KELOWNA, British Columbia (AP) — Just below the fog line hanging over the central Okanagan Valley, rows of saplings for a cherry orchard expansion line the eastern stretch of Highway 33 on the outskirts of Kelowna in Canada’s wine country.
New cherry varieties and climate change in British Columbia’s interior have enabled the fruit to grow at higher elevations than normal. Soon, this meadow surrounded by ponderosa pine mountains will be lined with cherry trees along a sloping hill above this city of about 145,000.
On a recent morning, Dixon Terbasket of the Lower Similkameen Indian Band arrived at the gate of the 10-foot-tall fence built last year. He pointed to the private property sign hanging on the fence in his ancestral hometown; a barrier to keep a soon-to-be-blooming orchard away from the mule deer and elk that once crossed this piece of land.
“Development happening at such a rapid pace and speed is driving urban sprawl into the wilderness,” said Terbasket, a wildlife technician with the Okanagan Nation Alliance.
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EDITOR’S NOTE: This story is a collaboration between The Associated Press and IndigiNews.
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Syilx Okanagans are indigenous people who have lived in the Okanagan Valley of inland B.C. for thousands of years. Their governing body, the Okanagan Nation Alliance, represents eight member communities, including the Lower Similkameen Indian Band.
The orchard expansion is about a third of a mile (0.6 kilometers) from a wildlife corridor that serves as an important link for at-risk species moving through the region’s natural areas from south of the border in Washington state to the south of the state. Drink dry.
Although this new orchard did not immediately infiltrate the corridor, it raised concerns that development was flowing into the natural area of the valley. Terbasket and other experts worry that man-made barriers are already damaging the corridor’s habitat connectivity, further threatening at-risk species and endangering the region’s biodiversity.
“Animals have to move through natural landscapes to meet life history demands,” said Adam Ford, associate professor in the department of biology at the University of British Columbia-Okanagan and Canada Research Chair in Wildlife Restoration Ecology.
“A lot of the land is already degraded,” Ford said. “We’re trying to hold on to the last slivers of green around our highly developed lands, and that’s especially true in the Okanagan, where we’re under a lot of pressure from urbanization and agriculture.”
Home to more than 180 licensed grape wineries and known as the “wine capital of Canada,” the Okanagan Valley is also nationally famous for its orchards producing apples, peaches and cherries.
The approximately 343-acre (139-hectare) cherry orchard expansion is located on land owned by GP Sandher Holdings Ltd., which represents Sandher Fruit Packers, a local family-owned business, according to state documents.
While part of the corridor is within Kelowna’s eastern city limits, this orchard parcel falls within the Regional District of the Central Okanagan. A significant portion of the corridor, including this parcel, lies within BC’s Agricultural Land Reserve, where farming is permitted under the province’s Right to Farm Act.
“The conflict you’re going to find is between the right to farm on farmland and the protection of that corridor,” said Dean Strachan, community planning and development manager for the City of Kelowna.
“With permission from the Agricultural Lands Commission, cherry orchards have the ability to build high fences to protect their orchards from deer. However, as a result, not only deer land access is restricted.”
Sandher Fruit Packers declined to comment.
Kelowna is one of Canada’s fastest-growing cities, growing from 127,380 residents in 2016 to 144,576 in 2021, according to the city. The official community plan for 2040, which takes population growth into account and was adopted in 2022, calls for slowing urban sprawl to protect farmland and ecologically sensitive areas.
The wildlife corridor stretching between two provincial parks around Kelowna — Okanagan Mountain Provincial Park and Kalamalka Lake Provincial Park — is about 40 miles (64 kilometers) long and six-tenths of a mile (1 kilometer) wide.
Wild animals such as elk, moose, mule deer, white-tailed deer and badgers roam here, and grizzly bears have also been seen. The corridor is home to other animals, fruits, plants and medicines used by First Nations peoples.
“This is a huge pain point for the grasslands that extend into BC,” said Scott Boswell of the Okanagan Collaborative Conservation Program, the organization spearheading a conservation plan for the corridor along with the Okanagan Nation Alliance.
“This is the upper range of this ecosystem,” Boswell said.
The corridor was identified as a place to be protected due to its unique ecosystem. Although outside its borders, the corridor lies adjacent to the Yellowstone to Yukon Conservation Initiative, a transboundary partnership dedicated to protecting habitats along the spine of the Rocky Mountains.
The Kelowna corridor is located closer to the Sagelands Heritage Program’s transboundary conservation efforts for shrub-steppe landscapes in south-central Washington in the Okanagan Valley.
“Ecosystems need to be interconnected if we want them to be optimally healthy and resilient,” said Sarah Hechtenthal, an ecosystem scientist with Parks Canada and chief scientist of the National Ecological Corridors Program.
The Kelowna region and the surrounding Okanagan Valley have been identified by Parks Canada as one of 23 priority areas in the country with “significant need to preserve connectivity.”
The area has rarer threatened and endangered species than other places in the state, Hechtenthal said. This includes badgers, burrowing owls, western rattlesnakes and dozens of other species.
“Priority areas in this region are really under intense anthropogenic development pressure and are being fragmented; corrupted; “It has been lost to the development of agriculture, resource extraction and urban sprawl,” he said.
The orchard site is located on land owned by the Central Okanagan Regional District, just outside Kelowna.
The agency said residents and neighboring communities have voiced concerns about soil movement, drainage and noise in the past. Another agency, the Ministry of Forestry, said it was investigating whether the orchard project received water from an unauthorized source but declined to comment further.
While the current orchard expansion is outside the wildlife corridor, Sandher “retains ownership of additional land that spans portions” of the corridor, said Brittany Nichols, the regional agency’s director of development services. He said the environmental assessment in the orchard’s development permit proposal outlined the company’s commitment to “environmental monitoring”.
Sensing the strain of human development on wildlife, the corridor’s health and connectivity, the Okanagan National Alliance, the Okanagan Cooperative Conservation Program and partners prepared a Wildlife Corridor Action Plan that was completed last year.
The fifteen actions reported by tribal hunters and knowledge keepers in the five-year plan focus on their respective laws, policies, and protocols. The plan is still in its early stages, and Boswell said interested groups are seeking funding from the state and foundations.
“We’re not just talking about deer; we’re talking about a whole ecological system that filters our water, filters our air, provides pollinators for all of our agriculture,” he said.
“This is a bigger picture than just one species.”
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Aaron Kendis is a staff reporter and photographer for IndigiNews, an Indigenous-led online publication in British Columbia.
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