Earthday 2023: The New Wild Cortes Exhibits (Part 1)

Roy L Hales/ Cortes Currents - Wild Cortes celebrated Earth Day, on Saturday April 22, with the opening of the new Mother Tree Exhibit. One of the advantages of being among the first to arrive, is that the facility was not too crowded. There were only half a dozen people when Wild Cortes opened at noon. Local biologist Sabina Leader-Mense agreed to give Cortes Currents a walk through. She was making some last minute touches to the exhibit when I asked some of the first viewers, ‘What’s your impression of the exhibit?’

“It's actually pretty amazing. This is my first time seeing it,” replied Charissa Hunt.

“What do you especially like?” asked Cortes Currents.

“The way it's set up and how everything's so easy to see and accessible for kids too,” she said.

Co-curator Donna Collins was attaching one of the last labels to the Mother Tree display, when Leona Jensen exclaimed, “Well Donna, I'm amazed - the displays have improved so much!”

The main exhibition room was filling up by this time. Alona Levesque was deeper in the room, where several species of owls were perched upon the shelves and a young fawn looked up from a patch of salal bushes.

“I like all the taxidermy animals. My sister is apprenticing with Laurel Bohart, who does the taxidermy.”

My walk through with Sabina Leader-Mense (SLM) began after that.

SLM: “We are here at the 2023 opening of the Mother Tree Exhibit, for the Cortes Wild Partnership, at the Linnaea Education Center. Cortes Wild is a partnership of five organizations. The Cortes Island Museum and Archive Society, the Forest Trust for the Children of Cortes Island Society, Friends of Cortes Island Society, Linnaea Farm Society, and the Discovery Islands Ecosystem Mapping Project from Read Island. We're a regional partnership that got together in 2018. Cortes Wild is the brainchild of Lynne Jordan, the former president of the Cortes Island Museum.”

“This beautiful display we have behind us, created by Laurel Bohart in about 2000, is called Wild Cortes. It follows water from falling on the bluffs of Cortes, moving through the forest, through the riparian, into the wetlands, and eventually into the sea. This was the permanent display at the museum and, as we all know, the building is very small. As we tried to bring new things in, it was constantly being reduced or compromised, and Lynne really wanted to see it find a permanent home. So she went out looking, talked to the Linnaea Farm Society and found this permanent home for the Wild Cortes Exhibit. Then, around that, we created the Cortes Wild Partnership just to have fun with the words.”

“Every year, or every second year, we try to have a new exhibit. This year the main exhibit in the display gallery is called ‘the Mother Tree.’ Donna Collins, Director with the Cortes Island Museum, Laura Bohart, our taxidermist, came together and said, ‘Let’s celebrate Suzanne Simard.’ They had read her book, Finding the Mother Tree, and were very impressed with Suzanne's work. They said, ‘Let's celebrate the work of Suzanne with a beautiful canvas of a Mother Tree!’ So they brought in Kathleen Pemberton, a fabulous Whaletown artist. Kathleen created a mother tree at the center of the display for us, and the other partners from Cortes Wild brought in their individual ways in which they celebrate forest on Cortes.”

“Suzanne Simard, for people that may not know her name, is a Professor at the University of British Columbia, in the Forestry Department. She has created a bit of a stir globally with respect to her research on mycorrhizal networking communications systems happening below the ground in our coastal temperate rainforest. It's called the ‘wood wide web.’ Suzanne is a very, very influential researcher in that field.”