Tag Archives: Common Raven

Animals

Birds are smarter than you think

Sandra Milligan has been teaching biology at North Island College, in Campbell River, for more than 20 years. She is an avid birder with deep roots in her local community. Someone from Sierra Quadra came to lecture she gave on bird intelligence, at ElderCollege in Campbell River, last fall. This led to Sierra Quadra inviting Milligan to speak at the Quadra Community Centre at 7:30  PM in Saturday, March 2. 

“Birds are incredibly intelligent, contrary to what science has believed in the past.  They understand what each other is thinking. One of my favourite topics, because I’m a bird watcher, (aka a bird listener) is to talk about bird communication and language. They can have hundreds (and thousands even) of different vocalizations and they really communicate in much more depth than science previously believed to be happening,” she explained.  

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Animals

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

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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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Animals

Ranting Ravens: Intelligent and mischievous

By Chadd Cawson, The Columbia Valley Pioneer, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter

We cannot talk about one spooky black bird one may associate with Halloween – the crow –  without speaking about its creepy cousin of the Corvus Corvidae family, the raven. While there are over eight different subspecies of ravens, the one seen soaring above the Columbia Valley on the unceded territories of the Secwépemc and Ktunaxa Peoples and the land chosen as home by the Métis Peoples of B.C., is the western, or northern raven, also referred to as the common raven. 

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Animals

Cawing Crows

By Chadd Cawson, The Columbia Valley Pioneer, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter

As we kick off the month of Halloween, let’s talk about one of nature’s spookier birds, the crow. While there are 40 different species worldwide, the species we most commonly see flying above the unceded territories of the Secwépemc and Ktunaxa Peoples and the land chosen as home by the Métis Peoples of B.C., is the American crow. Despite its name, this member of the Corvidae family, can be found soaring across Canada (along with most of the U.S.) except on the Pacific Coast, where its close cousin, the Northwestern crow, flies in its place. The Corvidae family has many members which include jackdaws, rooks, and ravens, which look almost identical to crows at first glance but are slightly bigger in size. 

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