Goose Island now a park

FORT FRANCES—A 75-hectare area of Goose Island officially has been designated as a provincial park by the Ontario government.
“It’s fabulous. It’s been a long-time coming,” said James Duncan, associate regional vice-president for the Nature Conservancy of Canada’s Ontario region.
“This was always the intent of acquiring the island, to see it added to Ontario’s parks and protected areas,” added Duncan, who’s been involved with the project since its early days.
Efforts to protect the island, adjacent to Sandpoint Island on Rainy Lake, began more than a decade ago when its original owners wanted to develop it into private cottages.
“Most of the islands up there have some level of development,” noted Duncan. “So a large undeveloped island, with all of the wonderful features it has . . . wetlands, good forest on it, in terms of [being] relatively untouched, it was a kind of a great opportunity.”
“We’re very happy that this island will not be developed and that it will continue to be used by the public and open to public use,” echoed Phyllis Callaghan of the Rainy Lake Conservancy.
The park will remain under the ownership of the Nature Conservancy of Canada, and will be managed by Ontario Parks as it had been as a provincial nature reserve.
“It’s really just to say thank you to the Rainy Lake community, as well, for all of their support and initiative for making this happen,” said Natural Resources minister Donna Cansfield.
As a designated nature reserve park, activities are limited to ones with a low impact.
“In an essence, it’s a park where you can use it for hiking, bird-watching, and that sort of thing,” noted Cansfield. “It’s really going to have a very low intensity use so that it won’t have big footprints on the [nature] reserve.”
The area also will be listed on the Ontario Parks website and in its published guide.
“I think you’ll find that a lot of birders will come because it will give them an opportunity to, without a lot of interference, to do some bird-watching,” said Cansfield.
“That’s pretty significant.”
The park also will help to protect the habitat of endangered species like the bald eagle, she added.
“There’s also a very significant stand of black ash trees and the northern pin oak, and both of these are very rare in Ontario,” Cansfield continued. “So it protects those species, as well . . . obviously, it has some wetlands, too.
“So that’s why it’s been designed and designated as a nature reserve.”
Efforts to preserve Goose Island as a publicly-accessible nature reserve first began in 1996 after its original owners began planning to subdivide it into separate lots for development.
Local cottagers, alongside the Nature Conservancy of America, and the Nature Conservancy of Canada worked to purchase the island with the help of the Ministry of Natural Resources and private funding.
“It was an international project in many respects,” said Duncan.
Two-thirds of the island is open to public while the other third remains undeveloped and owned by Minneapolis resident Ted Hamm, who helped to largely finance the purchase of Goose Island from its original owners.
“It respects the fact that this is a local resource, that should be available and enjoyed by the folks who, in essence, been have been stewarding that landscape for generations,” said Duncan.
“So by bringing it into Ontario’s formal parks and protected area system, it’s an asset of Ontarians and it’s still an area that can be enjoyed by the locals in terms of access and use.
“Had it been chopped up into private cottage lots, that use and access would have been lost,” Duncan stressed. “A really important subcontent to that is that it remains a community resource, and something that everyone can enjoy.”
The creation of Goose Island Provincial Park complements a provincial plan to protect natural habitats while working together with communities, said Cansfield.
“As identified areas come up, we work very closely with local communities, conservationship councils, [and] nature reserves, where we can pool our resources, purchase this land, and, in this case, we can make it a nature reserve,” she added.
(Fort Frances Times)