Originally published in Raphia Winter 2009, Letter from the Chair:

It is the last month of the year and I have been looking back to what we have done over the year. It is a long list that we have accomplished. None of this could have happened without the dedication of many volunteers and the active members of the board of directors. Thank you for giving COTERC another year.

We began with the knowledge that we had lost our most steady source of income. Bingo was gone. We had only 90 days to utilize the remaining cash and we had to think of ways to replace this resource. We also knew how much we needed to find to cover
our annual budget.

Fund raising events included our first art show at Reptilia; we attended four reptile swaps and we had a raffle for a herping trip to Costa Rica. (Thanks for buying and selling so many tickets and thanks Grant Crossman for making it possible). We also upgraded and improved our website. We developed a teachers’ guideline to the rainforest for the grade eleven curriculum. With our partners in Costa Rica, we developed and printed a sea turtle education brochure for tourists visiting the beach. Through some solid effort from the board we also managed to secure a $30,000 grant for our sea turtle conservation program. This will enable us to broaden our work beyond the intern program with York University. York also had an MES student, Sami Abdelmalik, travel to the station to work on an environmental program for the school in the local community of San Francisco. We also continued our large mammal survey and our two bird surveys. The region now boasts records of close to 200 bird species nesting in the area. And we also finished with a very successful Fiesta Verde. We can now look forward to next year.

The grant has allowed us to develop a relationship with McMaster University Biology department. A PhD student, April Stevens will be at the station for 7 months studying the sea turtles. A work party headed by board members Greg Mayne and Kym Snarr has headed down to rebuild the showers and laundry room and work on expanding the mammal survey program. In March we will be running a silent auction for the Canadian Museum Association. We welcome any quality items that could be used. We also plan on running a second art show in April, another Fiesta Verde in the fall and we will continue to visit the Reptile Expo’s and other information events across Ontario. If any one has ideas for fundraising, we would love to hear about it.

At Cańo Palma we are again heading into a busy year. Global Vision International is still working through the station. They are busy with the turtle walks and their jaguar predation study. The bird studies will continue and we plan on increasing the mammal study by increasing the number of transects. We are also working on increasing our nursery of native plants for reforestation programs.

Former COTERC director, Josh Feltham has moved to the Tortuguero region for a year
and has a huge list of jobs to accomplish including: producing brochures, virtual tours of the site for our website, info panels, multimedia programs for education, a guide to the herpetofauna, workshops and other activities to help us in our mandate to conserve. Josh has already been down there for two months and our manager Jonathan praises the work he has already accomplished. (Thanks Josh). Josh and hopefully I will be going down in March to run a reptile survey. The trip will cater to botanists and herpetologists, but birds and fish will also be identified. The trip is scheduled from March 24 to March 31. Feel free to call if you are interested in joining us.

I look forward to seeing what we can do and hopefully how we can bring positive changes to this fabulous corner of our natural world. I invite you all to join us in making these programs work.