Dr. J. Bruce Falls, Richard Pough, Aird Lewis and Dave Fowle, founders of the Nature Conservancy Of Canada, 1961
The sixties
In the early 1960s a plucky band of naturalists based in Ontario had a bold idea. Stung by the damage to the natural world they saw all around them, they launched a program to take direct, private action to protect natural spaces and promote conservation. At the time it was an audacious plan. It was also the birth of the Nature Conservancy of Canada (NCC).
In November 1962, the Government of Canada issued letters patent for the establishment of a private, science-driven, not-for-profit corporation to be called the Nature Conservancy of Canada (NCC). Conservationist Charles Sauriol was hired as NCC's first administrative director, and remained with NCC for more than two decades.
NCC's first project was completed in six years later, with the securement of Cavan Swamp and Bog in Ontario — an exceptional complex of bogs and other wetlands covering about 3,400 acres (1,378 hectares). The site is now the Cavan Swamp Wildlife Area and shelters an abundance of wildlife, including 22 species of orchids.
The seventies
The 1970s saw our work expanding across the country, with a donation of land at Sight Point, Cape Breton Island becoming NCC's first project outside of Ontario, and the first in Atlantic Canada.
Not long after, NCC began working on the Mud Bay project — NCC's first conservation site in British Columbia. Today, the property is an Important Bird Area on the Pacific Flyway, with invertebrate-rich mudflats and eel-grass beds that are well used by large numbers of migrating shorebirds and waterfowl.
By 1978, NCC had established a formal presence in Quebec as the Société canadienne pour la conservation de la nature. The "Un fleuve, Un parc" project, which aimed to conserve islands along a 70-kilometre stretch of the St. Lawrence River east of Montréal, became a model for NCC's landscape-scale approach to conservation.
Around that time, NCC began working on the Brokenhead River Forest Reserve — our first project in Manitoba. Located northeast of Winnipeg and just south of and draining into Lake Winnipeg, this project conserved 158 acres (64 hectares) of rare floodplain mixed-wood forest dominated by ash, elm, oak and spruce, with a rich understory of wildflowers.
The eighties
Throughout the next decade, we continued to branch out across the country. In the early 1980s, NCC helped to secure a property known as the Qu'Appelle Coulee — our first project in Saskatchewan. This 157-acre (64-hectare) site near the town of Wolseley now conserves a fabulous steep-walled canyon, or coulee, up to 75 metres deep that was formed by erosion.
Flat Island near Stephenville on the southwest coast of Newfoundland became NCC's first project on the Island, in 1985. This island and its greater vicinity at Sandy Point conserve the most valuable breeding habitat in Newfoundland for the endangered piping plover.
The decade was rounded out with NCC's first project in Canada's North: Coal River Springs Territorial Park, a protected area of 3,952 acres (1,600 hectares) in the southeastern portion of the province.
The nineties
With offices in most provinces across the country now established, we continued to develop relationships with partners and landowners across the country to further our conservation work. Today's Manitoba Tall Grass Prairie Preserve, an ongoing land assembly, is a result of decades of conservation partnerships established in the early nineties, which aimed to conserve the largest surviving tracts of tall-grass prairie in Canada — an ecological community that supports a diverse suite of species at risk that depend on its rare habitats.
In 1996, NCC announced a one-of-a-kind prairie project, the Old Man on His Back Prairie and Heritage Conservation Area in Saskatchewan. For a century, this property had been owned by the Butala family, who had carefully managed its natural values, maintaining almost all of it as native mixedgrass prairie. NCC officially took control of the property in 2001.
A new milennium
The dawn of the new milennium saw NCC building our conservation science framework, with the development of our conservation blueprints model, as well as communicating our conservation message to more Canadians than ever before. A year before NCC's 40th anniversary, NCC's number of conserved properties had reached the 1,000 mark and our annual budget reached almost $40 million in 2001.
Throughout the next few years, we also continued to diversify our conservation work with new initiatives such as our first public education and ecotourism centre at Johnson's Mills, New Brunswick — one of North America's most important stopovers for semipalmated sandpipers — allowing Canadians access to the annual migratory extravaganza while protecting habitat for the birds.
In 2003, NCC reintroduced 50 plains bison to the 13,000-acre (5,300 hectare) mixed grass prairie at Old Man on His Back. A year later, we announced a significant private conservation initiative, in partnership with local ranchers and The W. Garfield Weston Foundation and the Poole Family: the 27,000-acre (10,927-hectare) Waterton Park Front Project in Alberta.
With the portfolio of lands in our care expanding, we launched a fundraising campaign to help us raise the funds necessary to care for these lands. In 2007, we wrapped up the most successful fundraising campaign for conservation in Canada — The Campaign for Conservation: Saving Canada's Natural Masterpieces — having surpassed our $200-million goal to move conservation forward significantly in this country.
In 2007, we also announced the largest commitment by any Canadian government to conserve private lands. Through the Natural Areas Conservation Program, the Government of Canada set aside $225 million for the protection of natural areas. Under the program, $185 million were directly invested in NCC's conservation program.
The following year, we announced the largest single private conservation initiative in Canadian history: the spectacular Darkwoods in British Columbia. The 136,000-acre (55,000-hectare) property shelters a wide abundance of wildlife, including one of the last herds of mountain caribou in the world. Pristine water from alpine lakes feeds into 17 separate watersheds. Forests whose diversity rivals any in British Columbia thrive here.
With that acquisition, the number of acres we had helped to conserve since 1962 grew to more than 2 million acres (800,000 hectares) of land protected in Canada.
In 2009, we wrapped up the second year of our partnership with the Government of Canada under the Natural Areas Conservation Program. As of March 2009, under this program more than 336 properties totalling more than 256,150 acres (103,660 hectares) have been acquired.
2010 and beyond
In 2011, NCC and The Nature Conservancy (U.S.) announced a multi-million dollar funding commitment to help remove major threats to British Columbia's Flathead River Valley — a spectacular wilderness area that straddles the Canada-U.S. border. The Flathead supports 70 mammal species (16 carnivores), 270 bird species, 25 fish species and 1,200 species of vascular plants.
In that same year, we announced the largest forest carbon project to date in North America. Developed through a rigorous procedure involving numerous advisors, and meeting international standards, this sale of carbon credits is raising the bar for conservation in Canada and contributes in excess of $4 million for NCC's conservation work.
November 2012
NCC will be calling on Canadians to celebrate 50 years of successful conservation from coast to coast, and looking ahead to another 50 years of building a natural legacy for our children and grandchildren.
