Conservation group purchase protects forest

Nature Conservancy of Canada buys chunk of southeastern Ontario

TORONTO Looking at an image of Canada taken from the space station at night, there is a sliver of darkness amid the bright lights of southeastern Ontario.

That’s the Frontenac Arch, the densest forest southern Ontario has to offer, and the environmental charity Nature Conservancy of Canada has purchased parts of it to ensure it remains protected in the future.

“It’s the highway for migrating wildlife,” Gary Bell, a program director with the NCC, said of the 50-kilometre stretch of land that links the habitat of the Adirondack Mountains in upstate New York to the Canadian Shield in the Algonquin Highlands.

Environment Minister Catherine McKenna announced this week that the NCC is taking possession of six new properties in the region. The federal government is granting the charity nearly $664,000 to purchase the properties, in addition to more than $1.2 million raised by the NCC.

Bell noted that one of the properties was donated by its longtime owner.

The NCC is a land trust — a nonprofit, charitable organization that acquires, restores and conserves land, sometimes removing invasive weeds or mapping the location of rare species. In 1999, it purchased Middle Island at auction, reclaiming it for Canada. A year later, the NCC transferred the land to the Canadian government and Middle Island is now part of Point Pelee National Park.

“We do it in kind of a methodical fashion, identifying the most important lands for protecting habitat for native species,” said Bell.

The Frontenac Arch’s location and its dense forest make it one of the areas the NCC wants to safeguard, he said.

The land in the region is made up largely of granite, with wetlands, swamps and marble ridges.

“It’s not very hospitable for human development, and so it was the last of the southern Ontario lands to be given out as homestead lands. A lot of it was developed after the War of 1812,” Bell said.

But when farmers found the land difficult to work, much of it was turned back into a forested area.

It’s home to a number of endangered or rare species, including the five-linked skink, which is Ontario’s only lizard, the gray ratsnake, which is the largest snake in Canada, and the Least Bittern, which is the smallest species of heron.

Bell said the restoration and conservation of the new properties should go a long way to help protect the species travelling through the area.

And that’s part of why people are willing to sell the land, which in many cases had been in their families for generations, he said.

“They like to see and think that their property is going to be maintained the way they loved it. Often, people contact us because they know that land isn’t going to be developed, and is going to be part of a larger picture and always be the way it is, the way they remember it.”

He said that the NCC has also bought property from people who had been planning on developing the land.