Blueberries feel warm as drought stress affects harvest

Sheldon Atlookan helps coordinate the Aroland Youth Blueberries initiative. He said there are only enough berries for families to pick. Other bushes were not so lucky.

Harvest season

When Sheldon Atlookan went to check his patches of blueberries this spring, the flowering plants had evaded the seasonal risk of frost and looked promising. Soon after, small green berries began to appear. But when he returned again about a month ago, the sight this time signaled bad news for his collection group.

"They were like raisins, all wrinkled and flat," he said. "Some of them were like dust."

For second consecutive Year, Aroland Youth Blueberries Initiative canceled its harvest season, this time because there are not enough blueberries to harvest due to the high temperatures and lack of rain in Northwestern Ontario, which has recorded up to 75% less rain than normal in some areas. Last year, the group had to cancel the harvest due to the pandemic.

Harvesting blueberries

Atlookan, a band advisor for Aroland First Nation, in the region of Thunder Bay, volunteers his time to help coordinate the program, which typically sells hundreds of baskets of wild blueberries every season. The money the group raises pays for student trips to places like Niagara Falls and the Lakehead Canadian Exposition as a reward for completing the school year. Mr. Atlookan said they are tracking student successes this year to make sure they are recognized later.

"It is a great incentive for our community, the only one holding us back is Mother Nature," he said.

The consequences of this are serious, Moola said, because blueberries are a major food source not only for humans, but also for 50 species different mammals and birds He said that black bears (females in particular), which eat large amounts of blueberries as part of their diet, need to consume a certain amount of food in the fall in order to reproduce and give birth to healthy cubs in the spring.

For indigenous communities, wild blueberries are often a critical food source because they are free and accessibleMoola said. Remote communities in the north pay up to two to three times more for food and groceries than the rest of Canada due to the cost of shipping goods by air.

Effects of climate change

Mr. Moola said that there is also a social benefit for indigenous communities whose members collect berries together, which reinforces the traditional and medicinal values of the plant.

A wide swath of northwestern Ontario had between a 50 and 75% less rain than usual in June and July, according to Environment Canada meteorologist Gerald Chang. He said Thunder Bay's normal rainfall for July is 89 mm, but only 15,8 millimeters fell this year.

Chang said scientists have already established, including in the recent report of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and Canada Climate Change Report, that the heat waves will be more frequent and intense. Wildfires in northwestern Ontario burned at record numbers this year, prompting the evacuation of several First Nations communities in the area.

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