10. 75-year-old Nanaimo woman intends to keep her sheep farm going, June 5
Deborah Wytinck, 75, wanted to be a farmer since she was nine. In the late 1970s she and her late husband Don arrived in Nanaimo and began raising their livestock, dubbed coneygeers flock.
At its height, the couple had a hundred north country cheviot breeding ewes, but now it’s just four: Beanie, Beanita, BWX and GGW. The sheep are bred for lambs which then are either sold to larger operations or used for mutton.
But the money isn’t why Wytinck does it – it’s the holistic benefits that keep her farming even after her husband’s death last March. She said she doesn’t know what the long-term future may hold, but for now she’s keeping the farm going.
“It’s a good, healthy life and you feel well and you keep active,” Wytinck said. “We make a certain amount of profit, but the inputs always exceeds your output it seems in farming.”
With the urbanization of Nanaimo, she said she believes she will be the last to run the farm since she can’t imagine the agricultural zoning will be granted to the property again if it’s ever lost.
“It will die when I die or leave it,” she said.
9. Nature group advises caution around Vancouver Island's migrating toadlets, July 17
The middle of summer is the time of the year when the sun shines, the flowers bloom, and young western toads make their dangerous trek into the forest.
“Be on the lookout for the wonderful little local amphibians, the western toad…” advised Doug Fraser, president of Nature Nanaimo. “I think a lot of people mistakenly associate frogs with water, and while it is true all of our frogs lay their eggs and develop in the water as tadpoles, many of them live in the forests.”
Western toads are a species of concern due to habitat loss. Once a year, during spring, they travel to wetlands with shallow, sandy bottoms to lay their eggs. Each female can lay more than 12,000 eggs, but only one per cent of them are estimated to make it to adulthood.
Fraser said anyone who sees a western toad should tread carefully since they might be near a whole lot of them.
“If you’re in the back country, you might just happen upon these toads.”
8. Baby bats finding themselves in strange places around Nanaimo, July 30
From hanging on doorways to napping on the driveway – the number of calls involving bats appearing in strange places increased last summer, says the B.C. Community Bat Program.
Each year in July and August, the young pups spread their wings and hit the air to fly for the first time, but their navigational skills aren’t always up to par with their adult counterparts, said Linda Brooymans, the program’s mid-Island bat coordinator. Add in heat, smoke and the occasional windy, inclement weather, and the animals may find themselves in some unexpected places come dawn.
Through her work with the bat program and as stewardship coordinator with Nanaimo and Area Land Trust, Brooymans often gets a call when bats appear. Her advice is to avoid unnecessary contact.
“If they find a bat and it’s hanging out, it’s high and it’s safe from predators and it’s not at risk of having a human child, for instance, handling it or coming into contact with it, you can just leave them where they are. But if you do find them on the ground or find them low to the ground where household cats or dogs or children could come into contact with them, they should be moved away.”
7. Nanaimo researcher studying bushtit sex identification, July 7
Identification of whether a bushtit is male or female has historically relied on the bird’s eye colour, a less-than-ideal method considering the eye colour is also believed to change with age.
Chelsey Watts, a student researcher at Vancouver Island University, is using a mixture of field work and modern genetics to try to either confirm or deny the accuracy of these methods.
“There is no actual research that shows that’s correct,” Watts said. “So the point of my research is I’m going to collect some DNA samples from them and then confirm using DNA and match it with photos of their eyes to confirm that, ‘Yes, the light yellow eyes are females and the dark eyes are males.’”
She typically takes a sample of two tail feathers. DNA extraction involves using a digestive enzyme to break open the cells.
“Then I will … amplify the specific gene I’m looking for which will be on the sex chromosome of the bird,” she said.
A final report is anticipated this spring.
6. Marmot foundation welcomes record-breaking number of pups this year, Sept. 10
A record-breaking number of wild-born Vancouver Island marmot pups was recorded by late summer, and according to the Marmot Recovery Foundation, that number was expected to climb by year’s end.
Adam Taylor, the foundation’s executive director, said 89 marmots were born in the wild by September of last year, whereas in the past, the most pups ever counted by that time of year was 75.
Vancouver Island marmots have litters of one to five pups every other year, taking a break on the interm years to recover from the taxing birthing process. As a result, Taylor said he wouldn’t be surprised by a birthing drop in 2025, but cautioned that may not be the case since 2023 had 60 pups born, causing the foundation to believe 2024 would experience a drop.
“We hope that there’s lots of marmots that didn’t give birth this year that are waiting to give birth next year, but if we had a decline in the number of pups next year I wouldn’t be concerned after a really large number this year.”
5. Ambassadors saving turtles at Nanaimo's Buttertubs Marsh, June 11
Turtles at Buttertubs Marsh weren’t always threatened, but with urbanization came an increase in raccoons, and if there’s one thing those little bandits love more than the trash which attracted them, it’s delicious endangered turtle eggs.
That’s why volunteers with the Nanaimo and Area Land Trust are out every night for three months during western painted turtle nesting season to make sure the population doesn’t disappear from the marsh completely.
Using funds from the province, in 2023, NALT was able to purchase cages and install additional cameras to collect data and protect new nests at the marsh with the help of volunteer turtle ambassadors.
The ambassadors began patrolling the area nightly during nesting season between mid-May to July. They installed wire cages over recent nests with holes big enough to allow the infant turtles out after their year-long incubation and hibernation period, but small enough to prevent raccoons from digging them up. Trial and error resulted in the cages being increased from one square foot to two, a necessity due to the predators’ ingenuity. NALT also found issues with the non-labelled cages being removed, so this year’s cages are labelled in the hopes that people will understand the importance of not touching them.
4. Community centre attic is the mid-Island's largest bat colony, and growing, June 16
The largest bat colony on the central Island now averages 1,800 little brown myotis bats, an increase of almost 300 from the previous year’s count.
Situated in the attic and bat boxes of the North Oyster Community Centre in Ladysmith, the tiny mammals have formed a maternity colony, entirely made up of female bats and their young pups.
“I would say pretty confidently it’s the biggest roost [on the mid Island], it’s absolutely the biggest roost we know of,” said Linda Brooymans, NALT’s stewardship manager and mid-Island coordinator for the B.C. Community Bat Program.
Regular summer counts are spearheaded by Kathy Doyle, treasurer with the North Oyster and Area Historical Society, along with help from Brooymans. Money raised from the sale of the guano is used in the bat stewardship research.
3. Firefighters rescue dog stuck in construction equipment south of Nanaimo, Jan. 29
Cranberry firefighters responded to an unusual call after a local Labrador retriever found itself stuck in a piece of equipment at the Nickel Bros. property south of Nanaimo.
On Jan. 25, firefighters rescued a three-year-old dog named Tanker which got stuck in a hydraulic apparatus that was once used to do maintenance on Vancouver’s Lions Gate Bridge.
According to Garry Hein, deputy chief with the Cranberry Volunteer Fire Department, Tanker got wedged inside the equipment while chasing a rabbit, and responders were unable to reach the animal.
A member of the department with welding experience, Tyler Yarocki, ended up cutting the side of the machine with a torch provided by Nickel Bros., and when the side was open and cooled off, another department member crawled in the hole, untangled the dog’s legs and released the pet to its concerned owner.
Tanker was calm throughout the ordeal and when he was released, he “eagerly” accepted a treat, rescuers reported.
2. Meet the horses of ‘The Last of Us’ as TV series films in Nanaimo, May 14
The Last of Us’s second season features horse actor Jazzway, and it is hardly the steed’s first rodeo with a professional past repertoire that includes the TV show The 100 and the movie Jurassic World Dominion.
Jazzway plays the role of Shimmer, the trusty steed of protagonist Ellie Williams, played by Bella Ramsey. Also featured is Pimpin, the horse playing the part of Japan, ridden by Dina in the show’s second season, and Cinch, Jazzway’s double that’s able to be swapped in when needed.
“They’re pretty good animals. The horses are better than people,” said Quentin Schneider, the production’s animal coordinator. “They all have normal ranch jobs, then there’s training. They learn to lay down, they learn how to go from A to B, they learn how to do all sorts of stuff.”
After the filming, the animals got to relax by their trailer and were rewarded with hay for a job well done. Jazzway in particular got fed some high-fat treats, which the crew said was due to his older age as the horse is pushing 20 years old.
1. Gabriola Island hen sets record as world's smartest chicken, July 1
Lacey the Gabriola Island hen became a Guinness World Records title holder for the most identifications by a chicken in one minute.
This means that when different numbers, colours and letters are presented, the bird is able to recognize the shapes it is trained to recognize, and ignore the ones it isn’t.
Emily Carrington, Lacey’s owner, said she wanted to show just how smart chickens are.
“I was training them to do tricks and I thought it would be fun to try for a record because I’ve been doing a lot of training.”
For the one-minute video that earned the world record, Lacey had to choose a plate with three beads, ignoring a plate with one bead; choose the magnetic letter A, ignoring the S; choose the paper letter A, ignoring S; choose the letter O, ignoring Z; choose the letter B (this one the bird failed by choosing H); choose the letter J, ignoring T; choose the number five, ignoring seven; choose the yellow square, ignoring white, pink and blue squares; and knock a cup over to get a treat.
“The chicken is a very underestimated animal and I think if you could stop to think the chicken is a smart animal … you could maybe look at other animals and think ‘Maybe they’re smarter than I thought.’”
