Yarrow Creek Ranch is part of Nature Conservancy of Canada’s long-term goal to protect sensitive grasslands in Alberta
The Nature Conservancy of Canada is launching a drive to raise the remaining $7 million of its $20 million goal to protect sensitive grasslands along Alberta’s eastern slopes of the Rocky Mountains with the purchase of the Yarrow Creek Ranch.
Known simply as the Yarrow, the ranch encompasses more than 4,000 acres north of Waterton Park in the southwestern part of Alberta and contains endangered prairie grasslands and mammals.
In addition to protecting the landscape, the initiative would support the ranching community to ensure native pastures will remain for grazing.
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Tom Lynch-Staunton, Alberta vice-president with NCC, said the acquisition of the Yarrow will be a key part of the organization’s efforts to protect more than 40,000 acres in southwestern Alberta over the past quarter century.
“For many years, the Fischer-Cuthbertson family have cared for the Yarrow lands with laudable stewardship through grazing practices,” he said during a news conference announcing the funding drive. “They demonstrate how ranching and conservation can co-exist. Grazing animals, wildlife and domestic livestock help maintain and in many, many cases, help improve the health of these rangelands.”
The Fischer-Cuthbertson patriarch, Charlie Fischer, bought the ranch in 2008 with the idea of using sustainable grazing practices while working with the area’s ecological protection organizations.
“I want to thank the Fischer- Cuthbertsons for their vision and, of course, trusting NCC with a landscape that obviously they had quite a passion for and an interest in conserving,” said Lynch-Stauton.
He said an anonymous NCC donor will match donations between $10,000 and $1 million until the end of the year.
“It really is a phenomenal pledge this person has come forward with,” he said.
Lynch-Stauton said the prairie landscape is currently facing development pressures across Western Canada.
“Across the Canadian Prairies, we only have about 24 percent of our intact native grasslands left. We would like to protect the remaining 24 percent of native grasslands,” he said. “We really, truly believe there is a way to continue to conserve these lands and provide at the same time an economic model, especially for those raising livestock or other sustainable uses of that landscape.”
Lynch-Stauton said NCC is looking to expand its protection of sensitive prairie landscapes from the British Columbia border to Manitoba.
“We are looking at grassland conservation in those areas to ensure there are spaces for species at-risk like sage grouse,” he said. “We really try to focus our efforts on these eco-systems that tend to be more at threat of loss.”
Cenovus Energy has been one of the largest donors to the effort to purchase the Yarrow with a $3.7 million donation while the project has also received support from the federal and provincial governments as well as the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
Included in the documented 110 wildlife species on the property are 27 species considered to be of provincial or national significance including grizzly bears, little brown bats and birds such as the bobolink.
