Environment

Only A Week From Now: FOCI’s 2024 AGM

The Friends of Cortes Island (FOCI) 2024 AGM is coming up at 5 PM on December 3rd. They are celebrating more than 30 years with their Marine Stewardship program. Sabina Leader Mense will be the guest speaker. 

“That’s the second part of the AGM. For the first part, we will be talking about  the work we’ve done in 2024. We’ve just produced our 2024 Annual Report and that’s bursting at the seams with amazing work that we’ve been doing over the last year,” explained Helen Hall. executive director of the Friends of Cortes Island.  

“On our front cover of the annual report, we’ve got a picture of our parks work. Friends of Cortes maintains nine different parks and trails.  Every month of the year we’re  clearing the trails, picking up garbage and repairing infrastructure.  On top of that, we’ve been doing quite a lot of park’s improvements. For example, this year we put in a 170 foot boardwalk into Kw’as Park. We’ve been putting bridges in Whaletown Commons and the Hayes Beach Access. We’re currently renewing the signing in Kw’as Park.  That’s the regional parks. We also work with BC Parks on Manson Spit and have been doing that now for six years. This year we installed new fencing to protect the Spit and the coastal sand ecosystem. We also put in new signage and  carried out our annual broom bash, which has been working really well. So that’s our park’s work.” 

“This year we ran our first ever whole island beach cleanup. That involved getting people to clean their local beaches and put the garbage into super sacks that were left out for the whole month of May.  They were collected back  in June and put into an Ocean Legacy bin, hosted by Klahoose Aquaculture, and then the garbage was taken off the island.  That was a huge new project for us,  we had great partners  and it’s something we want to run next year.” 

“We’ve been running our Western Screech Owl project for three years. That just came to an end in April. We produced a scientific report. We also put up 25 nest boxes on Cortes, Maurelle, Read and Sonora Islands to provide critical nesting habitat for Screech Owls and we educated people about them too.  We’ve just applied for another grant for another two years to carry on working on that project.”  

“Probably my most fun and joyful project this year was with the Cortes Island School. We installed a fabulous butterfly meadow and  the students  planted it full of pollinator plants. That was like creating a  living work of art right in front of the school. It had all sorts of educational benefits.”

“Staying on the people side of things, we  ran a whole host of events during the year. In the spring, we ran a series called Create, Connect, Conserve that was about teaching people  how they can take action for nature on their doorstep. So that involved everything from building bug hotels through to how to build a rain garden. Twelve people turned out for the bug hotel making workshop.  They each went away with their bug hotels, which is a little wooden structure with lots of bamboo inside them and hopefully have been attracting bugs and bees ever since.”  

“We also ran our summer events program, which is always really popular. That included things like low tide walks at Manson’s Lagoon, a tour around Linnaea and Blue Jay farms, and we even ran a herbal tea workshop. The FOCI Climate Action Committee (Climate Action Network) also were running events, including films and they hosted a climate table throughout the summer as well. So we saw a lot of community engagement with those projects, which was great.”  

“We’ve been working in the Dillon Creek Wetland, which is a wetland that we helped to restore at Linnaea Farm two years ago. That’s really starting to naturalize beautifully, but it needs maintenance. So we’ve been doing monitoring work, we’ve been running work bees with the community and we’ve also been doing educational tours.”  

“Staying on a wetland theme, we also have our fabulous Cortes Streamkeepers group. We’ve had an amazing Chum Salmon run this fall and they monitor the fish coming in. They’ve been collecting eggs so that they can be incubated and released back as fry into the ocean. They also work with the school where eggs that are hatched out in the classroom and the students then release the fry into local creeks.”

“We’re also celebrating over 30 years of Marine Stewardship this year.
A critical species we’ve been monitoring is the European Green Crab, which is one of the world’s most invasive species. We’ve been doing early detection monitoring with DFO and Klahoose Fisheries. We’ve been focusing on Manson’s Lagoon because that’s exactly the type of ecosystem that Green Crabs like to live in. Unfortunately this year we did find one Green Crab. We’ll be continuing to monitor this situation next year. So that will involve trapping Green Crabs if they’re there and then removing them. It’s a super important project because Mansons Lagoon is really biodiverse and the last thing we want in there is Green Crabs.”

“We’ve also been doing monitoring for Dungeness Crabs in Cortes Bay.  We have  volunteers pulling up the light trap every week throughout the spring and summer to see if they find any Dungeness Crab larvae. That’s a part of what’s called the Sentinels Of Change program, with the Hakai Institute.” 

“We’ve been running a very long term Foreshore Monitoring project which involves volunteers going out in the summer at low tides to monitor transects which are lines down the shore to look at vegetation and fauna from the low tide right up. It’s been running for over 25 years and provides a long term view of the ecological health of the marine environment.” 

“On top of that, we’ve been doing Forage Fish monitoring through the winter, which again showed that Mansons Spit down in Manson’s Provincial Park is a really important nursery site for forage fish.”

“That’s a lot of different projects, and volunteers are pretty much involved in every single project, which is fabulous. We’ve got volunteers out doing the monitoring work,  helping us build nest boxes for the Screech Owls and we had volunteers come in to help us build the butterfly meadow at the school.” 

“We love the fact that we can work with volunteers. We love the fact that people come to our events and want to learn about what we’re doing and the natural environment.”  

“I’ve been working in the conservation field for the last 30 years. My philosophy is that people are really important in conservation, not only because they can do something about supporting the environment, but because it benefits them too.  Seeing the students making the butterfly meadow and having so much fun, and seeing people come out to our summer events and raving about them afterwards, was lovely. That’s all benefiting those people at the same time as benefiting the environment.  I think that’s a really important part of the work that we do.”

Cortes Currents:  FOCI will be announcing the winner of this year’s  Jo Ann Green environmental award at the AGM on December 3rd.  Is there anything else that you’d like to say about this event?  

Helen Hall: “Our AGM falls on Giving Tuesday and we’re trying to raise $10,000 to support our work. FOCI has been having a  financial challenge this year. Some of our bigger grants have ended and so we needed to make up that money through donations,  to give us a bit of a cushion to get through this  tough financial period. So  we’d love it if people would consider donating to us. We  hope that they will see  how important our work is on Cortes and  any amount of money is very, very welcome.”

“We’d also love as many people as possible to come to our AGM and find out about our work. There’s  an opportunity for people to ask us questions. We have a lovely bit of social time afterwards, which is always very popular. We’ve got some gorgeous food and we get a chance to socialize.”

“This year we have Sabina Leader Mense talking about the amazing 30 years of marine stewardship that FOCI has undertaken. It should be a great evening, so we hope people will come out to it.”

Links of Interest: 

All photos courtesy FOCI

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