Final Report On FOCI's Western Screech Owl Research Project

Roy L Hales/Cortes Currents - 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.” “In the spring we employed consultants from Madrone Environmental, Roxanne Chilcalo and Alicia Mildner to conduct our final report for us. They looked at all the results. We're really lucky that they're now going to come over to Cortes on Friday and give a talk about the report, what we found on Cortes and to put it into the context of regional work on Screech Owl.” “They've been working recently on another big project in the Campbell River area. So there's a really good comparison for what we're finding on Cortes. They're also finding a lot of the landscape has been logged. There’s only very small pockets of old-growth remaining and again, they're finding Screech Owls in those pockets.” “What we're trying to work out now is what is the strategy for making sure they can exist in those small pockets and how do we provide more habitat for them. This is just one indicator species showing that where you have old growth, you still have some really valuable species like Western Screech Owls. Obviously, we don't want to see any more old growth forests cut down, and I think this is just another argument for retaining everything we have, and having a moratorium on logging old growth areas.” “We're hoping that we can do some more work on Screech Owls going forward. We're just in discussion about that at the moment.”