Close to a dozen volunteers and two Park Rangers participated in the Friends of Cortes Island (FOCI) annual Broom Bash on Saturday, March 18.
They swept the spit at Mansons Lagoon in about 3 hours.
“We really appreciate all of the help from the volunteers here on Cortes. It’s really amazing that the local community comes out and takes ownership of this place. We couldn’t do it without the volunteers,” said Eli Simcoe Metcalfe, of BC Parks.
Continue reading 2023 Broom Bash at Mansons SpitUp until now, there have not been any reports of Western Screech Owls on Cortes Island since 2017. That just changed a few weeks ago in the island’s more remote northern forest.
Field biologist Sabina Leader Mense reports, “I was sitting in the skiff with my husband Dennis, under an unbelievably brilliant sky of stars. It was the last station of the night, pushing midnight, and in the 16th minute of that 17 minute call playback sequence, I heard something. I remember pivoting around in the boat. The sound was behind me and you do what owls do, you turn around. I think your ears and the muscles and your ears cup and you’re just straining to hear something. Then I heard the call again. It was very distant, but I recognized it was an owl. I began analyzing the audio disks in my head going, ‘is it a Northern Pygmy Owl? Is it a Northern Saw-Whet Owl?’ As I was doing this, it called the third time and I recognized it was a Western Screech Owl.”
Continue reading Success: The search for Western Screech Owls on Cortes IslandCortes 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.”
Continue reading George Sirk: Frog Stories
“It’s such a different experience from normal school. I think really just connecting with people, and having a class where you can be friends with everyone in it.”
“It regains my faith in humanity a little bit, seeing everyone be so supportive.”
“A lesson that I’ll be taking with me, is that I can learn from everybody who I meet.”
Those were some of the student comments from the Cortes Island Academy website. The 2022/2023 semester is now over and the academy is preparing for a Forest Ecology Semester in 2023/2024.
Continue reading Cortes Island Academy: Looking back to lessons learned and forward to 2023/2024
“ If we achieve this, which I believe we’re going to do, this is a model for other communities. We look at places like Salt Spring and even Quadra Island and places in northern BC where they have lost their lakes. The process is called eutrophication. When the lakes just become too rich in nitrogen, they become swamps. It’s not just our issue, it’s everybody’s issue and if we show a way to improve the nutrient flow into the lake while adding these extra homes, that’s a model for the whole world,” said Rex Weyler, one of the scientists monitoring Hague and Gunflint Lakes.
He was talking about the potential impacts of what would soon be called Rainbow Ridge.
Continue reading Good News about the drainage at Rainbow Ridge
