Roy L Hales/Cortes Currents- 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's a 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.”

Up until a few weeks ago, there has not been any reports of Western Screech Owls on Cortes Island since 2017. That changed when Sabina Leader Mense, and her husband Dennis, discovered one of the elusive owls in the northern part of the island. On Saturday, at a meeting with about  30 members of the community, Leader Mense announced the discovery of a second Western Screech Owl.  

HH: “We've been working with Emily since the start of the project. Her role is to work on a number of different species at risk, and to work with partner organizations like us to get conservation work happening and to engage with community groups.”

“It was key for us to work in partnership with the ministry in order for us to obtain the grant, and also for them to bring in a whole load of resources that we needed. They were able to loan us some of the recording units we have been using. The ministry were also able to advise us on where to conduct our surveys, and how to conduct them.”

Emily works closely with another important member of this project, the Pacific Megascops Research Alliance.

The Western Screech Owl project is also being funded by the Federal Government’s Habitat Stewardship Project.

HH: “This project raises our profile with biologists that we're working with, also with the federal grant given body. We're hoping that other projects might follow this one.”

Saturday morning, some key FOCI leaders took Emily on a hike.

HH: “Sabina, Autumn, Emily and I went out to a patch of older growth forest near Basil Creek. We were putting up an autonomous recording unit. We have a number of recording units in that forest for the next two weeks, to see if we can record any Screech Owls at night. We wanted to show Emily the kind of ecosystem that we were working in and also just to get her to see what we are doing on the ground.”

CC: Did she have any comments about the area?

HH: “She thought it was potentially good habitat for Western Screech Owls, so also a really useful place to put up autonomous recording units.”

“We had a wonderful presentation at Linnaea Education Centre on Saturday afternoon. There were about 30 people, and Emily was able to give us a really good overview about Screech Owl distribution and conservation. The Western Screech Owl was once abundant in coastal BC, but there's been a steady decline in their numbers since 1990. What they're trying to do is to figure out why?”