Federal, private funding to protect 6,000 hectares of Quebec forest, wetland

Kenauk property near Montebello home to more than 170 species

A 6,000-hectare swath of forest and wetland with historical significance in western Quebec will be conserved forever thanks to the Nature Conservancy of Canada and federal and private funding.

The non-profit Nature Conservancy of Canada made the announcement of the protection of the Kenauk property, near Montebello, at a news conference on Monday. The day is designated World Environment Day.

The land, which once belonged to Patriote leader Louis-Joseph Papineau, who led the 1837-38 rebellions against British rule in Lower Canada, is about halfway between Montreal and Ottawa.

The protected land is along a 20-kilometre corridor that’s three kilometres wide and is home to more than 170 species. The area contains rivers and lakes, so the land isn’t contiguous.

The land contains the largest known population of black maple trees in Quebec. Black maple forests are considered to be at risk under the province’s Threatened or Vulnerable Species Act.

It is also the habitat of the Eastern grey wolf, a species that is considered to be of special concern under Canada’s Species at Risk Act, and the American black bear.

The Kenauk property — the name of which comes from mukekenauk, Algonquin for “turtle” — was granted as a seigniorial domain in 1674 by Louis XIV, King of France, to Monseigneur Laval, the first bishop of Quebec. The Papineau family owned it for a century starting in 1801.

The Nature Conservancy of Canada began buying up the land for conservation in 2013.

The budget for the project was $9 million, including the land purchase price and stewardship costs.

The Canadian government contributed $3.3 million through the Natural Areas Conservation Program of Environment and Climate Change Canada. The other twothirds of the funding came from the Nature Conservancy of Canada and private donors, including American Friends of the Nature Conservancy of Canada, the TD Bank Group through its TD Forests program, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the Echo Foundation and about 50 individual donors.

The Nature Conservancy of Canada has set up an endowment fund of more than $1 million to pay the stewardship costs to care for the property, Joel Bonin, vicepresident for the Quebec region for the Nature Conservancy of Canada, said.

“It’s a very sizable transaction and it’s very important for us,” Bonin said.

The Nature Conservancy of Canada is a charitable organization that has 1.1 million hectares of conserved land in Canada. In Quebec, 400 square kilometres of land is conserved by the organization and by the Conservation de la nature Québec.

“These are permanently protected,” Bonin said. “We protect land through owning titles to land, which forbids any transformation forever, and we also own land.”

It’s a very sizable transaction and it’s very important for us.