View of Vancouver with Stanley Park in the foreground.Getty Images
Margaret Munro is a Vancouver-based freelance journalist.
With a whistled song that sounds like “Quick Three Beers,” a rare visitor announced it was perched atop the giant cedar in a neighbour’s backyard. An olive-sided flycatcher, a super migrant known to fly more than 20,000 kilometres a year to and from South America to breed in the northern forests of Canada and Alaska, had stopped to rest in Vancouver.
A few blocks over, a rufous hummingbird caught my eye, glistening like a new copper penny in the sunshine. The tiny jewel had flown in from wintering grounds in Mexico and the Gulf Coast states, joining the vireos and wrens singing on a leafy street.
In Canada’s third-largest city, the sight and sound of migrating birds is a thrilling and visceral reminder that the wild world is not so far away. Unfortunately, those songs of reassurance are fading. The trees – and the birds they held – are now gone.
The quiet street where the rufous hummingbird flitted from branch to branch, where more than 50 red cedars, Douglas firs, dogwoods, maples and locust trees had grown, is now a noisy construction site with a five-storey building rising from a giant hole in the ground.
And the neighbour’s towering cedar with a metre-wide trunk that attracted the flycatcher (along with woodpeckers, nuthatches and kinglets) was also cut down, creating what the realtor who was selling the property described as a “sun drenched” backyard. Shortly after, a new owner demolished the heritage house, and 16 other towering trees on the lot, to make room for a sprawling multiplex.
The dizzying pace of change in Vancouver is disorienting for human and avian inhabitants alike.
Heading to the grocery store recently, I was dismayed to see six western red cedars reduced to a jumbled pile, felled to make way for a laneway house. A few blocks away, a home and its mature trees disappeared, hauled away to allow for construction of another multiplex. And over by the Arbutus “Greenway” – which was created by federal Housing Minister Gregor Robertson when he was Vancouver mayor – eight huge evergreens were cleared from another lot.
And this is just in one neighbourhood. Similar scenes are playing out across the city, where development signs and construction sites are popping up like dandelions as Vancouver rushes to densify. No single loss is devastating. A tree or two cut here, a dozen over there, a block clear-cut there. The incremental steps of change are easy enough to ignore, but they are adding up, changing the sights and sounds – the very nature – of the city.
One need only stroll through Pacific Spirit Regional Park, where remnants of the ancient rain forest that once covered Vancouver still stand to get a sense of the ecological richness that has been lost over time. Pileated woodpeckers, with their flaming red crests, can be heard whacking away at tree trunks; flocks of tiny kinglets dart around the branches, flashing their brilliant feathery crowns, and Swainson’s thrushes, which as if by magic, return from Latin America in May to fill the forest with their haunting flute-like songs.
Some city officials have recognized the value of trees and the birdlife those trees support.
Vancouver’s updated urban forest strategy, approved by city council this year, aims to grow the city’s tree canopy from shading 25 per cent of the cityscape to 30 per cent by 2050. The strategy includes a map of the Vancouver’s “long-term ecological vision” that shows wide green swaths sweeping across the city, connecting parks, waterways and green spaces. “Prioritizing ecological corridors is essential for maintaining biodiversity and promoting connectivity,” states the report, which aims to establish an urban forest canopy “compatible with native wildlife habitats.”
That sounds great until you realize bulldozers are busy clearing lots and removing old trees, often in the very heart of the proposed and potential ecological zones, like the one along Cambie Street, which is increasingly lined with glass-fronted condos.
Even though thousands of trees are being cut across the city each year, developers like to say they are embracing the wild side.
A construction site for a future development sits in front of a row of townhomes in the Lions Gate Village neighbourhood of North Vancouver, B.C., on Oct. 21, 2025.Tijana Martin/The Globe and Mail
On the banks of the Fraser River in South Vancouver sits the new River District development, which advertises “nature is a constant companion.” No mention is made of the forest cut to make way for the construction.
Promoters of the Jericho Lands project, approved by city council in April, claim “respect for nature … is part of everything we do." The plan stresses the importance of maintaining green spaces but does not detail how many trees will be removed, or how much bird habitat lost, on the 36-hectare property where up to 13,000 housing units are to be constructed in buildings up to 49 storeys high.
At site after site, trees and green space are being lost.
Vancouver is at its best where it melds with nature; along its beautiful beaches and shorelines, on streets lined with trees, beside the Fraser River carving its way to the Salish Sea. But the bustling city and the surrounding municipalities that make up the sprawling metropolis known as Metro Vancouver face a daunting challenge when it comes to protecting its urban forest and its biodiversity. The region, already struggling with clogged bridges, highways and overcrowded parks, is expecting a million new residents by 2050.
To grow the forest canopy while accommodating more people, Vancouver is going to have to get as determined about ecological revival as it is about the development now dramatically reshaping the city.
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Metro Vancouver has a goal of shading 40 per cent of the urban landscape with trees by 2050, which is slightly more ambitious than the city of Vancouver’s 30-per-cent target. But given the rate at which trees are currently being cut, that is a huge task; a regional report found that would entail planting an area the size of 24 Stanley Parks.
Few would quibble with the Vancouver forest strategy’s contention that trees and forests are “indispensable” to human health. “Trees act as natural air purifiers, help manage stormwater, reduce urban heat islands, contribute to mental well-being, and invite social connection and a sense of belonging,” states the report.
It’s also worth noting that many of the nearly 600 people who died in British Columbia’s 2021 heat dome lived in areas with limited tree canopy.
Vancouver is busy replacing the 2,000 trees that are cut or fall in parks, on boulevards and other public land each year. It is also getting on with the costly job of adding trees to low-canopy areas such as the Downtown Eastside, where creating a pit to accommodate just one tree can cost between $15,000 and $20,000.
The big threat to the urban forest, however, is what is happening on private property, which holds 37 per cent of Vancouver’s tree canopy.
The city’s housing target calls for 83,000 new homes by 2033, and city hall is approving multiplexes that are replacing single-family homes that have a yard – and often mature trees.
Homes in West Vancouver, B.C., photographed on Oct. 21, 2025.Tijana Martin/The Globe and Mail
Developers and property owners are encouraged to save mature trees, but that is often impossible because the new buildings are so large that excavation of the entire property is required. Developers tore out approximately 1,430 trees in 2022, according to the most recent data available from the city.
Vancouver’s Protection of Trees bylaw does require the planting of a small “replacement” tree for each tree removed, but it is unknown how many survive condo and multiplex life. “The City does not systematically track the location of the replacement trees (i.e. ground vs courtyard vs rooftops), nor does it verify survival of replacement trees post development,” the city’s media office said by e-mail.
The tree-protection bylaw says developers can elect to pay $1,000 per tree if “replacement” trees cannot be accommodated on a site, but the city seldom collects. “Under the current by-law, pay-in-lieu amounts are nominal,” the media office said.
Long-overdue updates to the tree-protection bylaw will be presented to city council next year. The idea is “to better align with goals of the Urban Forest Strategy for private property and to streamline permitting processes,” the media office said.
The 75-page forest strategy includes 44 objectives and recommendations, including Action 17, which calls for “appropriate compensation for trees affected or displaced due to development.”
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It also notes that many of Vancouver’s trees are “older than any person alive on earth” and are well worth saving.
“The resilience of these trees is inspiring as they have lived through many challenges including windstorms, droughts and countless world-events,” it states. “They have stood as the City has changed around them and politicians and city staff have come and gone.”
Charging a substantial fee to cut down large trees could go a long way toward keeping more of them standing. If the penalty for removing a giant, old fir or cedar was $100,000, developers would undoubtedly explore ways to save them. And when trees must come down, a substantial tree-loss fee could help finance the creation of green spaces and corridors elsewhere.
As hummingbirds and flycatchers know, there is a world of difference between the spindly “replacement” trees that are being planted – often on condo rooftops and cramped courtyards – and the thousands of mature trees being felled.
For every high-rise and multiplex that goes up, developers should be required to help turn the city’s “ecological vision” into reality. They might, for example, be asked to pay for an eco-corridor as long as the building is tall. Or to daylight one of the fabled salmon-bearing streams that flowed through the city until they were diverted into underground pipes and culverts. (Make that two streams for the 80-storey tower recently proposed for downtown.)
Land swaps to save and expand existing green space are another powerful tool. They should be used to relocate more proposed buildings to parking lots, underused roads or private and public land that already has been denuded of trees.
There are other possibilities. To accommodate and create ecological corridors and give new trees room to branch out and grow, the city could reduce the amount of real estate given over to roads and vehicles. (The concrete jungle continues to sprawl, with 64 per cent of Vancouver now covered in pavement and impervious surfaces.)
And the city could be much more ambitious about digging up and rewilding side streets, empty lots and back lanes, linking them into a web of bio-diverse spaces planted with native species and trees.
How about starting a trees and streams “to remember” program, where people honour friends and loved ones by funding restoration?
Vancouver needs to go wild by design. Otherwise, it will increasingly become a forest of glass towers and multiplexes with streets overrun with vehicles.
It will come with a cost, but call it nature’s slice, even though it would be good for us all.