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When a wildfire roared toward Summerland, B.C., staff from the Interior Wildlife Rehabilitation Society had to evacuate about 30 animals from the facility in an hour.
Eva Hartmann, founder of the sanctuary, said the centre was destroyed — but the animals have all been safely relocated to a wildlife centre in Kamloops, B.C., about 220 kilometres northeast.
They include bats, skunks, a porcupine, a baby beaver named Poppy, two otters, 14 water birds and three turtles, said Ryan Cope, a volunteer.
“So, it was a bit of a Noah’s Ark menagerie getting them out, and they really only had an hour to get out before the fire blew through the property,” said Cope, adding that it was chaotic to corral the birds to their respective kennels.
The ferocious Bald Range fire burning in British Columbia’s south Okanagan region has claimed one life and displaced more than 20,000 people, but its impacts go beyond human victims, with tens of thousands of farm animals, wildlife and pets also affected.
Among the thousands who fled over the weekend, many brought dogs, cats and even goats with them.
But some residents were also forced to leave animals behind, filling social media feeds with pictures of people trying to find lost animals or connect owners with their singed and injured pets retrieved from the fire zone.
McKenna Robson, who has a farm in the Garnet Valley northwest of Summerland, said she was in Vancouver on Friday evening when she started receiving photos of the fire.
She called friends and neighbours who rescued some of the farm’s animals, but her 14 pet alpacas, who called her “babies,” were let loose. The risks of moving the animals was deemed too high, with one of them aged 25.
The next day she was back in the Okanagan region. Despite the evacuation order, she and a friend took a boat from Kelowna across Okanagan Lake to Summerland then made their way to the farm in a borrowed vehicle.
“Nobody was going to stop me at this point,” said Robson. “I had that in my mind that I wanted to get to my babies, and I just kept driving until I hit my road sign, and then just sped up to my property to just go start looking for my animals and getting answers.”
She found all the alpacas huddling together.
“I immediately counted, and every single one of them was there, and I think they were just as happy to see me as I was happy to see them,” said Robson.
Sheds and other structures on the property were destroyed, but Robson’s home was spared.
Dayna Joynt’s boyfriend Greg Gibbs has remained on his family’s property in Faulder, B.C., the tiny community west of Summerland that was overrun by the Bald Range fire, and she said he was sheltering at least 20 horses that have ended up there “with nowhere to go.”
Joynt said she and others on the multi-family property got out on Friday evening with five dogs, four cats and two goats.
They didn’t have the capacity to get any of their horses out, and her daughter lost “geckos and lizards and snakes and her cats,” she said.
B.C. Agriculture Minister Lana Popham said an estimated 50,000 farm animals were also facing the effects of wildfires on 146 agricultural properties under evacuation orders and 123 subject to evacuation alerts.
Popham told a briefing on Tuesday that the animals may not be in imminent danger, but they are threatened, and the risk is being managed under some programs aimed at keeping them safe.
She used Tuesday’s briefing on B.C.’s fire and drought situation to highlight the province’s Range Rider program, which brings livestock to safety during fires, floods or other emergencies.
“If a ranch is under threat by fire these folk head out on horseback or on ATVs and they find the cattle,” moving them to safety, she said.
It has been a “huge success” since it launched in 2021, she said, reducing livestock deaths.
Popham said the program recently helped the Coldwater Indian Band, when 1,500 cattle were moved within 24 hours after the community was placed under evacuation order due to the Brunswick complex of fires.
The minister said some livestock have been lost in the Bald Range fire, but the toll may not be known until the fall, when roaming cattle return home.
Cope, from the Interior Wildlife Rehabilitation Society, said Hartmann and her husband Jonathan managed to transport the family’s own horses to safety in the South Okanagan, where they are staying with family friends.
But Cope said the couple, who lived next to the wildlife facility, had lost their own home.
“It’s been just sort of devastating all around — not just because they built the centre from the ground up over the last five years, but to lose their home as well has really been hard.”
A fundraiser has been set up to resurrect the $300,000 facility, which was built by volunteers over the last five years.
Among those saved from the fire was a domestic lamb, whose story was shared by the B.C. Conservation Officer Service.
A photo showed the “unusual passenger” in the truck’s prisoner seat, looking out of the window.
Cope said a video shared by staff at the wildlife centre in Kamloops showed the two otters playing in their pools.
“It was really heartwarming to see they were doing well, and we’ve heard our little baby beaver Poppy is also doing well, and so they’re all safe and they’re all doing well,” said Cope.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Aug. 11, 2026
— With files by Brieanna Charlebois in Penticton, B.C.
Nono Shen, The Canadian Press
