Tag Archives: Mallard Duck

The 2023 Christmas Bird Count

The Cortes Island Museum has been sponsoring two birding events every year for the past two decades.* 2,873 birds were seen during the 2023 Christmas Bird Count, but this number would have been much higher if there were more participants. 

“We can only go to a certain number of places where we know there will be birds, and that’s mostly along the coastline,” explained Laurel Bohart, a keen birder as well as co-curator of Wild Cortes.

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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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Cortes Island’s Spring 2022 Bird Count

A total of 92 species are listed in Cortes Island’s Spring 2022 Bird count. More than 20 birders participated, including local naturalist George Sirk who started the day off as a guide on board the Misty Isles. This year’s count was expanded to include Mitlenatch island, where Sirk served as a naturalist in 1969 and 71.

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Wildlife returning to the Dillon Creek Wetlands

It has been a year since Autumn Barrett-Morgan was hired as a Biological Monitoring Technician at the Dillon Creek Wetlands Restoration Project. This is in Cortes Island’s oldest farm site, currently known as Linnaea Farm, but prior to the land being a farm, it was wetlands. Three years ago the Friends of Cortes Island (FOCI) and Linnaea Farm partnered in a project to restore the wetlands, to help reduce the sediment and thus reduce the nutrients flowing down Dillon Creek into Gunflint Lake. The wetlands are also meant to enhance the breeding and foraging grounds for wildlife, including Species at Risk. 

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