Humans have an innate longing for the wild. It is our true home. We evolved in wild places, and our mental and physical health depends on them. We need to live surrounded by bush, where we can roam the woods, climb the bluffs, and view the sea with hardly any human presence detected. We need spaces unspoiled by development, still haunted by bears, wolves, and small creatures that skitter at night. This is why Cortes Island is such a special place.
Learning the art of taxidermy
There is certainly a need for the wild in me. I spent my young childhood at a mission station in Nigeria where my family lived as missionaries. Friends there taught me how to skin birds. In 1965 our family moved back to Canada to avoid the Biafran War and my grandfather gave me my first lesson in mounting birds. When we returned to Nigeria the next year, I practiced the art of taxidermy, but in 1971 we returned to Canada’s cities where I wandered into the “bush” and explored the seashore as much as possible. But cities are not wild places and I needed to find a place that reminded me of the bush I had left, where I’d had freedom to roam. I did not find it until I met my partner. After a few years together, the longing was too much and we bought a homestead on Cortes, where he had lived before.
Here on Cortes, there are still tall trees with birds flitting between their limbs. Owl song resonates in the woods. Vultures and eagles soar overhead. If you are lucky, you can spot red-tailed hawks and ospreys, and be surprised by the rapid flutter of a sharp-shinned hawk dodging your bird feeder, looking for juncos. Falcons call from the shorelines. Wolves sing in the dark and cougars prowl beyond the settled areas. Bears are common in old orchards and frog song is everywhere in spring. Common nighthawks gather over Smelt Bay in late summer, diving for winged termites before starting their long fall migration south.
Cortes Island Museum and Archives Society
I arrived on Cortes in 2005 and met the then-museum president a few months later. She discovered my history and snagged me for the Cortes Island Museum and Archives Society. When she learned I was a taxidermist, she envisioned natural history displays to pique visitors’ curiosity. Initially, I mounted her African grey parrot—a species that used to gabble over the mission station in Nigeria—and then her favourite pet river otter.
Next, she persuaded me to do a songbird exhibit called “Raven’s Relations,” which is how the Wild Cortes exhibit was born. The first version was in the Cortes Island Museum and lived there for about three years before being placed in storage. In 2017, after many requests for the exhibit’s resurrection, Lynne Jordan, then the museum’s president, applied for a grant to re-invent Wild Cortes at the Linnea Education Centre. The museum invited other local eco-groups, including the Forest Trust for the Children of Cortes Island Society and Friends of Cortes Island, to participate. In 2018, Wild Cortes opened as the Cortes Island Museum and Archives’ satellite natural history exhibit. Today, the exhibit continues to grow, with over a hundred mounts on display.
Visitors were scant at first but now flock as word of mouth spreads. They wander through the exhibit and touch the mounts of a raccoon, an otter, or a baby beaver, and ask questions about how each creature died and why it was chosen for the exhibit. They identify the passerine birds from the Raven’s Relations tree and learn about Mother Trees which connect rootlets with mycelia, enhancing the forest above and below ground. They begin to understand the interconnections of all creatures on Earth, including themselves. Here, they tell their own stories of wolf songs and raven calls and speak of their longing for the wild places of their childhoods.
Cortes Island is not the only precious place under threat. The hope is that visitors will return home determined to protect what is most precious in all our lives: the Wild.