Our guest speaker Dave Weaver is a retired forester, and past president of the Beaufort Watershed Stewards. He is an active member of the Vancouver Island Private Managed Forest Action Alliance, an alliance of 30 environmental groups which are advocating for change in the Private Managed Forest Lands.
Everyone welcome! Bring a friend.
Here is the video from Carrina Maslovat’s and Laura Matthias’ presentation https://youtu.be/H7_HeeEQlLE. If you have an area of sun-filled Garry oak meadow on your land, and are interested to set up artificial cover object (black asphalt shingle) to observe if you have these tiny snakes (see below) on your land, please contact Linda Brooymans at the Nanaimo area Land Trust. stewardship@nalt.bc.ca The video explains all about it.
You can sign up here YESBioBlitz2025 under the community menu.
(Log in to iNaturalist. )
This is such important citizen science, which supports research and helps policy makers protect nature. Check out how your data makes a difference here. It is also a great opportunity to develop a local community of people who understand and care for nature.
Practice starts now! This event lines up with the City Nature Challenge across Canada:
April 25th – April 28th Take pictures of wild fungi, plants and animals.
April 29th– May 4th Upload and identify the species in iNaturalist.
Results will be announced by May 15th.
You can do this on your own, with your outdoor class, or with others who you can teach or learn from. You already have a friendly community of online iNaturalists who are so helpful at this time of year. Join us at:
All you need to participate in the BioBlitz are:
An iNaturalist account or app, which is free.
A smart phone or camera to capture images or sounds.
A smart phone or computer to upload your images or sounds.
You can use the iNaturalist App or the webpage iNaturalist.ca.
The area for this year’s YES Bioblitz is the same as 2024. It includes Ladysmith, South Nanaimo, Cassidy, and our coastal waters to the east – see map below. There are many public parks where you can explore, and there are reserves and private lands where you need permission. NOTE: We do not have permission to enter the Woodley Range Ecological Reserve.
Only photos and sound recordings taken during the designated dates and times (6am on April 25th to 8pm on April 28th) in this geographical location will count towards our YES BioBlitz. Of course, everything entered in iNaturalist, year-round and in other places, is still valuable.
Check out the resources and links below and note the top tips:
There are many great resources on iNaturalist and the Internet on how to participate as a school group, how to take photos that can be identified, and how to use iNaturalist. In some cases you should use Seek, which is a simpler app with more privacy controls, just as educational.
If you have questions, message us in iNaturalist or email us at yesbioblitz@gmail.com. If you want to chat, let us have your phone number and we will call back.
Past bioblitzes
How to guides
Other projects in our area!
First published in Take 5, September 2024
One winter afternoon in 2021, after a big winter storm, Carolyn and I were enjoying some time off at Cowichan Bay. As we strolled down the dock, expecting to see the sea-lions, we saw instead something that astonished us. The entire sea had turned brown – murky brown. The sea-lions had fled, along with any transient sailors. The fish and ducks had surely fled too. “It happens every year”, we were told.
Continue reading “Protecting Communities and Nature with a New Forest Act”
You can sign up here YESBioBlitz2024 under the community menu. First, you have to register or log-in. It’s all free.
This is such important citizen science, which supports research and policy maker to protect our environment. More and more studies and projects are using this open-source information. It is also a great opportunity to develop a local community of people who understand and care for the environment.
April 26th – April 29th Take pictures of wild fungi, plants and animals.
April 30th– May 5th Upload and identify the species in iNaturalist.
Results will be announced by May 15th and prizes chosen by the end of May.
New this year – we are planning a group walk in Cable bay area and in support of the Cable Bay Trail fund raising. Sign up here and meet up at Cable Bay trailhead on Nicola Rd at 10 am, Saturday April 27th.
All you need to participate in the BioBlitz are:
You can use the iNaturalist App or the webpage iNaturalist.ca.
The area for the Bioblitz is the same as 2023. It includes Ladysmith, South Nanaimo, Cassidy, and our coastal waters to the east – see map below. There are many public parks where you can explore, and there are reserves and private lands, where you need permission. NOTE: We do not have permission to enter the Woodley Range Ecological Reserve.
Only photos and sound recordings taken during the designated dates and times (6 AM on April 26thto 8 PM on April 29th) in our chosen geographical location will count towards our YES BioBlitz. Of course, everything entered in iNaturalist, year-round and in other places, is still valuable.
This year’s prizes will be a selection of nature books and cards.
There are many great resources on iNaturalist and on the internet on how to participate as a school group, how to take photos that can be identified, and how to use iNaturalist.
If you have questions please message us in iNaturalist or email us at yesbioblitz@gmail.com. If you want to chat, let us have your phone number and we will call back.
Checkout other projects in our area!
by Nikki Toxopeus
The results are in, the stats are done, and the prizes awarded!
The Yellow Point Ecological Society BioBlitz for 2023 is officially over! Thank you to all our participants and identifiers for making it so much fun and so successful.
We clocked up a similar number of species as previous years, with fewer observers. We had 298 research grade species as shown below, thanks to the quality of the observations and the support of the wider iNaturalist community helping ID the entries.
YES board members are not eligible for prizes, and so our prize winners are Annette Lefaivre (visiting from Calgary and helped map the area), Liam Steele (from Ladysmith and an outstanding young naturalist) and Heath Bleau (who recently moved, with his wife Kathy, to Nanaimo). Annette and Heath received a set of 10 Briony Penn Nature cards, and Liam was persuaded to accept a BC Museum Mushroom book, in part as a thank you for all his work helping to ID species.
We also awarded a school prize to the Grade 3 class at the Stz’Uminus Community School, who joined the BioBlitz for the first time and will be presented with a set of the Pacific North West Plant Knowledge Cards and a set of Briony Penn’s Nature posters.
Our results compared to last two years (given in brackets) are as follows:
Observations 1847 (2004, 2289)
Species 538 (556, 508)
Identifiers 165 (178, 252)
Observers 38 (47, 62)
This year, the most observed species were
Pacific Trillium (Trillium ovatum) was the most observed and by the most people.
Western Rattlesnake Plantain (Goodyera oblongifolia) was spotted multiple times by a few people.
The Great Blue Heron (Ardea herodias) was the top observed species last year and no one recorded it this year.
Other notable differences were that there were only 4 sightings of the Bald Eagle (Haliaeetus leucocephalus), Devil’s club (Oplopanax horridus) was absent this year, and western meadow rue (Thalictrum occidentale) was seldom seen.
The most observed species aligns with my experience of this season – the trilliums were out in force, the robins were furiously nesting and dominating the dawn chorus, and I did not see the Great Blue Heron by the Ladysmith Marina (but they are back now).
The top introduced and invasive species recorded remain:
Scotch Broom (Cytisus scoparius) – located along Cable Bay Trail, in Joan point Park, Holland Creek Park, Holland Creek Estuary Trail, Haslam Creek, near yellow Point Lodge and along power line ROWs. Broom cuts are planned for some of these locations.
European Holly (Ilex aquifolium) – located in Stocking Creek Park, Holland Creek Park, Morden Colliery, Kinsman Park, Estuary Trail, and other roadsides
Spurge-laurel (Daphne laureola) – all the above parks!!
I will be using and adding to this data set to help determine where we need to remove invasives from our parks and other special areas.
There was some great teaching and learning happening in the online chatter. Next year let’s expand the learning to the field, organise some group walks and take the iNater chatter to the field.
See you same time, same place next year! Reserve April 26-29th 2024 for getting out in nature with your friends, family, and other naturalists. This date aligns with the global City Nature Challenge BioBlitz and we hope Nanaimo and other Vancouver Island Cities will join in again.
Many thanks! – Nikki Toxopeus
The Salt Spring author, naturalist and artist Briony Penn has kindly allowed us to convert some of her beautiful illustrations into greetings cards, which we are selling as a fundraiser for YES. $6 each. Buy 3 or more $5 each. Add $5 for postage if you would like us to mail them to you.
We are not set up for an on-line shop, so please bear with us! The cards shown below are available by all five methods. Various other designs are also available if you visit the three outlets listed in method 1.
There are five ways you can buy the cards:
Our BioBlitz is over, at least for this year! To see all 533 different species that were identified, see below, or click here.
We would like to celebrate our book prize winners and all the participants who made the event so much fun and such a great success. Nikki would especially like to thank Carrie Robinson who organized the event and made it more fun by adding the book prizes. They are such great BC wildlife books and everyone did such great work. They were awarded to the following:
Liam Steele, age 11, is clearly an I-Naturalist super-user and worth following on I-Naturalist under Pacificwhitesideddolphin.We were so fortunate to have him join our event. Not only did he have the top number of observations; he also ID’d over a hundred species for other participants and had some amazing shots, like the Plainfin Midshipman (the fish that sings) and the American Mink (by Transfer Beach). He started his career as an i-Naturalist in June 2019 at the age of 9, when he used it as a guide for listing species on his summer vacation in Vernon and Osoyoos. He was 10 ¾ before he knew he could join i-Naturalist and he has now made over ten thousand observations. We are sure he will achieve his goal of becoming a wildlife biologist, and hope he finds the Pojar and MacKinnon Plant book useful in this quest.
Greg Roberts, unlike Liam, started with the Pojar and MacKinnon Plant book and he has been using it for years. Through our YES BioBlitz he has just been introduced to i-Naturalist. He was one of our most enthusiastic participants. He was there at the meeting asking the tough questions and was the first one onto the field on Day 1 of the BioBlitz. Greg has accumulated a lifetime of great wildlife pictures from his career as a trained geographer who spent most of his working life behind a desk in park and land planning but most of his free time canoeing, camping, and exploring. He has now started to upload his images into i-Naturalist and is really enjoying the help the app gives with IDs.
Coco van Zyl knows every inch of the land she has been stewarding for the past six years. She has repeatedly removed invasive and non-native species, encouraging and protecting native plants until they are robust enough to thrive. We are so lucky to have her record some of these species and to ID species for others. She needs little help from I-Naturalist to ID plants, and could probably help improve their App in this area.
Desiree Ferdinandi signed up North Oyster School for the BioBlitz and worked with her colleagues, Camille Paradis and Heather Trawick, and students in Grades 2, 3 and 6/7 to participate. They organized classes so that students took pictures and the grade 6/7 class uploaded them to her i-Naturalist account. She spent the week trying to ID them. Desiree is quick to point out that Camille Paradis and Heather Trawick put a lot of time and effort into getting North Oyster involved in the BioBlitz and did the lion’s share of the organizing. The end results were very respectable, and it was great fun for all. We would love to invite Desiree, Camille and Heather to our BioBlitz meeting next year to share how schools and groups can collate their observations.
Patti Gisborne signed up the Sense of Place Youth Project Outdoor Explorers. Amanda McDonough, their outdoor exploration manager, said they “were thrilled to photograph and record the diversity of life on the Gisborne property. The children learn about the plants and creatures here seasonally, and they found great joy in sharing that data in the BioBlitz. Children took turns discovering and photographing their favourite plants throughout the forest, field, orchard, and pond. They loved being able to identify unknown species through the i-Naturalist app. We will definitely be utilizing this app in the future for our programming!“
YES plans to host the BioBlitz as a regular annual event, and we are keen to hear suggestions on how we can make it even better next year. Please email us or post comments on our website and please continue to browse the YES BioBlitz project on I-Naturalist to see and ID the wonderful species in our area.
– Nikki Toxopeus
How Can We Protect the Forest on Private Land? On Vancouver Island, forests are threatened with being clearcut on private land, as well as on Crown Land and Private Managed Forest Land. We created this short video in 2019 to highlight the ways in which we can protect the forest.
by Nikki Toxopeus
The other day, my two woodland guides and I were coming back from a beautiful walk to Long Lake and one of my young guides leapt from the path and ripped out a solitary green stalk of Scotch Broom.
Continue reading “Alien Invasions in Yellow Point-Cedar”
Yellow Point Ecological Society 