A Year of Progress: Spotlighting Three New Key Biodiversity Areas and Updates on Canada’s KBA Initiative

By Chelsea Aristone, KBA Technician 

It is hard to believe it has been almost a year since our previous Key Biodiversity Areas (KBA) update – and what an exciting year it has been! The KBA Team at Birds Canada and our partners at Wildlife Conservation Society Canada have continued to progress the work of identifying KBAs across Canada. This process involves assessing sites against internationally established criteria to identify areas that are critical to the persistence of biodiversity and can be used to inform conservation planning and priorities.

Since our March 2024 post, 112 KBAs have been accepted and published on the KBA website, with many more moving steadily through the review process. For more details on our progress over the past year, check out the 2024 KBA Canada Annual Report. Although there is still more KBA assessment work being done, we want to take this opportunity to spotlight three recently published KBAs.

One of the most significant areas in British Columbia for Pacific Herring spawning is encompassed by the K’ómoks KBA. Annually, during the herring spawn, aggregations of 30,000 to 60,000 waterbirds benefit from food and nutrients that herring provide within this KBA. These large aggregations include nationally and globally significant numbers of multiple bird species including Surf Scoter, White-winged Scoter, and Glaucous-winged Gull. Terrestrial areas within the KBA also provide important habitat for birds, including Trumpeter Swan which overwinters in the Comox Valley. 

This KBA, like many others in southern Canada, is facing many threats due to increased development in this area. The number of people living within the K’ómoks KBA has doubled over the past 25 years and is expected to continue growing. There is also increasing concern that the current commercial harvest of herring is not sustainable, which could negatively impact the seabirds that rely on these spawning events.

The K’ómoks KBA lies within the Unceded Traditional Territory of the K’ómoks First Nation, the traditional keepers of this land. For thousands of years, Indigenous people have been stewards of this site, and for the past several decades local conservation groups have been involved in conservation actions. Art Martell, the volunteer caretaker for the K’ómoks KBA, shared recent conservation wins at this site including the Comox Valley Land Trust’s securement of critical wetlands for Western Brook Lamprey (Morrison Creek population), the restoration of coastal wetlands in the Comox Valley, and the restoration of the rare Taylor’s Checkerspot butterfly on Hornby Island.

Surf Scoter in flight. Photo: Sean Jenniskens

One of Canada’s largest remaining patches of undisturbed mixed-grass prairie can be found in the Grasslands National Park and Area KBA of southern Saskatchewan. This KBA hosts an incredible number of species, including 16 that meet KBA criteria. One of these species is the Greater Sage-Grouse, which has faced steep declines at a national scale. This species is best known for its courtship grounds, called leks, where males perform a spectacular courtship display which involves inflating the yellow air sacs on their chest and making a drumming sound. This site supports more than 50% of the Canadian Greater Sage-Grouse population and contains a considerable proportion of the national critical habitat for the species. In addition to Greater Sage-Grouse, this KBA contains the only colonies of Black-tailed Prairie Dogs in Canada. The burrows this species creates provide habitat for over 100 other vertebrate species, including Eastern Yellow-bellied Racer (a nationally Threatened snake) and Burrowing Owl (a nationally Endangered bird).

The park and its surrounding pastures contain large tracts of native prairie, managed through stewardship by Parks Canada, Indigenous Peoples, ranchers, and pasture managers. To protect the rare  habitats and species here, Julia Put, a Resource Management Officer at Grasslands National Park, highlights the need for “continued collaboration on conservation actions amongst (these) different organizations and stakeholders”. Current conservation actions include species-at-risk monitoring, habitat restoration, such as grazing and prescribed fires, habitat management agreements, and grass banking.

Greater Sage-grouse. Photo: Sean Jenniskens

Five kilometers off the northern tip of the Avalon Peninsula in Newfoundland is the world’s largest breeding colony of Leach’s Storm-Petrel. This colony, located on Baccalieu Island, hosts an incredible 1.95 million breeding pairs of Leach’s Storm-Petrel (over 13% of the global population and over 37% of the Canadian Atlantic Population), according to a 2013 survey by the Canadian Wildlife Service. Leach’s Storm-Petrel nest in burrows and are only active on land at night to avoid predation from gulls and skuas. Kyle d’Entremont, a research coordinator at Memorial University of Newfoundland (MUN), describes the awe-inspiring sound of the Baccalieu colony at night: “It was truly a treat to be able to sit outside in the colony at 3AM and listen to hundreds of thousands of them returning to their burrows at night; the hills seemed to shake with how loud it could be on some nights.” In 1995, this site was recognized as a provincial Ecological Reserve, making it the largest protected seabird colony in Newfoundland and Labrador.  If that alone isn’t impressive enough, Baccalieu Island is also home to the second-largest Atlantic Puffin colony in North America, with 75,000 breeding pairs reported in the most recent survey. 

Multiple conservation measures are in place to avoid disrupting seabird nesting at this site, including limited access to the island and a ban on low-flying aircraft. However, despite its protected status and ongoing conservation efforts, oil pollution, artificial night lighting, ocean warming, and incompatible fishing practices, are still pressures for the seabirds that nest on Baccalieu Island. Kyle d’Entremont highlights some recent conservation efforts at Baccalieu where members of the Montevecchi Lab at MUN collaborated with the Quinlan Brothers Fish Plant in Bay de Verde, a nearby community, and found that reducing artificial light at night led to a significant decrease in the number of petrels stranding at the plant. This work calls attention to the importance of continuing outreach and dialogue with communities near Baccalieu Island to encourage reducing artificial light at night where possible.

Leach’s Storm Petrel in flight. Photo: Blair Dudeck

For an up-to-date list of accepted KBAs, check out a map of sites on our website. As we continue to make progress with KBA identification, we are also looking ahead to what stewardship and monitoring of KBAs could look like. To learn more about our plans for this next step of the project, watch the KBA Caretaker Network Webinar.