The next members meeting will be on Monday Feb. 26 at 7:30 pm, both in person at the Museum of Natural History 1747 Summer St. and by Zoom. If you are a member, you will be recieving a link to the Zoom presentation in your email closer to the date.
Mike Lancaster, Executive Director of the St. Margaret’s Bay Stewardship Association, will take us on a virtual tour of the newly designated Island Lake Wilderness Area, a 3,927-hectare Protected Area in the St. Margaret’s Bay Area and part of the broader Ingram River Wilderness Area proposal. Mike will also discuss the 8-year campaign that this designation required and the need for continued support for the 11,000 hectares of the proposed Ingram River Wilderness Area that remains unprotected.
Description: Winter is a wonderful time to get to know the trees and woody plants of the Northern Forest. Without the distractions of summer leaves, we can focus on the more enduring characteristics of the woody members of forest habitats. In this seminar, we will take a wholistic approach to winter plant identification, integrating information of many types, including habitat, growth form, bark, needles and leaf remnants, fruit, twig arrangement, and buds. We will discuss aspects of dendrology, forest ecology, and plant anatomy as they relate to winter identification of woody plants. The seminar will consist of weekly interactive lectures and discussions with field challenge assignments to collect photographic observations of woody plants in nearby forests or parks. We will share these photographic observations through a citizen science course project on iNaturalist. Participants who are not able to access forests in winter may focus their efforts on assisting with identification and curation of the online course project collection.
Every fall for the past many years the Sea Turtle Beach Patrol runs a beach patrol program from November 1 to January 31 where they ask volunteers to walk a beach of their choosing once a week looking for cold-stunned hard-shelled sea turtles. “Cold-stunning” is basically hypothermia for sea turtles, which occurs when the water they are in drops to and below 10degrees. Most years they find one or two either dead or almost dead juvenile Green or Kemp Ridley’s sea turtles. By consider the warming oceans and the experiences of our neighbours to the south, they are expecting these stranding events to become more common. Massachusetts for example, has gone from 0 to over 800 cold-stunned turtles in the past 20 years. These turtles, when found alive, require professional warming and monitoring, and sometimes transportation to a rehabilitation Centre. They can’t be put back into the cold ocean.
