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MERRITT HERALD FREE
TUESDAY, AUGUST 5, 2014 • MERRITT NEWSPAPERS
BATTEN DOWN THE HATCHES A group of about 20 people gathered at the site of the second Bass Coast Music Festival in Merritt on Thursday for a tour before the four-day event kicked off on Friday. The tour group stopped to have a look at the main stage, which, in keeping with the festival’s “mutiny” theme, featured a pirate ship sinking into the stage at the old Merritt Mountain Music Festival grounds. Another side of a ship adjacent to the main stage can be seen sticking out of the ground, and white streamers are draped across the dance area. The design for the main stage had been in the works since September, starting out as a 3D model of a pirate battle on a computer, Bass Coast communications manager Paul Brooks told the Herald. Crews spent the last couple of weeks on-site to construct the elaborate stage, he said. Brooks said about 3,000 tickets were sold to the event and the festival was capped at 4,000. For more from Bass Coast, check out the Thursday, Aug. 7 edition of the Merritt Herald. Michael Potestio/Herald
Napier Lake Ranch to be protected land By Michael Potestio THE HERALD
reporter@merrittherald.com
The Nature Conservancy of Canada has raised the $3.4 million it needs for a conservation project that will protect 1,300 acres of grasslands in the Nicola Valley. Through this project, habitat for migratory birds, rare grassland plants and mammals such as moose and mule deer will be protected. The protected land is a por-
tion of the Napier Lake Ranch, north of Merritt off of Highway 5A. The funding will go toward purchasing the land and funds for the long-term care, management and monitoring of the land, Lesley Neilson, Nature Conservancy of Canada communications manager for the B.C. region, said. Monitoring the land involves studying it over time to see if the species inhabiting it still live in that habitat, if their populations have increased and if there are
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other forces changing it, Neilson said. She said the Napier Lake Ranch grasslands are at risk of development pressures such as fragmentation of the grassland habitat through subdivision. “That was the main concern here with Agnes Jackson, the land owner [of the Napier Lake Ranch], and why she came to us to work on this project,” Neilson said. She said this conservation initiative is a preventative one.
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Neilson also said the Nature Conservancy of Canada focuses on areas with the highest conservation need. “We work based off of scientific land planning that we’ve done that pinpoints the areas where there’s species at risk and there’s threats to the land that those species need for survival,” Neilson said. Neilson said native grasslands in B.C. are highly threatened ecosystems, and represent one per cent of the province’s land base.
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“Those are also the easiest kind of lands to develop. They’re flat, they’re open, you don’t have to take the trees out,” Neilson said. “We as humans have been attracted to them for all sorts of reasons. They’re beautiful, they grow food well, they’re in valleys, accessible. So there’s all sorts of reasons why there’s human development pressures in those little bits of grasslands that we do have, and we’ve lost a lot of them.”
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