KAMLOOPS – The annual Grasslands Conservation Council of BC (GCC) field day visited Tunkwa Provincial Park on June 8, with participants learning about the park’s creation and management of the surrounding grasslands.
Tunkwa Provincial Park was created in 1996 to protect a portion of the area’s extensive mid-elevation grasslands, as well as lakes, wetlands and forests on the South Thompson Plateau between the towns of Logan Lake and Savona.
Both Tunkwa and adjacent Leighton Lake, are man-made, the result of damming by ranchers in the mid 1800s. Both remain within the grazing licences of Indian Gardens Ranch, operated by GCC chair Bob Haywood-Farmer.
The area is popular with recreationists for the excellent fishing as well as hunting and backcountry activities. By the mid 1990s, the BC Forest Service recreation site campgrounds on each lake were being heavily used and the surrounding landscape was suffering.
“The area was getting trashed,” says Denis Lloyd, a forest ecologist and key member of the park creation process who now serves as GCC treasurer. “Bob [Haywood-Farmer] and I sometimes had conflicting views at the time, but I think the benefit to the grasslands, the lakes and wetlands, the aspen copses and the overall biodiversity of the area has been very positive.”
Lloyd says some environmentalists wanted to keep cattle out completely.
“But we needed ranchers on side; they are major players in the landscape management. We were looking for a consensus to develop a park system in the southern Interior,” he says.
Indian Gardens’ cows were impacting the area and they had few tools to manage them, Bob’s son Ted Haywood-Farmer explains.
“Pre-1995, the whole thing from one horizon to the next was one big open area,” he recalls. “Without any fencing, after turnout, cattle would come up at the beginning of June and go right to the shores of Tunkwa Lake.”
Summers were spent keeping the cattle away from the lake.
“I remember how sore my butt would get as a kid spending eight hours a day in the saddle,” Haywood-Farmer chuckles. “Keeping them there was good for breeding but they would over-graze the area.”
Lloyd says a compromise was reached at the table.
“We fenced off a few sizable areas to protect and be a representative example of what these landscapes would look like in an ungrazed situation,” Lloyd says.
The first benefit to cattle management was a perimeter fence through the park and the surrounding open grasslands.
“We were able to keep the cows out of the lakes and wetlands without having to come up every third day and drive them out,” Haywood-Farmer says.
That fence also helped with the ranch’s grazing rotations.
“It allows us to use the timbered area that is more dominated by pine grass early in the season when the pine grass has a higher feed value,” he explains. “And it lets the hard grass in the open country have the whole growing season to produce. That grass is of greater value to us in the fall when it is dormant than the pine grass is, and we can move our animals in to feed on it.”
The province also provided a grazing enhancement fund to support additional fencing that allowed the Haywood- Farmers to build more cross fencing to further manage their animals.
But all those fences disappeared in August 2021 when the Tremont Creek fire destroyed over 63,000 hectares, including almost the entire park. Both Lloyd and Haywood-Farmer say they need the fences back.
“I had the opportunity to be in one of the protected areas just before the fire and it is amazing how the area had improved with two-foot high fescue and a diversity of wildlife,” Lloyd says. “We need those fences back so the area can recover again.”
“I think we may still have two-thirds left to rebuild and we are still having real problems with our cattle management because we don’t have the fences,” he says.
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