Roy L Hales/ Cortes Currents - A total of 92 species were listed in Cortes Island's Spring 2022 Bird count. More than 20 birders participated, including local naturalist George Sirk who started the day off as a guide on board the Misty Isles.
So this year’s count was expanded to include Mitlenatch island, where Sirk served as a naturalist in 1969 and 71. He remembers when there were about 450 pairs of Pelagic Cormorants, no Double Crested Cormorants and no Eagles nesting there. Since then, the Pelagic population has dropped to about 250, 25 Double Crested Cormorants have arrived and a pair of eagles has taken up residence.
“The Pelagics nest on the sheer cliffs on the Western side of the island. They find any kind of small shelf that will just hold them. And then they make their nests out of eel grass. It primarily is what I've seen up there and guano, and they glue these things together. The nest must be about 18 inches across or so and they build them up over years. Some of them are two feet high. It all withstands the Southeast winds in the winter time. I guess all that guano was just like cement holds them together,” explained Sirk.
He added, “we used to have 3000 pairs of Glaucous-winged Gulls and I bet the population is down to about a thousand pairs. I believe it is primarily going down because of the garbage dumps. Back then, we used to just make gigantic garbage dumps: Delta, Campbell River, Nanaimo, Victoria, even on Cortez right? All the garbage was jumbled together, including all the foods and composts and everything. So the gulls could survive the winter when fishing is very hard cause the low tide is at night. They survived on the dumps, but then we cleaned up the dumps. All that wonderful recycling and then covering it up as soon as possible with soil. Then scaring the goals away too! And because they take four years to mature, the gulls really suffered when we cleaned up. That's my theory behind that, and I think it's a pretty sound theory.”
When Sirk first arrived on Mitlenatch, eagles used to fly over from Cortes and some to the surrounding islands to pick off the young gulls. That ended when a pair of eagles took up residence. While they eat some of the gulls, more survive because they keep the other eagles away.
Returning to Cortes Island, Sirk spotted some Western Grebes.
“Fishermen used to call them hell divers, because they are the largest of the Grebes and they can dive the deepest. They're the furthest off shore. You can see them two or three miles off the coast of Cortes and that's their habitat. They can go hundreds of feet deep and hunt their fish,” he said.
He lists five different types of Grebes and a number of other species in the podcast.
Some of this year’s highlights on Cortes:
Autumn Barret Morgan and Cory Dow spotted a Sandpiper at Linnaea Farm
John's and Sherry Sprungman observed a Golden Plover at Sprungman's pond. right there off of Bartholomew. And that's a super bird.
“This cold snap that's gripping north America really seems to have affected birds. They're holding off a little bit in coming north. They somehow sense that the Arctic is still frozen. It's still cold up there. All their ponds and lakes are still frozen and so they're a little bit delayed. I've noticed that on Cortes too. Birds seem to be like maybe a week late or so,” said Sirk.
