by KELOWNA, British Columbia (AP) – Just below the fog line that hangs over the central Okanagan Valley, rows of peaks for a cherry orchard expansion line the eastern stretch above Highway 33 on the edge of Kelowna in Canada’s wine country.
New varieties of cherries and climate change in the interior of British Columbia have enabled the fruit to grow at higher altitudes than usual. Soon, this grassy terrain will be surrounded by mountains of ponderosa pine dotted with rows of cherry trees on a sloping hill above this city of about 145,000.
On a recent morning, Dixon Terbasket of the Lower Similkameen Indian Band arrived at a 10-foot (3-meter) high fence gate that was built last year. He noticed a private property sign hanging from the fence on his ancestral home – a barrier to keep a budding orchard free from deer and elk that once passed over this piece of land.
“The amount of development that’s happening so fast and so fast … the urban sprawl is moving out into the wilderness,” said Terbasket, a wildlife technician with the Okanagan Nation Alliance.
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EDITOR’S NOTE: This story is a collaboration between The Associated Press and IndigiNews.
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The Okanagan syilx are an indigenous people who live in the Okanagan Valley in the interior of B.C. for thousands of years. Their governing body, the Okanagan Nation Alliance, represents eight communities, including the Lower Similkameen Indian Band.
The orchard expansion is about one-third of a mile (.6 kilometers) away from a wildlife corridor that serves as a critical link for endangered species moving through the region’s natural areas, from south of the border in Washington state into the province. dry inside.
Although not immediately infiltrating the trail, this new orchard has heightened concerns that development is encroaching further into the valley’s natural territory. Terbasket and other experts are concerned that man-made barriers are already disrupting the connectivity of the corridor’s habitat, further threatening endangered species and jeopardizing the area’s biodiversity.
“Animals have to move through landscapes to meet their life history demands,” said Adam Ford, associate professor in the department of biology at the University of British Columbia-Okanagan and Canada Research Chair in Wildlife Restoration Ecology.
“So much of the land is already degraded,” Ford said. “We’re hanging on to the last green ribbons around our highly developed landscapes, and that’s especially true in the Okanagan where we’re under so much pressure from urbanization and agriculture. “
Home to more than 180 licensed wineries and known as the “wine capital of Canada,” the Okanagan Valley is also nationally renowned for fruit orchards producing apples, peaches and cherries.
According to provincial documents, the cherry orchard expansion – about 343 acres (139 hectares) – is on land owned by GP Sandher Holdings Ltd., which is Sandher Fruit Packers, a local family business.
Although portions of the trail are within the eastern city limits of Kelowna, this orchard parcel is within the Central Okanagan Regional District. A significant portion of the corridor — including this parcel — is within the BC Agricultural Land Reserve, where farming is permitted under the Provincial Right to Farm Act.
“The conflict you’re going to find is the right to farm on agricultural land, and the protection of this trail,” said Dean Strachan, manager of planning and community development for the City of Kelowna.
“The cherry orchard has the ability, under the permission of the Agricultural Land Commission, to build high fences to protect its orchards from deer. But deer are not only restricted from the land, as a result.”
Sandher Fruit Packers declined to comment.
Kelowna is one of the fastest growing cities in Canada, growing from 127,380 residents in 2016 to 144,576 in 2021, according to the city. Recognizing population growth, its official community plan for 2040 — adopted in 2022 — calls for urban sprawl to be slowed to protect agricultural lands and ecologically sensitive areas.
Winding around Kelowna between two provincial parks – Okanagan Mountain Provincial Park and Kalamalka Lake Provincial Park – the wildlife trail is about 40 miles (64 kilometers) long and six-tenths of a mile (1 kilometer) wide.
Wildlife such as elk, moose, mule deer, red deer and badgers – and grizzly bears can be seen. The corridor contains animals and other berries, plants and medicines used by First Nations.
“For the grasslands all the way into the interior of BC, this is a big sticking point,” said Scott Boswell of the Okanagan Collaborative Conservation Program, the organization leading a protection plan for the trail along with the Alliance of Nations. Okanagan.
“This is the best range of this ecosystem,” Boswell said.
The corridor has been identified as a place in need of protection due to its unique ecosystem. Although outside its borders, the corridor runs adjacent to the Yellowstone to Yukon Conservation Initiative, a transboundary partnership dedicated to protecting habitats along the Rocky Mountain ridge.
The Kelowna corridor sits closer to the Sagelands Heritage Program’s transboundary conservation effort dedicated to shrub-steppe landscapes in the Okanagan Valley to south-central Washington.
“Ecosystems — if we want them to be healthy and resilient at their highest level — they need to be connected,” said Sarah Hechtenthal, an ecosystem scientist with Parks Canada and chief scientist of its National Ecological Trails Program.
Parks Canada has identified the Kelowna area and the surrounding Okanagan Valley as one of 23 priority areas in the country with “significant need for connectivity conservation.”
Hechtenthal noted that the area has more threatened and endangered species than anywhere else in the province. This includes badgers, barn owls, rattlesnakes and many more.
“The priority areas in this region are really under intense anthropogenic development pressure, and they are fragmented; degraded; lost to agricultural development, resource extraction and urban sprawl,” she said.
The orchard is located just outside of Kelowna on land owned by the Central Okanagan Regional District.
The agency said residents and neighboring communities have raised concerns about soil movement, drainage and noise in the past. Another agency, the provincial Ministry of Forests, said it was investigating whether the orchard project was piping water from an unauthorized source, but declined further comment.
Although the current orchard expansion is outside the wildlife corridor, Brittany Nichols, the regional agency’s manager of development services, said Sandher maintains “additional land ownership that abuts portions” of the corridor. She said an environmental assessment in the orchard development permit proposal outlines the company’s commitment to “environmental monitoring”.
Feeling pressure from human development on the wildlife, health and connectivity of the trail, the Alliance of Okanagan Nations, the Okanagan Cooperative Conservation Program and their partners put together a Wildlife Trail Action Plan that was finalized last year.
Fifteen actions — informed by tribal hunters and knowledge keepers — in the five-year plan focus on their laws, principles and protocols. The plan is still in its infancy, and Boswell said the groups involved are looking to get funding from the province and foundations.
“We’re not just talking about horses, we’re talking about a whole ecosystem that filters our water, filters our air, provides pollinators for all of our agriculture,” he said.
“It’s a bigger picture than just one species.”
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Aaron Hemens is a staff reporter and photographer at IndigiNews, an Indigenous-led online publication in British Columbia.
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