Meadowlark Nature Festival

Tour 37 – Southern Interior Land Trust – Cold Creek Property Tour – Saturday, May 18, 2019 from 9:00 am – 12:00 pm

Tickets: Adult $30.00/ticket Children $5.00/ticket

Join Southern Interior Land Trust (SILT) President Ross Everatt, wildlife biologist Al Peatt, outdoors enthusiast and writer Judie Steeves, and cottonwood expert Kasey Moran for a walk and talk tour of SILT’s 20-hectare Cold Creek property near Keremeos. Over 200 plant and animal species occur here and the views of the river and surrounding mountains are spectacular. The property fronts the Similkameen River and extends from an intact cottonwood stand through dry shrub-steppe to steep cliffs, and includes a spring-fed year-round stream! The property has habitat for bighorn sheep, mountain goat, deer, bobcat, beaver, rattlesnake, woodpecker, butterflies and peregrine falcon. We’ll explore the diversity of ecosystems and wild life, learn about the private life of cottonwoods and why they are important to people too, and how conserving gems of habitat such as Cold Creek will help all living things for generations to come. Bring binoculars if desired. NOTE: Cold Creek is a gem of near-natural Similkameen wildlife habitat. There is cactus, poison ivy, unfenced riverfront, and the possibility of encountering rattlesnake at this property. This tour is brought to you in partnership with Southern Interior Land Trust.

Meeting Place: Either of two locations. Meet at 8:45 am at the Walmart Penticton parking lot near the auto repair area, and then rendezvous with remaining participants at 9:30 am at the Esso station parking lot in Keremeos located at the intersection of Hwy 3 and Hwy 3a.

Transportation will be via carpool.

For more information and to purchase tickets for this event click on this link to the Meadowlark Festival

SILT Welcomes New Directors

The Southern Interior Land Trust has added two new board members in the past few months.

Timothy Broesch is a financial advisor with Edward Jones and lives in Okanagan Falls with his wife and four children.

He loves hunting, fishing, hiking and enjoying the outdoors with his family. He learned as a youngster living on a small ranch in Eastern Washington the importance of looking after our natural resources for the health of both people and animals.

“If you want healthy animals and a productive garden you must take care of them. That means keeping water clean, preventing over-grazing, regular removal of invasive species, as well as considering the needs of the wildlife on our land,” he comments.

He is hopeful when his children are grandparents that they will still have the option of enjoying outdoor recreational activities as they do now. Without protected areas for wildlife, he believes we all stand to lose.

Kasey Moran is a PhD candidate in John Richardson’s Stream and Riparian Areas Research Lab with the Forest and Conservation Sciences department of UBC Vancouver. Her research is focussed on rivers and cottonwood forests in the Similkameen, with an emphasis on the ecological effects of river engineering and prospects for restoration.

She has done thesis work around aquatic invertebrate responses to surface and groundwater interactions in streams. She has worked as an ecosystem technician for Canadian Wildlife Service and as a laboratory technician for an evolutionary genomics lab at UBC.

She also has a background in fine arts: her paintings have been exhibited at a small number of galleries in Penticton and Vancouver, and she has produced illustrations for scientific journals, teaching manuals, posters, and brochures.
For more than a decade she lived in the Penticton, Okanagan Falls and Twin Lakes areas and she still has connections to family and community there.

“I’m excited to take an active role in conserving wildlife habitat as a SILT board member,” she comments.

Border Patrol — For Wildcats

LightHawk tracks lynx and bobcats from the sky!

Cats never follow the rules, and neither do their wildcat cousins! The border between Canada and the US doesn’t stop a lynx or bobcat, but it can mean life or death for these wild predators. In Washington, lynx are state-listed as endangered, while in British Columbia, they’re commercially harvested for fur. LightHawk flew internationally to help Southern Interior Land Trust scientists collect data on how lynx and bobcat move across the landscape. Knowing this is critical to improve how the cats are managed on both sides of the border, and to prioritize migration corridors for protection.

Volunteer Pilot David Riffle helped the team track the cats from the air, and find radio collars that had dropped off the lynx and bobcats. The collars contain all the cats’ movement data, and without LightHawk’s help, two of the located collars would likely never be recovered due to their remote location. Aerial expediency was key — if winter hit before the collars were located, the batteries would have died and the data would have been lost.Thanks to your generosity, we’re helping wildcats and scientists on both sides of the border!

Remembering Rick Simpson

After nearly a decade on the board of the Southern Interior Land Trust, most recently as vice-president, avid conservationist Rick Simpson of Kelowna passed away Feb. 2 of cancer.
For health reasons, he had resigned from the board last year.

Rick had a particular interest in conservation of habitat for fish and had devoted his spare time and his energy for more than four decades in various areas of the province, and provincially, to helping to improve survival rates for spawning salmon and kokanee.

At the same time, he focussed on mentoring and educating young people so there would be passionate new anglers to appreciate the natural world and work to follow in his footsteps.
He also volunteered with fish and game clubs, the B.C. Wildlife Federation, Fishing Forever, the regional environmental advisory commission, and was on the Okanagan Salmon Community Initiative, part of an Okanagan Nation Alliance project to re-introduce salmon to the Okanagan. He was outspoken on environmental issues in his community.

Networking and promoting collaboration between different sectors of a community was a mantra of his, and he involved all sectors of the community, from industry to civic authorities to volunteers and the general public in habitat conservation causes.

Rick will be greatly missed, and the board and members of the Southern Interior Land Trust express our sadness and condolences to the Simpson family. He is survived by his partner of over 15 years Gael Russell, his son Richard Kemp Simpson, his daughter Kelly Suzanne Simpson, the mother of his children Grace Bartel, his brother Jeffery Simpson and his sister Victoria Nuttall.

Rick Simpson Obituary