On the weekend of March 11-13, 2011 I joined a group of volunteers and a couple of The Land Conservancy of BC (TLC) (http://www.conservancy.bc.ca/) staff to help remove invasive species from South Winchelsea Island (SWI). SWI was the first property acquired by TLC in the late 1990's and is a 25 acre island located off of Nanoose Bay, just north of Nanaimo, BC. After a short 15 mins boat ride, we arrived at the dock to SWI.
To the right of the dock is North Winchelsea Island, a Department of National Defense owned property and home to a Stellar Sea Lion pride.
There is a cabin on the island that was built by previous owners, and is available for rental. The cabin has three bedrooms and runs on solar power and propane.
The island's landscape is truly West coast - rugged rocky outcrops with Garry Oaks, lichens, moss and other rare native plants abound.
Our group had lunch on Friday and then headed across the island to tackle our first job.
We started with a patch of broom and then found a dense thicket of H. Blackberry underneath a large Eagle's nest. The eagle's weren't home but one did fly over just to check us out.
After a couple of hours we returned to the cabin and enjoyed a home cooked meal and shared our stories around the wood stove. We had a couple of volunteers from Japan who were eager to practice their English.
On Saturday we were lucky to find that the weather had cleared and so we set off to the far end of the island to attack a rather nasty patch of H. Blackberry. After lunch we were treated to beautiful sun and we swept the coastline looking for broom and more blackberry. We finished the day by pulling dozens of juvenile broom along where a road once had been built when the cabin was constructed.
For dinner we enjoyed our burgers grilled on the BBQ and swapped stories of the biggest H. Blackberry stalk that was cut or broom that was pulled. We were tired but quite pleased with the amount of work we had done.
A fresh boatload of firewood was delivered to the island and one of our Japanese guests was fascinated by the TLC staff chopping it up. He convinced the staff to let him give a try!
Saturday night we could hear the wind blowing, brining with it clouds and by Sunday morning, quite a downpour was in progress. Rather than risk being stranded, we radioed the boat captain to come and get us before noon, although a little sooner than expected, we felt we had accomplished much over two days.
TLC puts on Conservation Holidays for people to visit the island and help with the removal of invasive species. SWI is such a beautiful place and it's an amazing experience to be able to help stop it from being overtaken by invasives.
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