Land purchase to enable grizzly bear sex

Listen

A threatened population of grizzly bears in the Selkirk Mountains of western Canada may have an easier time hooking up with other grizzlies in the Purcell Mountains now that a conservation group has purchased some land there.

Grizzlies “looking for love”

“We call it looking for love,” says Nancy Newhouse, Canadian Rockies program manager with The Nature Conservancy of Canada. “They try to find opportunities to make sure that the females can move between those populations and have that genetic exchange.”

150 hectares have been added to a conservation corridor that runs through the Creston Valley, internationally known for its beauty and rich wildlife. The Nature Conservancy of Canada made the purchase with the help of other conservation groups and a TD Bank foundation.

$1.4 million was used to purchase what it calls the Frog Bear Conservation Corridor and put aside enough to manage it in perpetuity.

Only breeding ground for northern leopard frog

The endangered northern leopard frog also happens to breed there and at no other known location in North America. Other rare or at-risk species living in the area include then northern rubber boa, great blue heron, American bittern and western screech-owl. Newhouse says the purchase was important for Canada.

“What makes us Canadian”

“We’re talking about an internationally significant bird area in the Creston landscape and a species that’s just an icon for Canadians. When we think about grizzly bears I think it’s in some ways what makes us Canadian is that we’re so proud of the fact that we have these big carnivores that we can co-exist with.

“And the Kootenays is one of these really exciting landscapes where we still have all the original species that existed 200 years ago, all of the ungulates—the deer, elk, caribou, moose—and all of our carnivores, so the lynx, bobcat, grizzly bears, et cetera. It’s really exciting.”