature we imagine we know, the sea otter is a hardy mammal entirely built for a life aquatic with the thickest (and therefore most gorgeous) fur of any mammal. It is essential to the balance of the kelp ecosystems as a “keystone” species. Sea otters once ranged from Mexico up through the Aleutian Islands of Alaska and toward Japan.

In the second part of the book, the drama of the “beautiful weasel” unfolds. The “discovery” of the Pacific Northwest by Europeans led to the “soft gold rush” between 1785 and 1840 and international trade in sea otter pelts. The saga of the sea otter involves a collision of cultures, violence, epidemics, distrust, great wealth, and the ambitions of seafaring men. The traders recorded some of the earliest accounts of the Haida people, who would hunt and sell pelts to Westerners; their notes are fascinating to read.

For a brief time, the sea otter was one of the world’s first globalized trades; Spaniards, French, Americans, Russians, and Portuguese clamoured to trade with the Haida and other First Nations on the coast, then continued their two-year journey to Canton (Guangzhou) to sell the unparalleled furs to adorn the Chinese elite. At the height of the trade in 1805, some eighteen thousand pelts were traded in Canton. But within a decade the number of animals showed a steep decline. At the same time, epidemics devastated the Haida population, ending trading in many areas. The boom was brief, and the bust was final: Sea otters were eliminated in Haida Gwaii and on the rest of the Canadian coast.

Pockets of surviving sea otters in Alaska and California allowed the eventual reintroduction of sea otters in British Columbia. The book’s final chapter discusses the complex challenges involved in bringing back a species high enough on the food chain to rival our exploitation of other resources. It includes an introduction to the marine area planning and conservation underway in British Columbia. Authors N.A. Sloan and Lyle Dick outline co-operative coastal and marine planning agreements and give a nod to the complex relations between the provincial, federal, and First Nations governments along the coast and on Haida Gwaii. For me, this chapter outlines a practical approach to hope — hope that in going forward into this new century we can learn from our very human mistakes, managing our actions towards better relationships with sea otters and with the natural world upon which we all depend.

These two books offer a significant contribution to the natural history of Canada. One is a compendium of information on the diversity of the fuzzy creatures of Canada; the other is a window to the history and significance of one of these creatures for our human narrative. In “the age of Noah” — as Thomas Friedman has called our time, when we struggle to save disappearing species — we would do well to study our biological cousins and base our management of human effects on their ecosystems. These two books can help us in this important endeavour.