Adventure for Wilderness – Taber Grasslands Tour – June 6, 2026
June 17, 2026
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Text by Lindsey Wallis
Photos by Lindsey Wallis and Ruiping Luo
Alberta’s native grasslands are disappearing. As one of the least protected and most imperiled ecosystems in the province (and indeed in the world), every acre of intact grassland matters. That is one of the reasons AWA brought a group to the Taber Grasslands, just south of the Scope Reservoir, to see six sections that were auctioned off as leases for irrigated cropland earlier this month. As we arrived, the bulldozers were already stripping a field, despite the auction not being for another two days.
Daryl Johnson, whose family has ranched these sections of land since the 1940s, joined us to bring us up to date on the fight for this piece of prairie. The lands were tax recovery lands, given up by settlers in the 1930s because they were unable to be farmed. The Alberta government held them and leased them to ranchers for cattle grazing until, in the 1990s, the MD of Taber requested that they be transferred to the MD. This was controversial, even at the time, as conservationists and ranchers were worried about the future of these grasslands. But assurances were given by the MD that they would stay as native prairie, the MD even passed a bylaw in 2014, the “Prairie Conservation Bylaw.” Its purpose is to ensure the “conservation of municipally owned grasslands” “for the benefit of all citizens of the MD.” It recognizes that “prairie grasslands owned by the Municipal District of Taber provides both economic and environmental benefits to the residents of the Municipal District of Taber.” The land transfer was completed in 2017 and not a decade later, the MD is breaking its own promises by converting six sections of this land to agriculture, despite vehement opposition by the local ranching community and conservationists.
We wandered to the bank of the Scope Reservoir, where the roar of backhoes competed with the calls of gulls and chestnut collared longspur. A platoon of pelicans glided wingtip to wingtip just over the water, while a group nested on one of the islands. Our next stop was a washout area filled with calling longspurs, lark buntings, horned larks and other songbirds. Prairie birds and insectivores are among the species of birds with the most precipitous declines (the chestnut collared longspur has declined 94% since 1970). We also saw lots of prairie wildflower species in bloom, including a super bloom of meadow death camas dotting the prairie.
Our final stop featured sandy blowouts, where we found sand dock, bee-flower and other native plants that need these sandy soils to survive. Baird and Brewer’s sparrows called from the thick grass. All of these unique features will be obliterated by the plow, and the ecosystem services, including water and carbon storage will cease to be. While these section appear lost, we were grateful to be able to experience them one last time and are asking the MD of Taber to do the right thing with the remaining tax recovery lands by putting a caveat on title prohibiting conversion of the grassland.
