Final piece of rare habitat acquired for protection

NEAR OLIVER — It’s a jigsaw puzzle of sorts. For nearly two decades, The Nature Trust of B.C., a land conservation non-profit organization, has been acquiring property parcel by parcel to protect a rare habitat that’s home to about 20 at-risk species.

Some of the at-risk species include: Behr’s Hairstreak butterfly, Bighorn Sheep, Pallid Bat, Desert Night Snake, Great Basin Spadefoot Toad and Lewis’s Woodpecker.

After almost two decades of working to acquire the grassland between OK Falls and Oliver, the group recently purchased the fourth and final piece of property.

Nature Trust now protects 375 acres of the antelope-brush habitat worth nearly $4.7 million.

Experts say it is most effective to keep the land intact to best conserve the habitat.

“It maintains its resilience as an ecosystem. It’s not all cut up and fragmented,” explained Marian Adair, a habitat ecologist with Nature Trust. “Because of that, it will much better survive the pressures that will come onto it, like climate change,” .

Even though the land will be left undeveloped, there is still work to be done.

“We will develop a management plan for the property, which will ensure those ecosystems and those species are being managed to the best available science that we have, so we can prevent catastrophic wildfire or loss of the ecosystem,” says Nick Burdock, the group’s Okanagan Conservation Land Coordinator.

The Nature Trust of B.C. has worked with donors, foundations, organizations and all levels of government to secure the antelope-brush habitat.