Metrolinx could have saved old growth trees in Toronto ravine by moving them, expert says

Metrolinx could have saved old growth trees in a small east-end Toronto ravine by moving them instead of cutting them down, an expert says.

Eric Davies, a forest ecologist at the University of Toronto, said this week that Ontario's regional transit agency could have enlisted the services of a tree-moving company to dig up, move and transplant the large old-growth trees on the southern slope of Small's Creek Ravine.

This week and last week, Metrolinx has been knocking the trees down with an excavator and cutting them up with chainsaws. There is now a pile of logs in what was once a beautiful ravine located between Woodbine and Coxwell avenues.

Metrolinx says it has cut down the trees because it is building a retaining wall and new culvert to replace one that has collapsed. The work is part of the Lakeshore East rail corridor expansion project. The agency told CBC News that it consulted arborists but they said what Davies is suggesting won't work.

Davies said the big red oak and white birch trees that were on the southern slope could have "definitely" been saved. One company that specializes in "large tree transplanting" is Environment Design Inc., based in Tomball, Texas.

"Moving trees is an easy thing. Two, three hundred year old tree, you can move no problem. There's a 95 per cent survival rate. They do this all over the world," Davies said.

"It's not done a lot in Canada. They might not have even heard about it. But I think that's one technique that could really be a win-win for them and the trees and the community." 

Davies said Metrolinx would have had to identify which big trees it wanted to move and then determine if they were healthy. Then it would have had to measure the slope where the trees were growing and the slope where they would have been transplanted. 

"You cut it out, you put it in a staging box, you prune the roots and you prune the canopy, and so you basically just hold in a staging area until the construction is done and then you put it back down," he said.

"They come to the tree, they dig around it, then they put pipes underneath it and they lift it out of the ground with a crane."

The crane could have been located on the GO Train tracks next to the ravine, he added. At least one large oak tree, believed to be more than 100 years old, is still standing, but heavy machinery has been parked nearby.

Davies said Metrolinx should find a "much better way" to carry out its construction than to cut down old growth trees. He said the ravine is ecologically significant and important to the local community and it's "unimaginable" that anyone would want to cut trees down here.

"I don't think people want to do this anymore," he said. 

He said large old-growth trees hold onto more soil and rain and produce more shade than seedlings do by thousands of times. They host thousands more insects and birds than smaller trees, he said.