Burning for change

Prescribed burn at NCC's Old Man on His Back Prairie and Heritage Conservation Area, SK (Photo by NCC)
The Nature Conservancy of Canada (NCC) is committed to conserving nature in all its diversity, to create a legacy for future generations. NCC uses the latest conservation science to safeguard Canada’s lands and waters. As a part of this...
Bird homes: Location is everything

Juvenile American robin (Photo by Sarah Ludlow/NCC staff)
On May 17, Conservation Volunteers helped install 14 nest boxes on the Nature Conservancy of Canada’s Edenwold property in Saskatchewan. These nest boxes were designed with certain species in mind ― tree swallows and mountain bluebirds....
Conserving Canada's grasslands

Pronghorn antelope, Old Man on His Back (Photo by Karol Dabbs)
There are many reasons why grasslands are endangered in Canada and around the world. Globally, grasslands are faced with continuing habitat loss, fragmentation and desertification. These impact both biodiversity and people who rely on healthy...
Badgered into respecting the wild

American badger (Photo by Max Allen/Shutterstock)
It was my co-worker Emily's and my first day out in the field without a manager — the training wheels were off. We were bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, ready to impress the property land managers with a thorough property inspection. This...
The silence of the hillsides

Fort Ellice, Riding Mountain (Photo by NCC)
For the past six months, I’ve worked as an assistant conservation biologist with the Nature Conservancy of Canada (NCC) in Riding Mountain Natural Area in western Manitoba. I found that a summer in the area challenged me to reconsider how I...
Greenspace makes for great headspace

Hikers in Happy Valley Forest, ON (Photo by NCC)
The natural world has always been my fall-back position. Whenever life got too busy, scary or stressful or even when it was at its most fulfilling, I seemed to want, in fact to need, to find some green space to process it all, for a while. As a...
Why Canada’s prairies are the world’s most endangered ecosystem

Rolling prairie at Old Man on His Back Prairie and Heritage Conservation Area, SK (Photo by Branimir Gjetvaj)
Updated November 7, 2018 Ask any Canadian kid to name the world’s most endangered ecosystem, and chances are you’ll hear one of the following answers: 1) rainforests; 2) coral reefs; 3) leave me alone. Ignoring the last answer,...
Alberta's ranching evolution (Part Two)

A cattle herd just west of Fort MacLeod (Photo by Doug Madill)
(Continued from Part One.) Since it was the landscape of the rangelands that had originally attracted me to Alberta and western Canada, I have become increasingly fascinated with not only the buildings and artifacts associated with the ranching...
Alberta's ranching evolution (Part One)

Boholomec Ranch, Crowsnest Pass (Photo by NCC)
For me, there is something about the Canadian prairies. It’s not where I originally came from, but when I moved west to Saskatchewan and Alberta from Ontario some 36 years ago, they just took me in, and I knew I could not ever stop living...
The swift fox: A conservation success story

Swift fox (Photo by Karol Dabbs)
Although I work as the Nature Conservancy of Canada's (NCC's) conservation coordinator responsible for the area in Alberta where swift foxes now live, I have never seen a wild one myself. These are elusive creatures. I did see several being...