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.
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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: bhobbs@hrca.on.ca
Charitable registration number: 1331 43099 RR0001
www.conservationhalton.ca/foundation