Tag Archives: Linnaea Farm

Animals

Success: The search for Western Screech Owls on Cortes Island

Up 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.”  

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Business, Food, History

More Than Just A Store: Cortes Natural Food Co-op

“One of our mandates is to create good employment for Islanders who are here full-time year round. And for our youth returning in the summer as well. It’s a great place for people who move to the island to start out and get to know the culture of the island by working with us.” –– Mary Lavelle

The Cortes Natural Food Co-op is one of the top five or six employers on the island, an attraction for tourists and visitors, and the go-to grocery store for many year-round residents. Active members enjoy several benefits, but membership is not required to shop there — so the store serves many times more people every year than its approximately 360 active members.

Employing 20 people even in the off-season, and with over $2 million in sales each year, the Co-op is a significant island business. But it also makes a conscious effort to be a good neighbour. As General Manager Mary Lavelle put it during our interview, “Staff, board, management — we’re always considering the community. That is one of the factors that we always consider in our decision making: our community. And I think that’s part of what makes us so special.”

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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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Forests

Expert Panel Discussion: Suzanne Simard, Tzeporah Berman, Paul Stamets

An expert panel discussion featuring Suzanne Simard, Tzepoarh Berman and Paul Stamets was one of the highlights of the Children’s Forest AGM on January 28. The topics ranged from finding an effective way to communicate with industry to a proposed research collaboration on Cortes Island. The podcast below is an abridged version of that segment, starting with the introduction Forest Berman-Hatch gave for his mother.

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Arts

Artist spotlight: Local Jemma Hicken returns to the stage for Lovefest

By Louis Belcourt, CKTZ News, through an LJI grant from Canada-info.ca

Jemma Hicken is a born and raised Cortes musician who is returning to the scene this year to play at the returning, annual summer music festival Lovefest.

Hicken has recently finished a degree in music and has moved back to the island to get in touch with her roots.

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