We are excited to welcome our new Program Manager, Helena-Grace Treadwell. Helena-Grace first visited Invermere in 2022 and promptly fell in love with both the landscape and a local lad. She is originally from New Zealand, via stints living in the USA, UK, and travels around the world. She has an MSc in Sustainable Energy Systems and post-grad certificate in Ecology. Joining Wildsight channels her passion for protecting and championing our planet's wonderful wild places, and spreading sustainability awareness. Helena-Grace loves eating vegetables from the garden, meditation, and being in the water.

Join us in welcoming her and helping her learn more about her new home and all the amazing people living here and working to protect the special place.

We are holding a monthly Bighorn sheep monitoring event. No experience is needed to be a citizen science sheep monitor, just the ability to walk and be outside for 3–4 hours. We will provide you with orientation and tools to do the monitoring. This is in support of our Bighorn Sheep Conservation and Biodiversity project. By participating in the program, volunteers actively contribute to the project’s objectives by assisting in monitoring activities such as observing and documenting bighorn sheep sightings, recording behavioural observations, and collecting data on habitat use. 

The next event will be on February 24, 2024. Time 11 am – 3 pm. The sheep herd is located near Canal Flats; we can arrange car pooling for the event. We will meet at the Local cafe in Fairmont.

Join Wildsight educators Patty Kolesnichenko and Jill Jennings for this free webinar as they dive into a world of mystery and intrigue, of tracks and traces, of clues left behind by creatures you often do not see — a world of animal signs. Animal tracks and signs create the perfect scaffolding to storytelling, investigation, imagination, and FUN, all found in nearby nature.

Patty and Jill will share a brand new resource that brings the stories of the snow to life. All registrants will be entered to win some great draw prizes!

Winderberry is checking all the boxes on a climate resilient approach to food production and business. Winderberry/Edible Acres is a certified organic farm practicing regenerative agriculture by adding their own farm-made compost to their fields. They actively farm with crop rotations and overcrop plots each season while also practicing a farm to table model supplying their own cafe with seasonal produce.

They are working towards climate resiliency by improving soil water retention with the use of organic matter, compost and mulch and reducing food miles by supplying the local market as possible. They also have one annualized geo-solar greenhouse that collects hot air in the summer, allowing an extended season where they harvest the greenhouse out of the ground in Feb/March as the hot air rises throughout the winter. The greenhouse business makes its own soil and compost, and grows all the annual bedding plants in fibre pots.

Wildsight Invermere will be partnering with Winderberry to offer some workshops and tours in the next few months, so you will get to learn in person about all these climate friendly practices. Stay tuned…

Do you have appointments to get to? Need groceries or to get to work? Do you wish you could attend that event, sport, or club? Miss your friends? Missed the bus? Car broke down? Maybe you'd rather use transit than drive a car?

DTSS Climate Club, students & Wildsight are working together to create a film about our public transit issues. We plan to submit the film and feedback from our community to our local government asking for a solution. We want to improve public transit options in the valley! For more information or to get involved send us an email to cvtransportproject@gmail.com.

Please help us help you by filling out our short survey. We need your valuable feedback!

At the Wild & Scenic Film Festival this fall we asked you what concerns you, what you’re doing about it and what you’d like more information on. You filled our “Passion to Action” board with ideas and feedback. One of the common themes was gardening, composting and food sustainability. There are many community organizations working on these subjects, so we’d like to connect you with these two as a start:

Check out Avalily Permaculture and Earthskills Institute for workshops on all your gardening needs. “Intro to Food Forests” is coming up February 15th — sounds interesting!

Groundswell offers many workshops throughout the year, seed exchanges, plant sales, and volunteer opportunities to learn hands on in their greenhouse. Find more information on their website.

The Columbia Wetlands Stewardship Partners are asking the public to forward sighting information on American Badgers in the Columbia Valley. Have you seen an American Badger or one of its burrow entrances (large elliptical hole often seen with a mound of dirt at the entrance) in the Columbia Valley? If so, they want to hear from you! Please let CWSP know what you saw and when and where you saw it. To do so, please send an email to badgersightings@gmail.com.