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.
Continue reading The 2023 Christmas Bird Count
Laurel Bohart has volunteered her time to mount or prepare the study skins of 100 birds, fish and mammals for the Cortes Island Museum. She is a member of the Board and one of the co-curators of Wild Cortes in the Linnaea Farm Education Centre. Bohart is also a professional taxidermist, whose interest can be traced back to her parent’s missionary years in Nigeria during the mid 1960s.
The first words she used to describe taxidermy were, “It’s fun.”
To which she added, “It’s a form of sculpture when you mount a bird or a mammal. It’s better than a photograph, which is two dimensional. These are three dimensional.”
Continue reading The Taxidermist behind Wild Cortes
Cortes Island: The results from this year’s Christmas Bird Count are finally in. As expected, the numbers are down. According to George Sirk, this was because of the weather.
George Sirk: it was really cold and it was the day of the World Cup soccer final. I was at home nice and cozy with Kim, having breakfast and coffee and watching this tremendous finale of the World Cup. I had told Gina Trzesicka at the Cortes Island Museum that I was not going to be available until about 10 o’clock because I had wanted to see this finale
Continue reading A very cold but rewarding 2022 Christmas Bird Count
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.
Continue reading Wildlife returning to the Dillon Creek WetlandsAn injured Red-Tailed Hawk was recovered and recently released by a local wildlife advocate.
Cortes Currents reached Autumn Barrett-Morgan at home, by zoom, for the story.
Continue reading Cortesians rescue Red-tailed Hawk, forge relationship with MARS
