A few dozen people brought home a Christmas tree by helping the Nature Conservancy of Canada cut down Colorado blue spruce trees.
About 35 people volunteered the assist the national land conservation organization by removing the non-native trees at its Haynes property near Pine Lake on Saturday.
Those volunteers went home with a blue spruce tree for Christmas, while additional trees were sold at the Kerry Wood Nature Centre later the same day. NCC workers brought 10-15 trees back to Red Deer to be sold by donation.
“It’s a fun event, so we want to make it an annual thing hopefully,” said Jessica Hayes, NCC’s natural area manager for Central Alberta.
“I had attended one of these events in the past before I even worked for NCC. There were probably 20 of us volunteering then.”
The event, which was called “Spruce Up the Holidays,” hasn’t happened for at least a couple of years, Hayes noted. The goal of Spruce Up the Holidays is to re-naturalize a former tree lot on the Haynes property – volunteers help do this by identifying, tagging, safely cutting down and wrapping a select number of non-native blue spruce trees.
“The NCC acquired a property that was formerly owned by a land-development business. They used the property to plant trees, so they could transplant them onto subdivision properties, golf courses and things like that,” Hayes said.
Removing these non-native trees is seen as “an essential” step towards the ecological restoration of this site, according to the NCC.
The NCC has been working in the Red Deer River area for more than a decade. This work has resulted in the conservation of more than 5,000 hectares of land.
Hayes explained that the Colorado blue spruce trees were planted densely, which blocks native white spruce trees from growing.
For more information on the Nature Conservancy of Canada, visit www.natureconservancy.ca.
sean.mcintosh@reddeeradvocate.com
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