We’ve partnered with Yves Saint Laurent Beauty to build human made “beaver” dams along 1.5 kilometres of Park Rill Creek in the southern Okanagan. Like beaver dams, these structures are made of organic materials like wood, mud and grasses, and they’ll help create vital habitat for wetland species. The hope is that these constructed wetlands will eventually attract real beavers, as similar projects in other areas have already done.
Our conservation complex at Vaseux Lake has protected 1,196 acres of wildlife habitat from development. The complex protects rare and endangered wetland plant communities made up of red-osier dogwood and black cottonwood. Here you’ll also see grasslands dominated by antelope brush (a globally imperilled ecosystem), sagebrush and bluebunch, and wheatgrass dotted with stands of Ponderosa pine and Douglas-fir.
The Vaseux Lake complex is a refuge for bighorn sheep, but also for species at risk such as white-headed woodpeckers, Lewis’s woodpeckers, night snakes, Nuttall’s cottontails, western small-footed myotis, western skink, and Behr’s hairstreak butterflies.
