Jos hirviä ei metsästettäisi…

Tässä tapaukseessa Tielaitoksen sopimusurakoitsijat  ovat hoitaneet ko. tien laitojen raivaukset.

Korkea hirvieläinkanta on myös mahdollistanut meillä erittäin nopean susikannan kasvun? Ja asiaan ei tule ratkaisua ellei suurpedoista ainakin karhua ja sutta aleta metsästää joka vuosi.

En muista kuin 70-luvun vaihteessa olleen Keski-Suomessa vuoden, jolloin hirvi oli täällä rauhoitettu. 2000- luvun alun ruuhkavuosista hirviä vähennettiin suunnitellusti. Ja hyvä niin. Tuolloin metsästys oli pelkkää ampumista, nylkemistä ja ruhojen paloittelua. Nyt kanta on vakiintunut sopivalle tasolle. Touhu tuntuu taas metsästyksestä.

Lieksassa ei metsästäjät ole päässeet sopuun lupien kohdentamisesta, vaan siellä luvat on jaettu pääsääntöisesti hehtaarien perusteella. Vuosien aikana on pienen kannan porukoille tullut liikaa lupia ja tihentymäaluelle liian vähän lupia.

Nurmes on Lieksan kanssa samaa hirvitalousaluetta mutta siellä on jo useamman vuoden ollut käytössä malli, jossa Nurmeksen rhy:n alue on jaettu kolmeen osaan ja näille jokaiselle on omat kertoimet riippuen hirvikannasta. Tämän mallin käyttöönoton jälkeen on heikompien alueiden hirviluvat lähteneet nousuun ja tihentymäalueen kannnan kasvu on taittunut.

Luonnon kanssa pelatessa nallekarkit menee harvoin tasan ja se olisi hyvä metsästäjienkin ymmärtää.

Tapaus Kanadasta, eli mitä rajallisella alueella tapahtuu, kun susia ei ole eikä hirveä metsästetä. Vastaava eläinkoe on myös Isle Royale Lake Superior -järvessä. Lähde: Lonely Camp -sivu Facebookissa.

4 hirveä per neliömaili ei kuulosta kovalta määrältä. Ehkä maiseman kantokyky on alempi silloin kun siinä ei ole taimikoita. Tästä voisi tehdä hypoteesin, että myöskään meillä ei olisi luonnontilassa ennen ihmisen tuloa hirvikanta nykyisissä määrissä, kun ne joutuisivat etsimään ravintoa soilta ja purojen varsilta ja sulkeutuneita metsiä olisi nykyistä enemmän. Myös pedot pitäisivät osaltaan hirvikantaa pienempänä.

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Moose were introduced to the island of Newfoundland with six animals. Two in 1878. Four more in 1904. No wolves lived on the island. No predator large enough to kill an adult moose existed anywhere in Newfoundland. By 1998, Gros Morne National Park alone held more than 7,000 of their descendants, over four per square mile of habitat, and the moose had eaten 25 square miles of forest into treeless grassland that Parks Canada calls moose meadows.

A single moose eats 40 pounds of plant material every day. Seven thousand moose inside a national park ate 280,000 pounds of vegetation daily. They ate the balsam fir saplings that were supposed to replace the mature canopy. In some stands, moose removed 98 percent of the regenerating fir before the trees could grow tall enough to escape their reach. When insects or windstorms killed mature trees and opened the canopy, no young trees grew back because every sapling that emerged from the forest floor was eaten within a season. The forest did not thin. It disappeared. The ground that had been shaded by a closed boreal canopy for centuries became open grassland because nothing growing on it could get past the height of a moose’s mouth.

The park had created the problem by solving a different one. When Gros Morne was established in 1973, hunting inside the boundaries stopped. Outside the park, Newfoundland hunters took thousands of moose every year and held the provincial population in rough check. Inside the park, the moose had 40 pounds of food per animal per day, no predators, and no hunters. The population climbed every year for 25 years without anything pushing back. By the mid-1990s, the density inside Gros Morne was several times higher than in the surrounding landscape, and the forest was collapsing under the weight of a herbivore that had been introduced a century earlier on the assumption that six animals could not possibly reshape an island.

Parks Canada recognized the damage but struggled with the solution because the solution was killing animals inside a national park. Hunting in national parks is prohibited across the Canadian system. The entire philosophy of the parks is protection. Allowing rifles inside Gros Morne to shoot the moose that the park’s own protection had produced required years of research, public consultation, and a formal Hyperabundant Species Management Plan before the first trigger was pulled.

In 2011, Parks Canada began issuing moose hunting licenses inside Gros Morne through the provincial big-game draw. Roughly 200 moose were killed the first year. About 600 per year followed. By 2017, the population had been reduced to the target of approximately 2,000, roughly two per square mile, the density biologists estimated the forest could sustain without collapsing.

The forest is coming back. Tom Knight, the park’s forest health project manager, told CBC that monitoring studies and casual observation both confirmed the recovery: we are seeing a lot more young trees and shrubs starting to grow in the understory and we are seeing a lot lower browsing rates on those trees. Even just going for a casual stroll in the park you can see the difference. Parks Canada planted 400,000 trees in 2024 alone to accelerate recovery in the most severely damaged areas where natural regeneration could not restart on its own because the seed source had been eaten decades earlier.

On the Bakers Brook Trail inside Gros Morne, the park maintains a moose exclosure: a fenced area that has kept moose out for years. On one side of the fence, the forest is dense, green, and layered with young fir and shrubs growing in the understory the way a boreal forest is supposed to look. On the other side, the forest floor is open, grazed flat, and bare. The fence is the only difference. The soil is the same. The climate is the same. The light is the same. The moose are on one side and not the other, and the two sides of the fence look like photographs of two different ecosystems.

Source: Parks Canada, Gros Morne National Park / CBC News / Tom Knight, Forest Health / EcoTicias / Parks Canada Hyperabundant Species Management Plan.