FOCI reports increased numbers of Barn Swallows and Nighthawks, fewer heron nets
Cortes Currents
English - August 25, 2023 11:55 - 3 minutes - 7.18 MBNews cortes island discovery islands quadra food security energy indigenous nations Homepage Download Apple Podcasts Google Podcasts Overcast Castro Pocket Casts RSS feed
Roy L Hales/ Cortes Currents - The Friends of Cortes Island (FOCI) are reporting a possible resurgence of the island’s Nighthawk and Barn Swallow populations, but found fewer than normal Great Blue Heron nests.
“FOCI has been interested in Species at Risk here on Cortes since we started. We have a section on our website about Species at Risk. You can go look them up. We love to engage the community. Each year, we put a spotlight on some Species at Risk to highlight them and bring awareness to the community. said Manuel Perdisa, Summer Intern with FOCI.
“This year, we've been gathering data about nesting barn swallows and herons from the 20th July until the 11th of August.”
“This is citizen science. It's data that we're collecting from the community on Cortes. It's through-out weeks, so the same bird might be counted twice.”
There were 19 Barn swallow nests in the chart FOCI sent and 14 of these were in the vicinity of Blue Jay Lake farm.
“The local farms have been seeing notable increases. All of this is citizen science, so these aren’t hard numbers I can go into. When we get reports of large increases like that, that will really just mean there is something happening.”
“I can tell you that we only had three reported heron nest sightings on the island. I was able to view the heron nests myself. They were still high up in some fir trees, but under the canopy where they were more protected and hidden away from predators. I'd really like to thank the community members who made me aware of the locations of these nests so that I was able to photograph them.”
“Nighthawks are a whole separate deal. We were asking for bird counts, and, or just bird sightings. we've been recording data about the common Nighthawks from the end of July 31st until present. Some people would phone in and say they saw this many birds at this hour of this day, whereas others would phone in and just say they saw relatively many birds in this area this day.”
“We haven't got a count on Nighthawks sightings, but based on Citizen Science reports, it seems we have had hundreds of Nighthawks sightings within this month.”