By the light of the Snow Moon, a whispered series of soft whistles echoed through the misty forest, just louder than the sound of water flowing over the falls of Shingle Creek on North Pender Island. This was the call of a Northern Saw-whet owl (Aegolius acadicus) – a tiny owl no bigger than a robin. These tiny forest dwellers are increasingly rare on Pender thanks to the loss of intact, old forests with large standing dead trees, or snags, containing woodpecker holes they need to nest in. The invasion of the west coast by the barred owl, a larger, aggressive, generalist species from the east that thrives in human-disturbed forest habitats, has not helped matters.
A single male saw-whet owl will defend a territory anywhere from 70-100 ha in size, and there are few undisturbed forests left on Pender Island large enough to accommodate this pint-sized predator. But here on the slopes above Shingle Creek, the tiny owl has found an expanse of mature forest with more snags and potential nest sites than can normally be found on Pender Island. This is Osprey Ridge Nature Reserve: one of the newly protected forests the Pender Islands Conservancy secured in 2024, thanks to funding provided by Environment and Climate Change Canada and the BC government under the Old Growth Nature Fund. Although it is only 10 acres (4 ha) on its own, this forest’s superpower is its connectivity with other existing protected areas: Roe Lake, part of the Gulf Islands National Park Reserve, and Shingle-Masthead CRD Community Park. And it is in this larger protected forest context that the Saw-whet owl found space to live, and where it now calls to advertise a territory and maybe even produce a new generation of owls.
In the highly fragmented and subdivided landscape of Pender Island, the Pender Conservancy’s goal is to protect and connect, gradually securing parcels that collectively create contiguous habitat over larger landscapes. And we do this for species like the Saw-whet owl: species that are disappearing from this coastal landscape as the large expanses of forest habitats they need are progressively converted and fragmented by residential development. By permanently protecting critical wildlife habitats through strategic land securements, we are helping to ensure there will be space for these species in the future.
