Over 100 people came to the Quadra Community Centre on December 7, to learn about the acoustic dialects and social connections of Orca, Humpback and Fin Whales. Sierra Quadra invited Janie Wray – CEO and co-founder of the North Coast Cetacean Society, BC Whales, and the manager of the BC Hydrophone Network – to share from her more than two decades of research.
Continue reading Janie Wray: Listening to WhalesClose to 400,000 BC Hydro customers, primarily on Vancouver Island and the Lower Mainland, lost power during the recent windstorms. Gusts of up to 159 km/h were reported on November 19, the first night of the storm. By 4 PM on Friday, November 22, all but about 5,000 customers on Vancouver Island and the Gulf Islands were back online. Parts of Cortes and Quadra Islands were among the last areas to be restored.
BC Hydro identifies extreme storms like this with climate change and, in their 2023 Climate Change Accountability Report, states:
Continue reading Loss of Electricity and CityWest Internet During Recent Storm
Canada’s National Observer, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter
BC Green Party Leader Sonia Furstenau is doubling down on her commitment to the carbon tax before the Oct. 19 election.
The party will clamp down on the oil and gas industry, close loopholes on pricing carbon pollution, and provide larger rebates to individuals and families, Furstenau announced Wednesday.
Furstenau criticized Conservative Party of BC Leader John Rustad for denying the climate crisis is a problem and accused the BC NDP of tinkering with the carbon tax system it inherited to grant subsidies to the oil and gas industry.
Continue reading On carbon tax, BC Greens stand alone
On January 31, 2024, the Canadian Food Inspection Agency confirmed that two cases of Chronic Wasting Disease (CWD) have been found south of Cranbrook, in the Kootenays. ‘The first sample came from a ‘harvested’ adult male mule deer and the second from a white-tailed doe that was struck on the road.
CWD is a highly infectious and fatal disease, which the U.S. Centres for Disease Control and Prevention states, “affects many different species of hoofed animals including North American elk or wapiti, red deer, mule deer, black-tailed deer, white-tailed deer, sika deer, reindeer, and moose.”
This is the first report of CWD west of the Rocky Mountains in Canada or the United States.
Continue reading Chronic Wasting Disease reported in the Kootenay RegionEditor’s Note: Most of what follows is applicable to our waters, doubly so because MERS operates in our waters. Stay tuned to see if there are any scenes from Cortes or the surrounding islands in the BBC story.
Canada’s National Observer, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter
Whale researcher Jackie Hildering and her colleagues never imagined their work on humpbacks would capture the attention of the globe’s premier documentary series.
Or that whale poo would be of such interest to Planet Earth — BBC’s famous nature show.
Continue reading BBC’s Planet Earth does a deep dive on West Coast whale poo
