Tag Archives: Douglas-fir

The Most Exciting Conservation Story on Cortes Island

Transcript of a radio broadcast by Sabina Leader Mense

Just last weekend several of us were at the Cortes Island Museum for the launch of Sheila Harrington’s new book ‘Voices For The Islands: 30 Years Of Nature Conservation In The Salish Sea.’ What Sheila does in this book is she celebrates this amazing community of conservationists that are living and working in the Salish Sea.  

In the foreword, Briony Penn wrote, “If you’ve picked up this book, chances are that you’ve fallen in love with the islands in the Salish Sea. You might have wondered how the heck they’ve retained their natural beauty against the hostile tsunami of contemporary clear-cuts, cookie cutter suburbs, and mindless malls that are encroaching elsewhere.” 

Briony talks about the collective efforts of thousands of people over generations that have actually been working to maintain the beauty of the islands. 

Sheila’s book documents the last 30 years of people (voices in the islands) who have been working at conservation. She includes a chapter on Cortes, so we’re in there with the best of them! I encourage everybody to pick her book up and have a read  to see what the island community of conservationists have been doing. 

The most exciting conservation story on Cortes today is definitely the Children’s Forest! This is the 624 acres of forest lands that stretch all the way from the Carrington Bay Road trailhead, east across Carrington Lagoon to Goat Mountain, just on the northern shore of Blue Jay Lake.  These are lands owned by Island Timberlands. It’s part of their privately managed forest land base on Cortes Island.

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Cortes Community Forest Five-Year Plan Update: Tour of the Larsen’s Meadow Cut Block

Public consultation around plans for the next five years of timber harvesting got back underway on Saturday, March 23, with a tour of the Larsen’s Meadow cut block led by Operations Manager Mark Lombard. Two more public tours are currently scheduled: March 30 in the Carrington/Coulter Bay area and April 20 in the Green Mountain area. These outdoor tours are part of the follow-up to an initial public meeting in the Spring of 2023, when maps and preliminary plans were presented.

Lombard works for the Cortes Forestry General Partnership (CFGP), which holds the tenure (right to log) for the Cortes Community Forest, comprising much of the Crown Land on Cortes Island. CFGP is a partnership between Klahoose First Nation (KFN) and Cortes Community Forest Co-operative (CCFC). 

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Fresh look at an iconic display: The Cortes Island Water Cycle

Wild Cortes came into being as a result of a series of interactions between Laurel Bohart and Lynne Jordan, former President of the Cortes Island Museum. They started in 2005, shortly after Bohart moved to Cortes Island.  

“I met Lynn Jordan on on the ferry. She had this parrot, an African grey, and it was dead and frozen. She wanted to find a taxidermist, so I mounted her bird. That was the beginning of Wild Cortes, because we did ‘Ravens Relations,’ and put it up in the museum for a few years. People were absolutely enthralled. They wanted to know if we would have more animals, so we dreamed up the original Wild Cortes, the story of water,” she explained.

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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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Controversy over a Quadra Island Woodlot

David Broadland recently wrote a devastating critique of the old growth logging at Hummingbird Lake on Quadra Island. It is sometimes necessary to cut down an old growth tree, so I asked the Cortes Community Forest how often this occurs in their operation.

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