Joshua Wright says a yellow cedar tree he photographed last year was "incredible," the largest he'd ever seen in a decade of hiking around Vancouver Island.

The monumental cedar stood in what was one of the few intact or nearly intact old-growth valleys left on the island, says Wright, an advocate who also recorded the sounds of marbled murrelets — a threatened species under federal law — within the same forest.

Wright measured the cedar's diameter at 2.79 metres, a size that should have ensured protection for the tree, along with a one-hectare buffer under provincial law.

But when he returned to the area south of Gold River in June, Wright says the tree had been felled as part of a logging operation approved by the province.

"It was clearly above the threshold for what the government

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