Looking across from a stairwell to visual displays on wallboards
Animals, Education, Rivers & Oceans

Wild Cortes (Part 2): Beyond the Main Exhibition Area

(This is the second part in a series about WIld Cortes, in Part 1 Sabina Leader Mense shows us through the main exhibition area.)

Cortes Island’s natural history centre just expanded. In addition to the main exhibition area, Wild Cortes now has displays in the Linnaea Education Centre’s lower atrium area. 

While the Ecolab has been operational for some time, it has not been widely publicized. In the conclusion of a two part series about the 2023 displays at Wild Cortes, local biologist Sabina Leader Mense (SLM) takes us outside of the main exhibition area.

Image credit: The eagle and rockfish that Laurel Bohart is working on – submitted photo

Our first stop was the long entrance hallway, where a small cluster of Cortes residents were watching two people intently peering into microscopes. 

The Ecolab

SLM: “In 2019, the Linnaea Farm Society said, ‘we have this additional area, would you like it?’ and I said, ‘you bet.’” 

“We’ve turned it into an ecology lab or affectionately known as ‘the Ecolab.’ It doubles our wall space for displays, but most importantly it’s an interactive area where you can bring things in, you can arrive in muddy boots. It’s got a concrete floor, a beautiful big bench with microscopes set out there. We have discovery boxes. You can pull a box off the shelf and it’s called ‘insects,’ or ‘lichen,’ or ‘sand.’ There’s one called ‘feathers.’ You open it up and there you have a directed laminated sheath that says, ‘explore the structure of a feather.’ Look at it under the microscope. You’ve got bone maps, where you can build part of an eagle. You can work in an eelgrass bed with a transect and record the size of the eelgrass blades just as we do underwater. You can look at the forage fish eggs that forensic Friends of Cortes is researching out.  This is a lab for all of the partners, and for the public, to come in and to use. It’s here, open, an absolutely fabulous, exciting place to be part of.” 

“In addition to all of that, this year Linnaea has opened up  the  entire lower wall space of  their atrium for us, all the way to the Vancouver Island library.”  

“The atrium is about to receive an eagle hanging onto a big rock fish that’s being done by Laurel Bohart.” 

“We’ve had various displays over the years, and we’ve  condensed some of those down. It’s really important information that’s still upfront and center for people to come back to the Wild Cortes Center here. So important for our local school kids, homeschooling and Cortes public school parents, learning the whole naturalist tradition. It’s just essential that we have a place like this and that’s the ultimate goal of the Cortes Wild Partnership, to create a hub of ecoliteracy so that we become ecoliterate. That means understanding, again, the connections and the networking that’s within the natural world so that we can live in it together more harmoniously.” 

“As we walk down the hallway, you see Manson’s Lagoon display. Why is that lagoon so filled with life?”

“There’s  a small condensed display from our very first natural history display, which was in 1998, celebrating the international year of the oceans. Bonnie McDonald, the president of the museum at that time, had just very successfully moved  the old store from Manson’s landing up to Beasley Road where it sits today.  Everything was in place. It was wired, it was plumbed, it was painted. There was nothing on the walls. So Bonnie came to me and said, ‘Can we do something just in the entrance?’ What we’re looking at right now is what we created for that entrance. We created a marine alphabet. I wrote  an alphabet for the children and went to the schools. The schools had the kids create artwork for the letters. ‘A is for anenome sitting so still.’ So this marine alphabet was written to celebrate Manson’s Lagoon, which is a class A provincial marine park. The artwork was there for all the letters, A to Z, and that’s what you’ll see in the atrium. ECOlab. The entire length of the atrium ECOlab is A to Z, celebrating that work, and that was 1998.”

“The next display is about eelgrass.  This amazing nearshore environment that we have is a critical marine ecosystem. What is eelgrass? What makes it special? How do we study it? You can come back into the Ecolab, you can sit down and we have a mock up of an eelgrass bed that  you can emulate what Bowen MacDonnell and I did back in 2004/05.  We actually mapped the eelgrass beds.  We put a quadrat down, underwater. A quadrat is just a big half meter square. We count how many blades we have. We’d measure the blades, get a length on the blades, and do all of that work underwater.  You can come into the lab and there’s a mockup of a bed.” 

The next display that we have just put up a couple of hours ago, is the ‘Beautiful Bee’ display that was at  the main museum the last couple of years, condensing that down, bringing that fabulous information up front so people can still see what was done there. 

The next display is ‘Species and Ecological Communities at Risk on Cortes.’ A display we did many years ago. I have literally updated that to today’s records. We have some 33 species at risk identified just on Cortes and the really frustrating thing is that British Columbia still has absolutely no protection, no legally binding protection for species at risk.

“We’re the only province in the entire country that doesn’t have  species at risk legislation to protect these species. We are the province that has the highest biodiversity of any province in the country.  It’s a travesty, and you’ll see on that board a 2023 update to the work that our youth did way back in 2015 to promote these species at risk. When the Liberals were in power, the NDP were really promoting a bill called Bill M 211, which our youth got behind – created buttons, promoted it.  The disappointment is that it’s 2023 now and NDP are in power and haven’t gone anywhere near doing that. So we’re thinking that with the new regulations that have come through the Old Growth Strategic Review, the province has signed onto that and has committed to biodiversity and protecting biodiversity. We need to all step up, talk to our MLA’s and support a biodiversity law for British Columbia, which will in effect protect species at risk.”

“And the displays continue on with the Big Three. Laurel Bohart and Donna Collins put together a display on the cougar, the wolf, the bear – our three big carnivores. As you walk through the doors to the Vancouver Island Library, you’ll see the four panels that discuss the wildlife coexistence program that is one of the Friends of Cortes Island outreach programs that we conduct.  Learning as a community to live without conflict with our large carnivores.”

“So what are we doing?”  

“All about wildlife corridors: Why are they important? Where do we have one? This is a corridor I’m working on right now with conservation covenants going on.” 

“This is our Cortes Community Wolf project. We’ve just talked a lot about coexistence and how to live together.”

“So yes, we’ve got the lower level. So much to see and we haven’t even touched the tip of the iceberg. Folks should come on down.”

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Image credits: All photos were submitted

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