Conservancy takes over 15,000 acres for corridor
The Nature Conservancy of Canada has formally protected 60 square kilometres of land — nearly 15,000 acres — northeast of Montebello to give wildlife room to move.
The area, about three kilometres wide and 20 kilometres from north to south, will maintain a forest “corridor” between Mont Tremblant National Park and commercially managed forests to the north, and the Adirondacks to the south.
The announcement was made Monday at the Manoir Papineau National Historic Site in Montebello.
The Nature Conservancy got $9 million from a variety of donors to pay for land purchases and stewardship.
While birds are the obvious migrating species, the Conservancy’s Quebec vice-president, Joël Bonin, said there has been gradual but constant movement for thousands of years: “Every wildlife species from insects, mosses and invertebrates to birds.
“If we wish to have stable environment in the future, with climate change, we need to leave room for movement towards the north. Because that movement is currently occurring,” he said.
“As birds bring seeds — seeds of nut trees for example — these will migrate as well.”
It may even help the expansion of turtles (slowly) as waters warm to the north.
Bonin called it “a network of timberland” that stretches all the way to the boreal forest of Northern Quebec.
“Over here, 12,000 years ago, we had a kilometre of ice. So everything moved north (when it melted) anyway,” he said. A further warming 4,000 years ago caused another big shift.
It’s also a driving theory in modern ecology that species in isolated patches of wilderness wither away if they can’t move freely over larger distances.
The Nature Conservancy acquired the land from 50 private families, some of whom have been there for generations. It got funding from the federal government, TD Forests, Echo Foundation, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, American Friends of Nature Conservancy of Canada and other donors.
The land is all part of the Kenauk property, the historic land of politician and Patriote leader Louis-Joseph Papineau and his family through the 1800s. It was originally a seigneurie granted to Bishop François de Laval, Quebec’s first bishop, in 1674 by King Louis XIV.
While the land isn’t threatened by any immediate development, Bonin said the Nature Conservancy decided to move because it wanted to secure the future.
“There are more and more Canadians who, as they transfer their land from one generation to the other, are thinking about the Nature Conservancy” or other conservation agencies “to make sure that their legacy for their family, but also for Canadians, is protected. And their legacy is often nature.”
The land is heavily forest, and cut through with rivers and other wetlands.
“I think he would be proud, first of all of his country. He would be proud of the values that Canadians are bearing now, generations after him. He would be proud of the fact that as Canadians and as Quebecers, we understand that there will be somebody after us, another generation and then another. And it’s important to give to the next generation the values that we inherited,” he said.