see the Conservation Halton Foundation 2015 Donor Report
Transcription
see the Conservation Halton Foundation 2015 Donor Report
Your 2015 Thank You Report Thanks to you, it’s time to celebrate ! Dear friends, As we start the new year, it’s nice to take time to reflect on the good things that happened around us. Your 2015 Thank You Report is a look back at last year and the great things you helped make happen. As you read the Report, I hope you feel that your decision to donate to Conservation Halton Foundation was a good one. Thank you for your trust. Your gift was the key to helping many great things happen in our community. Along with our partners, we purchased and conserved almost 100 acres of land. This property, which is near land already protected by Conservation Halton, the Hamilton Conservation Authority and Royal Botanical Gardens, will be conserved forever – thanks to you. In 2015, we celebrated the 10th year of the Halton Children’s Water Festival. The Festival has influenced an entire generation of young children and will help them craft solutions to manage our precious water resources in the future. Thank you for taking a few minutes to revisit and celebrate all that you’ve helped achieve. Thank you. Jim Sweetlove Chair, Board of Directors Brian Hobbs Director - Development A better ‘nose to beak’ experience with Chomper the Great Horned Owl and friends at the Mountsberg Raptor Centre In the fall of 2015, work started on the “Nose to Beak Project” at the Mountsberg Raptor Centre. The purpose of this project is to provide enhanced shelter for our raptors and improve the accessibility at the Raptor Centre for all of our visitors. Through this project, we are building two new raptor enclosures – each of which will house four birds. This will make for great housing for Chomper and his friends. The enclosures are big and bright and the same style as we built for Rufus the Red Tailed Hawk in 2013. As a result, our raptors will be more accessible than ever before. Pathways around the Raptor Centre have been paved and re-graded with a maximum 5% grade to make travelling with a walker, stroller or wheelchair easier. There are wheelchair accessible picnic tables, resting areas and turning spots for wheelchair users. The Raptor Centre has new power door openers and the pens feature new signage (below) which is AODAcompliant and tailored for visitors with vision or hearing impairments. For more than 15 years, the Mountsberg Raptor Centre has provided a permanent home for non-releasable hawks, owls, vultures, falcons, and eagles that are otherwise unable to survive in the wild. We hope this project will help you and our other visitors get the best ‘nose to beak’ experience possible with Chomper and his friends. Almost 100 acres protected by environmental partners In 2015, Conservation Halton Foundation was an enthusiastic partner in the effort to purchase and conserve nearly 100 acres of land near Dundas which links properties already owned and conserved by Conservation Halton, the Hamilton Conservation Authority and the Royal Botanical Gardens. The newly acquired lands provide the connection between protected properties, creating a safe wildlife corridor stretching from Cootes Paradise to the Niagara escarpment. Purchased as part of the Cootes to Escarpment EcoPark System, the lands help conserve nature in one of Canada’s biodiversity hotspots. It is home to more than 1,500 species of plants and animals, including nearly one-quarter of Canada’s wild plants and more than 50 at-risk species. It provides the last intact ecological connection between Lake Ontario wetlands and the Niagara Escarpment. Conservation Halton Foundation was proud to work on this acquisition along with our partners who included the Hamilton Community Foundation, Royal Botanical Gardens, Hamilton Conservation Authority, the City of Hamilton, the Hamilton Naturalists’ Club, and the Friends of the Greenbelt Foundation. The lands were purchased for conservation purposes and a management plan for these lands will be created. Over time, we hope these lands will support passive recreation such as birding and hiking and be a place where you can enjoy peace, solitude, and nature with family and friends. The purchase of these lands continues Conservation Halton’s involvement in conserving natural lands, as we’ve been doing for more than 50 years. As we did with Crawford Lake, Rattlesnake Point, Mount Nemo and others, these natural spaces will be conserved forever in our community and be places for you to enjoy. Released shrikes support wild population What do you get when you combine a songbird the size of a robin with the attitude of an eagle? You get something like the Eastern Loggerhead Shrike. Shrikes are small like songbirds, but aggressive like raptors in that they capture their prey with the talons. They are incredibly rare – almost being extinct in Ontario. In the face of this challenge, Conservation Halton Foundation raised the funds to build a specialized breeding facility for Eastern Loggerhead Shrikes near the Mountsberg Raptor Centre in 2011. Since then, with the help of our Raptor Centre staff, we have supported the operations of the Shrike Recovery program at Mountsberg in 2012, 2013, 2014 and 2015. The results of the program have been very strong with most of our breeding pairs hatching young birds. And each year, we have provided more and more young to release into the wild to support the recovery of the wild population. In 2015, the Mountsberg shrike breeding program produced 34 shrike hatchlings – four which were retained in the breeding program and 30 which were released into the wild at an eastern Ontario release site (photo, inset). There are still many years of hard work ahead, but the results are promising. Data from field studies in 2015 show that captive bred birds from Mountsberg are returning to Ontario after annual migrations and they are mating with wild birds and successfully rearing young. This is certainly reason to celebrate. Shrikes equipped with geolocators are also returning and we are learning where they migrate to so we can understand pressures they may face in other parts of their annual journeys. Our hope is that over the longer term, with continuing work through the Mountsberg Shrike Recovery Project, our staff, project partners and supporters, that we ensure that Eastern Loggerhead Shrikes are no longer an endangered species in our country. - The Halton Children’s Water Festival – 10 years of success 2015 was an important year for us because it marked the 10th year of the annual Halton Children’s Water Festival. Over each of the past 10 years, we have had thousands and thousands of young students come visit Kelso Conservation Area each September to learn about the importance of water in our community. The Halton Children’s Water Festival has helped us connect with an entire generation – to teach them about protecting our most important resource – water. To date, more than 34,500 students have participated in the Festival. How many is that? That’s enough students to fill the seats at the Air Canada Centre in Toronto one and half times over! As part of our 10th year celebration we also unveiled a new logo, which you can see below, that was designed by a local public school student. Thanks to our committed volunteers and partners from Halton Region, the Halton District School Board, the Halton District Catholic School Board, the City of Burlington and the Town of Oakville, the Festival is better than ever with new activities offered or refined every year. Thanks to our generous sponsors, the Festival is financially self-sustaining and accessible for students from our community. Thanks to the Water Festival, our students are prepared to be leaders in our community, with progressive ideas to help solve problems we face with water-related issues in our community and around the world. Festival teaches about carbon cycle, invasive species, urban wildlife and more Now in its fourth year, the Halton Forest Festival is a great annual event that teaches grade 6 and 7 students fascinating facts about our forests. Every year in the great outdoors at Rattlesnake Point Conservation Area, students get hands-on learning that they won’t forget. They learn about how trees capture carbon from the atmosphere and play an important role in climate change mitigation, how forests are affected by invasive species such as the Emerald Ash Borer, and how we can make room for other species that share our environment like Barn Owls, Coyotes and more. And because they’re outside in nature, running around and having fun – they retain and remember what they learn. And so the students aren’t the only ones having all the fun, in October, there is a Forest Festival Public Day where 1,800 visitors from the community come out to Rattlesnake Point to build a bird nest box, learn to shoot a bow and arrow, and to test their lumberjack skills. Thank you to our community partners and sponsors, and to you, for making the Forest Festival a continuing success. Stewardship: the act of caring for the land to maintain it in a healthy state Through our Stewardship program, Conservation Halton staff work with people like you to give nature a helping hand. We work with people throughout the community to restore habitat for birds and wildlife and to improve the quality of our waterways. This is done through hands-on restoration projects and community workshops throughout the year. In 2015, we worked with 51 volunteers to plant 10,105 trees and shrubs to enhance habitat for wildlife in the community. We also restored 5,750 meters of stream bank – that’s more than 5 kilometres. Why do we do this? Because these projects make our forests, grasslands and meadows more diverse. They support more native species and fewer invasive species. They support more wildlife. They support waterways that are cleaner and colder and better for native species like Brook Trout. Every year, we work with individuals, community groups and groups of employees who help improve our environment throughout the community. We hope you will join us at one of our 2016 events and learn how to use native species in your garden and create your own rain garden, build a bee box or a bat box, or help with planting projects that will expand pollinator meadows, remove invasive species and plant native trees and shrubs to increase cover and habitat. For more information on these projects or the great things we have planned for 2016, please contact: Brian Hobbs, Director – Development Conservation Halton Foundation Phone: 905-336-1158 x 2255 Email: [email protected] Charitable registration number: 1331 43099 RR0001 www.conservationhalton.ca/foundation