Bow Valley Naturalists Society

We traditionally offer educational programming: a winter speaker series christmas bird count plus participation in community programs. All of which are free and open to the public. We maintain an informative website and publish a newsletter three times/ year with interesting articles plus online updates (29) on coming events and current issues of interest to our membership. We have 2 long term citizen science based research programs: monitoring avian productivity and survivorship (maps) and high elevation localized species (hels). Our education and research program is primarily focussed on ecological topics and issues that affect our regional community. Since covid-19 and the inability to meet in-person we launched our programs online. Now our events are either online (zoom) or in-person; we continue to ecperiment on how to deliver hybrid events (both online and in-person) so there is a choice for audiences. We continue to have a broad reach with these events and will continue offering them in future. In 2022 we introduced the bob and mary smith speaker series - hosting a guest speaker event in their honour; this was made possible from a grant from the eleanor luxton heritage foundation. We continue to grow in our reach to our communities and beyond. For example we have a reach of almost 600 subscribers (half are also members) through our online mailchimp updates. Adding a canadahelps donate button to our website has also increased our donations.