Tag Archives: Cortes Island Museum

Animals

George Sirk: Frog Stories 

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Cortes Island naturalist George Sirk knows a lot about frogs.  

GS: “A lot of people know me because of my interest in birds, which is really an addiction, isn’t it?  I’m just hopeless when it comes to birds.  I’m just totally into them. They’re so fascinating.  I came from Venezuela when I was 10. My parents immigrated to Vancouver and I couldn’t speak English. I could speak Spanish and I knew a little Estonian and I could understand German because my parents argued in German.”  

“So there I was in Vancouver, a little weird guy 10-years-old, and I met some other weird young people too, what we would call nerds.” 

“They were into frogs. Jim Palmer was one,  Lowell Orchid, that’s another.  Jim just passed away actually in December, but Lowell’s still with us all here. We used to collect frogs  very close to Kits Beach, the Lacarno beach area. It used to be a military base at one time.  So there used to be a lot of empty properties,  fields and it  got very wet in the wintertime. The tree frogs would all go in there and have a great time.” 

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History

‘Wayfinding’ at the Cortes Island Museum

‘Wayfinding: Stories of Maps & Place’ opens at the Cortes Island Museum, between 1 and 4 PM on Sunday, March 26.

“I think wayfinding really touches on so many aspects of our current life.  We have a really fabulous series of maps and artifacts. It’s an opportunity to share that with the public for the first time on many counts. I think everybody, on some level, has a personal story to do with wayfinding. This is a celebration, and a reminder that we all have stories to tell of place and an evolving relationship to the landscape,”explained Melanie Boyle, Managing Director/Curator of the museum.

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Forests

A taste of the upcoming Season at Wild Cortes

Wild Cortes will be giving a peak of the theme for the upcoming season  this Monday, between 1:00 and 3:00. 

Curator Donna Collins explained, “It’s a bit of a preview that’s going to be a family day activity. We will be taking the families out into the forest, measuring trees to find a mother tree. Then we’ll also be digging to pull up some of the mychorrhizal networks and looking at them here underneath the stereoscopes. After that, participants will be actually creating their own mitochondrial network that will link to their own tree root.  They will be building this themselves. Finally, we will be mimicking the connections that all of these mychorrhizal networks and trees make, by making the connections with string and connecting people.”

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Animals

A very cold but rewarding 2022 Christmas Bird Count

Cortes Island:  The results from this year’s Christmas Bird Count are finally in. As expected, the numbers are down. According to George Sirk, this was because of the weather.

George Sirk: it was really cold and it was the day of the World Cup soccer final. I was at home nice and cozy with Kim, having breakfast and coffee and watching this tremendous finale of the World Cup. I had told Gina Trzesicka at the Cortes Island Museum that I was not going to be available until about 10 o’clock because I had wanted to see this finale

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Community, History

About the Cortes Island Seniors Society

“The Cortes Island Senior Society, as it is now called, was registered in 1987, but previous to that there were seniors groups.  I think mainly they called themselves the old age pensioners. They eventually became a seniors group. At some point when they wanted to build,  someone told them that they weren’t even called a building society, so they decided to become the Cortes Island Seniors Building Society, which they were for a number of years,” explained Sue Ellingsen, Vice Chair of the Cortes Island Seniors Society. 

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