All the people we have met so far in the Grampians area have given us a warm welcome into your beautiful community. Like Jeff, Teresa and Nigel who were here the last two summers, we (Sean, Ruth & Aiden) are participating in the Parks Canada – Parks Victoria exchange program’s next round and will be here for two six month periods from November to April. I’ll be continuing Jeff’s work on kangaroo and wallaby monitoring in support of the work looking into grazing impacts in the Grampians, and helping out where ever I can. The idea of the program is to share experience and ideas from national parks on one side of the globe with national parks on the other.
The park we come from is called Riding Mountain located in the southwest corner of the province of Manitoba. The park is at the eastern edge of the Canadian prairies, along the southern tip of the boreal forest and includes some hardwood trees that are at the western limits of their range in the park so it is relatively diverse. Like the Grampians, Riding Mountain is an escarpment feature that rises out of the plains and is surrounded by agricultural land. Agriculture in the area consists primarily of cattle, oilseeds and grain crops.
Riding Mountain is home to many wildlife species including wolves, black bears, moose, elk, white-tailed deer, bison, lynx, cougar, fisher, pine marten to name a few. There are 270 species of birds recorded there and 760 species of vascular plants that are adapted to survive our climate, which includes temperate extreme ranges from – 48?C in winter to 37?C in summer. We get about 500 mm of precipitation per year with about a quarter of it falling as snow (120 cm on average between November and April).
We live in a small community of 1200 people adjacent to the park. Sean has worked in Parks Canada for close to 20 years as a park interpreter, park warden and more recently as a GIS and ecosystem data specialist. Ruth is a secondary school math and physics teacher and Aiden is coming to grips with just starting school. We are looking forward to discovering the Grampians and all the interesting people who live in this spectacular place. Please don’t be shy and we’ll try to do the same.