One of Cortes Island’s longstanding traditions is the Christmas Bird Count; for almost 25 years, local residents have volunteered in a coordinated week-long audit of the island’s bird life. For many years this effort has been coordinated in the field by longtime islander George Sirk, host of CKTZ’s ‘Nature Boy‘ which kicks off a new season at 9:30 AM on Wednesday, January 7, 2026.
Roy Hales interviewed George about this year’s bird count.
“The only word I can find to describe that feeling… is gobsmacked,” exclaimed field biologist Sabina Leader Mense.
She was referring to the moment she heard a Western Screech Owl respond during a call playback survey near Bullock Bluff on Cortes Island. It was nearly midnight, the final station of the night, and her team had conducted over a hundred surveys without a single response. This owl’s call — unmistakable and repeated 12 times — marked the first confirmed sighting since 2017.
Continue reading The Call That Changed Everything: Western Screech Owls Return to Cortes Island
A small group of people turned out to hear an overview of FOCI’s Western Screech Owl Project at Mansons Hall on Friday September 27, 2024. Participants listened to different owl calls, examined owl feathers and learned why putting up nest boxes is important. The speakers were the two biologists from Madrone Environmental who wrote FOCI’s final report. Cortes Currents interviewed the lead author, Roxan Chicalo, afterward.
“What gets me up in the morning, when I’m working at these species at risk, is thinking about balanced ecosystems. Everything is working together to create the ecosystem that supports our lifestyles as humans. In my mind, every animal and plant has a role that they play,” she began.
“Screech owls are a small avian predator. They eat anything from amphibians to small mammals to fish, insects, slugs, all sorts of different small animals in the ecosystem. As a predator, they keep a check on those prey species populations so that they don’t get out of control, and they also support biodiversity. If one of these prey species booms in their populations, they might start to compete against other populations of other animals. We might see that we’re having more extinction events. That’s why we should care to promote a balanced ecosystem and support that.”
Continue reading Roxan Chicalo: Searching for the elusive Western Screech Owl
The Cortes Island Museum has been sponsoring two birding events every year for the past two decades.* 2,873 birds were seen during the 2023 Christmas Bird Count, but this number would have been much higher if there were more participants.
“We can only go to a certain number of places where we know there will be birds, and that’s mostly along the coastline,” explained Laurel Bohart, a keen birder as well as co-curator of Wild Cortes.
Continue reading The 2023 Christmas Bird Count
Laurel Bohart has volunteered her time to mount or prepare the study skins of 100 birds, fish and mammals for the Cortes Island Museum. She is a member of the Board and one of the co-curators of Wild Cortes in the Linnaea Farm Education Centre. Bohart is also a professional taxidermist, whose interest can be traced back to her parent’s missionary years in Nigeria during the mid 1960s.
The first words she used to describe taxidermy were, “It’s fun.”
To which she added, “It’s a form of sculpture when you mount a bird or a mammal. It’s better than a photograph, which is two dimensional. These are three dimensional.”
Continue reading The Taxidermist behind Wild Cortes
