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VERNON COMMONAGE AND CARRS LANDING

32 km, mostly paved

This route winds through the grasslands south of Vernon past a variety of ponds and small lakes, passing through the orchards of Carrs Landing and ending at Highway 97 in downtown Lake Country.

START: 34th Street and 25th Avenue in south Vernon; drive south on 34th Street.

AFTER A FEW blocks of suburban backyards, 34th Street turns into Mission Road, breaking out into the open fields of the Vernon Army Camp. The camp has been here since 1899 (my grandfather trained here in World War I), but the structures you see were all hurriedly built in 1941. As the road continues southwest, you leave the camp behind, and the slopes to the south are mostly in natural grass and shrubs. These grasslands are known locally as the Vernon Commonage.

The northwest side of the road is lined with poplar plantations irrigated with water from Vernon’s wastewater system. A short distance from the army camp is the Allan Brooks Nature Centre, perched high on a hill to the south of the road. This centre (www.abnc.ca) is open daily from May through Thanksgiving, offering a virtual tour of the natural landscapes of the north Okanagan. The building was once a weather station, and that remains a strong theme in the exhibits about climate change and meteorology. The Centre is named after Major Allan Brooks, who lived in Okanagan Landing (just below you on Okanagan Lake) from 1897 to 1945. Brooks was one of the best-known bird artists in the world at that time and illustrated many of the major books on birds published in North America in the first half of the twentieth century.

You’ll notice nest boxes on the fence posts on the side of the road through these grasslands. Local naturalists put these up for bluebirds, but the boxes are also used by other birds, including tree swallows, chickadees, and house wrens. There are two species of bluebirds along this route; the male mountain bluebird is a breathtaking sky-blue colour all over, whereas the male western bluebird is a deeper blue and has a rusty breast. The females are more difficult to separate, but female westerns always have a noticeable orange wash to their breast. The western bluebird is a species of open woodlands, whereas the mountain bluebird prefers grasslands. These birds normally nest in cavities in trees, some made by woodpeckers, others by the natural decay of older trees. Bluebirds began to have a harder time finding nest sites in the 1950s, as older trees were felled and available cavities were often usurped by an aggressive newcomer, the European starling. Trails of bluebird boxes have become a very popular way to help the bluebirds and other hole-nesting species, and the birds’ populations have bounced back significantly in the last few decades.

The grasslands here are dotted with snowberry and wild rose shrubs. These provide ideal habitat for the clay-coloured sparrow, a prairie bird that has found a foothold in these Interior grasslands. If you stop at the junction of Benchrow Road (about 3 kilometres from the army camp, where Mission Road becomes Commonage Road) on a summer morning, you’ll likely hear the characteristic song of this sparrow—a series of dry, monotonous buzzes. It is certainly not as musical as the nearby meadowlark’s, but this song is heard in relatively few places west of the Rockies. The bird looks as indistinguished as its song sounds—as its name suggests, it is a dusty brown above and grey below.

The conifer plants to the northwest are also irrigated with wastewater from Vernon. Although rather unnatural in these grasslands, conifers provide winter cover for roosting owls. The road swings up the hill to the south, angling along a small valley filled with small aspens and hawthorn bushes. Owls find cover in here as well, especially the grassland-hunting long-eared owl.

Just after the road crests the hill, it passes a sizable lake to the west. This is Rose’s Pond, worth a stop to check out the abundant duck population (except in the dead of winter, of course, when it is frozen solid). Stands of silver snags attract hooded mergansers and Barrow’s goldeneyes, ducks that use tree cavities for nesting.

At the junction with Bailey Road, bear right up the hill; the road traverses a low ridge beneath the earthen berm that surrounds the McKay Wastewater Reservoir. You can soon see this large body of water from its south end. Water that has gone through secondary treatment in the Vernon sewage system is piped 7 kilometres to this 77-hectare reservoir, where it is dispensed to various irrigation projects around the commonage. As you can imagine, the water is rich in nutrients and provides good feeding for the many waterfowl that gather here when it is ice free.

The road continues up past the Predator Ridge Golf Resort and on through stands of Douglas-fir mixed with some ponderosa pine. It then descends to a large pond, Tompson Lake, that is reminiscent of many prairie potholes, nestled in rolling hills with aspen copses and pine groves.

The aspens are a favourite nest tree of woodpeckers, particularly the red-naped sapsucker. This bird drills lines of small holes in the bark of deciduous trees—particularly birch and willow—then returns to lap up the sweet sap with its special brush-like tongue. These holes or wells, as they are called, are frequented by other animals looking for a sugary treat, including hummingbirds, squirrels, and various insects. Red-naped sapsuckers prefer aspens for nesting, however, since the trees often have heart rot, making it easy to excavate a deep nest hole once they have drilled through the strong outer wood.

In spring, scan the lake for typical pothole ducks such as Barrow’s goldeneye (the males with white crescents on their big, blackish-purple heads) and redheads (the males live up to the species’ name but are otherwise grey). As in most duck species, these males will leave the nesting lakes in early summer to gather on larger lakes to moult in bachelor flocks, letting the females raise the young themselves.

You then descend farther down to an even smaller pothole— Cochrane Lake—continuing on down along Anderson Brook, its narrow valley lined with Douglas maple and Douglas-fir. Many of the firs have large witches’ brooms caused by infestations of dwarf mistletoe. This tiny, parasitic plant is almost invisible itself, but when it sends its rootlets into a host tree to tap into the sweet sap, it causes the host tree to grow a mass of dense twigs. The mistletoe does not kill the host, but it does slow the growth of the tree considerably. Unlike other mistletoes, dwarf mistletoe does not spread its seeds through tasty berries eaten by birds. Instead, when the seed is mature, the seed capsule bursts from high internal pressure, shooting the sticky seed off at high speed, much like a watermelon seed explodes from between your finger and thumb.

As you regain the pavement on the outskirts of Carrs Landing, the road travels through mature ponderosa pine forests. Look on the lower branches of these trees for a bright green, moss-like growth. This is chartreuse lichen, a fungus that has teamed up with a bright green alga to survive on sunlight and moist air alone. The lichen uses the bare pine branches simply to get up into the light; in this environment it doesn’t grow too high on the tree, where it would dry out quickly. Chartreuse lichen is also called wolf lichen, since it contains toxic chemicals that were used to poison wolves in bygone days. Native people extracted a bright yellow dye from the lichen; one of the important uses of this dye was in Chilkat blankets. Interior tribes traded the lichen—found mainly in Interior mountains—to the coastal blanket makers for valuable coastal commodities such as eulachon grease.

Across the lake stands the tiered peak of Terrace Mountain, an ancient volcano that was active during the Eocene Period about 55 million years ago as the Okanagan Valley was opening. Just offshore to the southwest is Grant Island, also known locally as Whiskey Island. This site hosts one of the largest gull colonies in the British Columbia Interior. About three hundred pairs of ring-billed gulls nest on the island, along with smaller numbers of herring gulls, California gulls, and occasional glaucous-winged gulls. The colony was established around 1968, shortly after the large Glenmore Landfill was established in December 1965, only 17 kilometres to the south (section 16). The island was purchased by the North Okanagan Naturalists’ Club to protect the colony; at that time the island was renamed in honour of Jim Grant, a well-known local naturalist and mentor.

On the shoreline near the island is Kopje Regional Park, a small lakefront park with a musem known as Gibson Heritage House. The house is a classic example of an orchard homestead built in the early 1900s, when the Okanagan was booming with British immigrants attracted by the ideal climate and gentle beauty of the valley.

About 6 kilometres beyond Kopje Park, Carrs Landing Road meets Okanagan Centre Road. Turn left as the road follows a small gulch filled with wild rose and red-osier dogwood. Okanagan Centre Road then turns into Oceola Road, which descends gradually to meet Highway 97 in downtown Lake Country. You can turn left to return to Vernon or turn right to go south to Kelowna.

focus Swainson’s Hawk

One of the characteristic summer birds of the Vernon grasslands is the Swainson’s hawk, an elegant soaring bird easily recognized by the two-toned pattern of its broad wings—the flight feathers that make up the trailing part of the wing are dark grey below, whereas the wing linings in front of them are white. Swainson’s hawks also soar with their wings in a noticeable dihedral, raised slightly above the body in a V-shape. These birds eat mice and large insects; in June 1925 local bird artist Major Allan Brooks saw a flock of seventy-five near the Vernon Commonage gorging on a large influx of crickets.

Because insects are so important to the Swainson’s hawks’ diet, they make a 24,000-kilometre migration in the fall to the grassy Pampas of Argentina. The hawks leave the grasslands of Canada and the western United States and soar down the mountain ranges of Central America. Virtually the entire population crosses the isthmus of Panama, in flocks numbering in the thousands. Naturalists were deeply concerned about the hawks’ population recently when hundreds were found dead in Argentinian fields after eating grasshoppers killed by the pesticide monocrotophos. Canadian Wildlife Service biologists and other international experts have helped the Argentinians resolve this serious problem. The birds return to Canada in mid-April; in British Columbia they nest in a few scattered grasslands east of Osoyoos, on the Douglas Lake plateau, and around Vernon.