Great Bear Rainforest estuary to become a conservation area
B.C. has a new conservation area near Bella Coola in the Great Bear Rainforest after a descendant of the settlers who had owned the land for decades sold it to a land trust.
The area is near the mouth of the Bella Coola River and close to the town on B.C.’s Central Coast. The estuary covers 70 hectares, about 20 per cent of the size of Vancouver’s Stanley Park.
It has been renamed the Tidal Flats Conservation Area, the Nature Conservancy of Canada (NCC) was scheduled to announce today. The trust will protect the area’s intertidal marshes, mudflats and tidal channels, and continue to provide a home for animals and birds as diverse as grizzly bears, salmon and the threatened marbled murrelet.
It was necessary to conserve the estuary to prevent private development or forest clearing, said the NCC. The country’s largest private land trust will spend $1.6 million on the project, which includes the purchase price and costs for developing it into a conservation area, said NCC B.C. regional vice-president Nancy Newhouse.
The unidentified seller’s family had owned the land for “many decades” and he had grown up on the property, said the NCC. But the family had moved off the land years ago and only remnants of the house are left.
The family may have been among the Norwegian settlers granted homesteads before the turn of the 20th century, when Bella Coola had a Hudson’s Bay Co. trading post and was a busy port for B.C.’s Interior.
The settlers became the area’s first commercial loggers, fishermen and farmers, according to the Bella Coola Museum.
The area is now used mostly by locals and tourists for walks, launching boats, fishing, gathering plants and scientific research, and that’s not expected to change.
The NCC will carry out a project-management plan over the next year to determine how to make the area accessible to the public, maybe adding signage and a boardwalk, said Newhouse.
“If anything, the public will have more access,” she said. “Our primary mandate is for the land to be conserved for wildlife habitat and local use. Time will tell how it is used,” she said.
It’s home to grizzlies, the region’s largest coho run, Dolly Varden trout, eagles, trumpeter swans, marbled murrelet seabirds, Barrow’s goldeneye and American widgeons, to name a few species, and Western red cedar and Sitka spruce grow in the upland forests.
The Nuxalk Nation are among the locals who support the conservation project because its members use the area for “cultural, medicinal and recreational purposes,” Chief Wally Webber said in a news release. The local tourist office called the change a “tremendous opportunity” for the Bella Coola Valley.
Funding was provided to the NCC by the federal Nature Fund, the Natural Heritage Conservation Program and the North American Waterfowl Management Plan, to name some of the agencies, as well as by individual donors.
By protecting the salmon habitat “we’re establishing a sustainable ecosystem so that our wildlife can thrive,” said Jonathan Wilkinson, federal minister of environment and climate change, in a news release.