Tag Archives: Hank’s Beach

Arts

Painting With Eyes Closed: The Artwork of Filipe Figueira

‘Painting With Eyes Closed,’ an exhibition by Filipe Figueira opens at the Old Schoolhouse Art Gallery on Friday June 21st, 6-9pm. 

“You always have to come up with the title for shows. Usually they’re sort of pretentious and arty, but there’s a reason for this one. It alludes to the process. I’m inspired by scenes on Cortes. I’ll go somewhere, sketch and I’ll get inspired, but a lot of my ideas come just when I’m at the point of falling asleep. The painting will come into my head. Sometimes really detailed thoughts, like the paints to use, the techniques, the layout and even very specific paints and paint mixes pop into my head. Often I have to get up and sketch. Sometimes it wakes me up in the middle of the night. I’ll be thinking about the painting and that becomes the basis of the paintings. They are scenes from Cortes, but they’re mediated through this process,” he explained.

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Animals

The First Wildlife Coexistence program on Vancouver Island

Around 40 people turned out for the Wildlife Coexistence Gathering on Cortes Island. This was an opportunity for Cortesians to meet some of the extended community of advisors  to the local program and learn more about our three top predators: grey wolf, black bear and cougar. The gathering was organized and hosted by Sabina Leader Mense and Georgina Silby from the Cortes Community Wolf Project. It began with a welcoming ceremony in the Klahoose All Purpose Building on Friday, April 5. There was an all day teaching series in the Linnaea Education Centre the following day. The gathering ended with a walk through the wildlife travel corridor in Hank’s Beach Forest Conservation Park on Sunday, April 7.  

Sabina Leader Mense emailed, “We celebrated our cultural relationships to our wild kin with the Klahoose First Nations singers & drummers and our guests Grace SoftDeer from the Chickasaw First Nation and Dennis Hetu from the Toquaht First Nation. We then explored our social and ecological relationships with our wild kin in formal and informal presentations by our invited guests, Bob Hansen, Pacific Rim Coordinator for WildSafeBC and Todd Windle, Coordinator for the Wild About Wolves Project.

Cortes Currents recorded most of the sessions at Linnaea and has arranged the material in a series of articles. This is an abridged version of the segment in which Bob Hansen talked about the origins of Vancouver Island’s first wildlife coexistence program. Years later it became the model for Cortes Island’s program, and Hansen was one of Sabina Leader Mense’s mentors.

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Animals

Wolf Tales from Cortes Island

Cortes Island’s wildlife coexistence programs can be traced back to  human/wolf conflicts in 2009. Local biologist Sabina Leader Mense reached out to Bob Hansen, then wildlife-human conflict specialist with Pacific Rim National Park Reserve.  The Cortes Community Wolf Project is modelled on the Wild Coast program that Hansen had been running in the Pacific Rim for more than a decade. Hansen and Conservation Officer Ben York helped Sabina write ‘Learning to Live with Wolves on Cortes Island,’ a five-point primer which FOCI endorses and posts throughout the community.

Hansen returned to Cortes at Sabina’s invitation, for the first time since 2011, on February 3. He gave a workshop on electric fences and a demonstration on using bear spray at Linnaea Farm. There were also a lot of ‘wolf stories’ and new information. 

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Animals

Recent sightings: Co-existing with wolves on Cortes Island

There’ve been reports of wolf sightings on Cortes island, which actually isn’t too surprising.

“We’re incredibly lucky to have wolves on Cortes. They’ve disappeared on a lot of the other islands. This is one of the last islands in the Salish Sea with wolves on it. Obviously we want to do everything we can to make sure that they can carry on living here, and that we can coexist alongside them,” explained Helen Hall, Executive Director of the Friends of Cortes Island (FOCI). 

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Waste

2023 Cortes Island Beach Clean-up

Eleven volunteers turned out for the Friends of Cortes Island (FOCI) annual Beach-Clean-up on Saturday, June 17. 

“Most of what we collected today is styrofoam, which is used for floats. That’s obviously washed up on the beach, which is great to get off because it breaks up. We got a whole truckload full of styrofoam. We’ve also picked up a lot of the little black plastic trays they use on the oyster farms, tires with styrofoam in them, a few buoys and then just some sort of trash, but mainly styrofoam,” explained Helen Hall, Executive Director of FOCI

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