2024 Fall Highlights
Black Oystercatchers (BLOY) are year-round residents in Xaana Kaahlii GawGaay (Skidegate Inlet) and this area is recognized as an Important Bird Area in part because of globally significant numbers of BLOY.
Photo by Liam Ragan
Upcoming Volunteer Opportunities!
Help out with the December 8 BC Coastal Waterbird Survey
and/or the December 15 Christmas Bird Count,
see details below:
2024 Christmas Bird Count
Skidegate/Daajing Giids/Sandspit - Sunday December 15
If you would like to participate in the 2024 Christmas Bird Count, please let us know. Everyone is welcome, no experience necessary!
North end (Port Clements, Rose Spit, Tlell and Masset) and Sandspit area residents contact organizer Margo Hearne: hecatebird@gmail.com
Skidegate and Daajing Giids area contact the Laskeek office: laskeek@laskeekbay.org
The Christmas Bird Count is organized so groups do not overlap the same area or count the same birds multiple times.
For a Haida Gwaii bird checklist go to our website (laskeekbay.org) go to resources > birding tools to download the list. https://www.laskeekbay.org/laskeek-bay-birding
For information and a map of other participating regions, go to: https://www.audubon.org/community-science/christmas-bird-count/join-christmas-bird-count
BC Coastal Waterbird Surveys
In October the LBCS crew continued the monthly BC Coastal Waterbird Survey at the Daajing Giids docks. The BC Coastal Waterbird Survey provides rewarding opportunities for volunteers to contribute their knowledge of coastal habitats and waterbirds. This initiative has been happening since 1999. The data collected directly supports the conservation of British Columbia’s waterbirds.
The survey involves counting waterbirds at specific locations along the BC coast each month. Volunteers will learn bird identification skills from our Biologists and will have access to binoculars or a spotting scope, but are welcome to bring their own equipment as well.
Please email our office if you would like to learn more and get involved, laskeek@laskeekbay.org
Beginner and experienced birders welcome!
December's survey will happen in Daajing Giids on Sunday Dec. 8., meet at Spirit Square at 3pm.
Important Bird Areas / Key Biodiversity Areas
by Tony Gaston
Over the past few years, LBCS has been collaborating with Birds Canada over the designation of "Important Bird Areas" (IBA) in Haida Gwaii. What are IBAs and where is the initiative going?
Starting in the 1980s in Europe, and subsequently expanding to North America and elsewhere, Birdlife International designated a series of sites as "Important Bird Areas" (IBA) based on their supporting, for at least part of the year, more than 1% of the world population of a given bird. The designation of these areas was intended to flag up places of conservation concern for birds. In Canada the designation of appropriate areas has been carried out by Birds Canada. Haida Gwaii is assigned many IBAs because the islands support much more than 1% of many seabird species' populations, being an important breeding ground for Cassin's Auklet, Marbled Murrelet and Ancient Murrelet and also an important wintering area for others (e.g., Western Grebe, Pacific Loon).
Where possible, local guardians are assigned who monitor the IBAs for conservation concerns. The Laskeek Bay Conservation Society performs this function for the waters of Laskeek Bay, which qualifies as an IBA on the basis of the Ancient Murrelet and Black Oystercatcher populations that breed there and the number of Marbled Murrelets occurring throughout the year. One of the responsibilities of the IBA guardians is to check on the status of bird populations in their IBA and our annual monitoring surveys, initiated before Laskeek Bay was declared an IBA, do this task to perfection.
More recently, Key Biodiversity Areas (KBAs) have been adopted by a network of international organizations under the International Union for Conservation of Nature, (IUCN) as a framework for identifying important biotic areas (Key Biodiversity Areas, KBA). As part of this global initiative, the Birdlife International IBAs are now transitioning to KBAs (http://datazone.birdlife.org/site/ibacriteria).
The main aim of the KBA program is to secure the long-term protection of sites that are important for biodiversity. To qualify for IBA/KBA status, a site designation must be based on robust data and the application of scientific criteria, such as the proportion of the global or regional population of each species using the site (Handley et al. 2022). LBCS has been assisting with this process which should create a higher profile for sites of high biodiversity and hence high conservation concern within the archipelago.
Marbled Murrelet Photo by Jo-Anne Castillon
Marine Plastics Monitoring
Our marine plastics monitoring is now a year-round project, with several small crews collecting samples from Laskeek Bay and Skidegate Inlet in August and September. We completed beach debris surveys at Crow Valley beach on East Limestone Island and South Beach on Reef Island. Gwaii Haanas staff collected water and sediment samples from locations in Gwaii Haanas, including the west coast of Moresby Island. Slack Tide Enterprises and Jake Pattison obtained sediment and water samples from the west coast of Graham Island. Samples are sent to an Environment & Climate Change Canada lab in Ottawa and ECCC will send results back to us this winter. Based on those results, we will choose a subset of sites to sample more frequently next year. Our main goal for this year is to get broad geographic coverage, to get a sense of the spatial variability of microplastics in Haida Gwaii's marine environment.
Marine Plastics sampling: a trawl net is towed at a slow speed of 1.5 knots by Max and Rian, near East Limestone Island.
Photo by Madeleine Springle
Happy Anniversary to Us!
2024 marks 35 years of operations for the Laskeek Bay Conservation Society! To celebrate, we held a community event at the Saahlinda Naay Haida Gwaii Museum on November 2nd. Thank you to those of you who were able to attend, we estimate 50 people turned out for our event on a busy Haida Gwaii weekend. We were happy to see some familiar faces from previous staff, Directors, and volunteers, as well as many new folks of all ages.
There were 12 taxidermy birds on display, from the Haida Gwaii Museum collection, which people enjoyed sketching and getting a close look at. A couple comments were: "Seagulls are surprisingly big!" and "Why do Rhinoceros Auklets have such long whiskers?" Haawa to Nathen Peck of the Haida Gwaii Museum for organizing this part of the event.
Photos below by Mary Morris and Matt Peck
Another popular display was the Pigeon Guillemot nest box, with accompanying video clips of the PIGU parents tending eggs and feeding newly hatched chicks. Haawa to Jake Pattison for his work on the box design and construction over the past years, and Haawa to Rian Dickson for putting this display together. Conveniently, Greg McClelland and Ariel Lenske of the Canadian Wildlife Service were on Haida Gwaii on Nov. 2nd, and were able to work with Rian and Jake on some fine tuning of the nest box camera system while at our event (see photo below).
Photos below by Mary Morris
Our outreach Worker Eilean McCutcheon gave people lessons in seabird identification and spotting scope use, as they enjoyed the gorgeous ocean views from the Haida Gwaii Museum's large windows. The birds were cooperating and I heard people identifying loons, cormorants, and grebes, in the bay.
On Haida Gwaii we are fortunate to have a steady supply of young and energetic volunteers from the university students who attend the Haida Gwaii Institute each semester. The HGI students helped carry gear in to the museum for the 35th event, they ran the merchandise table, they helped people with door prizes and snacks, and they carried gear back out to our cars at the end of the event. We send a huge Haawa to these students and wish them all the best as their semester draws to a close.
Photo below by Matt Peck
The new t-shirt to commemorate our 35th anniversary year was unveiled at the event. It features a Black Oystercatcher Chick, and the Haida name for this bird, Sgadang giit'ii / Sgaada.nga gidga. The eco-friendly fabric and printing are done by the Kindred Coast company in Parksville, and the design is by our Executive Director Judy Hilgemann, so it's a local BC product. Shirts will be available very soon on our website. Adult shirts are $40, children's shirts are $35. If you would like to order one right away, please email laskeek@laskeekbay.org for more information on available sizes and colours.
Noa and Taya Dickson-Brown modelling our new kids' t-shirts. Adult t-shirt colours are green, blue and teal.
Thank you for reading our newsletters, and for sending feedback and comments. Look for our Winter Newsletter early in 2025, as we continue with some winter birding activities and begin the next field season planning. We hope to see some of you in the new year for various projects and outreach, or for field season volunteering.
The entire Laskeek team would like to extend a huge thank you to everyone who donated in response to last week's call for donations for travel expenses for our Biologist Rian Dickson to attend the 2025 Waterbird Society and Pacific Seabird Group Joint Meeting in San Jose, Costa Rica, Jan. 6-9.Donations remain open, thank you again for helping Laskeek be a presence at this international conference. Rian's conference presentation on Ancient Murrelets will be made available on our website early in the new year.
Haw'aa/Haawa!
