Tag Archives: Western Screech Owl

Animals

Final Report on FOCI’s Western Screech Owl Project

The final report on the Friends of Cortes Island (FOCI) Western Screech Owl Project will be unveiled at Mansons Hall on Friday. The two biologists who were hired to write it will be giving an hour long talk that starts at 7 PM. 

“Western Screech Owls are a beautiful little owl. They used to be one of the most common owls in coastal BC, but they’ve declined hugely in the last 20 years,” explained Helen Hall, Executive Director of FOCI.  

“They’re a species that need attention. In the last three years we’ve been running a project on Cortes, Read, Maurelle and Sonora Islands to look for Screech Owls and to do what we can to help conserve them.  We started the project in 2021.  In the spring of 2022, we conducted our first audio surveys, mainly on Cortes Island. Then in 2023, we expanded our surveys onto Read, Maurelle and Sonora Islands. We did pick up Screech Owls in the north of Cortes and one on Read Island. We also went out put up nest boxes around all the islands to try and provide nesting habitats for the owls.”

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Animals, Justice

Fairy Creek: Federal Court Rules Canada Failed To Protect ‘At-Risk’ Birds In Old Growth Logging Areas

A Federal Court ruled that Canada’s Environment Minister, Steven Guilbeault, failed to protect habitats of at-risk migratory birds in old growth logging areas. Chief Justice Paul Crampton stated the Minister’s decision to limit protection to areas where nests were found ‘was neither reasonable or tenable.’ 

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Animals, Education

The Taxidermist behind Wild Cortes

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.”   

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Animals

Provincial Biologist visits Cortes Island; Second Western Screech Owl discovered

A provincial biologist visited Cortes Island over the weekend. Emily Upham-Mills is an ecosystems biologist with the Ministry of Water, Lands and Natural Resource Stewardship and an important member of the team working with the Friends of Cortes Island (FOCI) on the Western Screech Owl Project. 

Helen Hall, Executive Director of FOCI, explained, “Emily very kindly came up on the weekend to talk to the community. This project is really important for FOCI. We’re doing really interesting scientific work and that data is going back both provincially and federally. It puts us in the spotlight with this particular species. It’s a project that’s running for three years. We’re in the second year of trying to discover whether there are Western Screech Owls on Cortes Island.” 

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Animals

Autumn Barrett-Morgan: Soundscapes

The audio portion of this story starts with a chorus of croaking frog voices, rising up from a wetland. After a few seconds, the distant call of an owl is introduced.

Autumn Barrett-Morgan first learned about soundscapes when she was studying bird identification in college, but it really come alive after she became a Monitoring Technician with the Friends of Cortes Island Society.  

“In the past two or three years, I started  really diving into the soundscape on the Dillon Creek Wetland Restoration Project. I found it really important in birding, because not all birds are visible or make themselves visible and that left me not knowing who I’m listening to. So it got me really inspired to dive into observing the soundscape through studying the bird calls once I got back home.” 

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