Responsibility for safeguarding species on the brink of extinction can be daunting.
When only a handful of individuals of the species remain, conservationists have good reason to be nervous. We know so little about so many of these species, and most of their ecosystems are already so greatly changed, that everything we do carries risk of doing more harm.
We are fortunate, however, a few pockets sheltering at-risk species still exist in our area.
For instance, Little Saanich Mountain is one of the region’s top sites for rare species. It was purchased in the early 20th century by the National Research Council to buffer Canada’s Dominion Astrophysical Observatory from human-caused wildfires and night-time light. Most of the 71-hectare reserve has escaped development, logging and other major, recent disturbance.
It contains Garry oak woodland — found in Canada only in isolated pockets in south coastal B.C. It also includes a remnant of old-growth coastal Douglas-fir forest — which, due to its accessibility and low altitude, is now rarer even than the towering rainforests that featured so prominently in former decades’ Wars of the Woods.
Few people frequent the mountain beyond the federal facilities, although even 100 years ago, the hill was known among local naturalists for unique plant and animal life.
Today, the slopes act as an island amid the recreational properties, farms and ever-increasing housing density of the mid-Saanich Peninsula. The reserve’s ecosystems remain mostly intact and shelter rare plants, fungi and animals.
One, a rare daisy-like plant called white-top aster, is found in only three places in Canada. Little Saanich Mountain, however, is home to 17 healthy subspecies — the largest population in Canada.
Bentinck Island at Rocky Point is another of the region’s rare-species refuges. The Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife in Canada lists meadow lotus and bear-foot sanicle — both found on the island — as endangered species. There, protection through past decades is largely the result of restricted public access to the Department of National Defence lands.
However, rare species can also be found in higher-traffic areas in the region. They are often protected by — of all things — invasive plants.
In Esquimalt, Macaulay Point comprises a series of bluffs bound on three sides by salt water and on the north side by military housing.
About a dozen years ago, the Township of Esquimalt, which leases part of the point for use as a park, removed tonnes of broom, blackberry and tree lupine from a one-hectare test area, home to a small population of provincially red-listed lupine. Once the area was cleared, people and dogs moved in.
Elsewhere in the park, a patch of purple sanicle makes its home at the foot of an embankment. Yet another rare plant of the region’s Garry oak woodlands or Garry oak-associated ecosystems, purple sanicle dies if repeatedly trampled. At one point, the bank had become a popular shortcut for people walking, running and exercising their dogs along a footpath, and for mountain bikers who found it thrilling to career down the slope.
To deter the traffic and protect the sanicle, a living fence of Nootka rose was planted.
Unlike Scotch broom and blackberry, Nootka rose is native to the region. With its long spines, once the shrub becomes established and spreads, it serves a similar purpose to invasive broom and blackberries — it keeps large two- and four-legged critters out.
You’d think removing the invasive plants would be the first thing to do to protect the rare plants of this region. Just go in there and sweep out the broom, purge the spurge, yank the ivy and pull the blackberry.
But the experience at Macaulay Point shows it’s much more complicated than that.
Clearing broom could put any at-risk plants in danger of over-browsing by deer or trampling by people. That could be as bad as — possibly worse than — leaving dense, impenetrable thickets of invasives.
And that’s just it — even with the latest information, the best of intentions and careful planning, anything we do to help the region’s rare species could backfire and wipe them out.
We just don’t yet know enough.
