To Produce a Bird Conservation Guide Book for Municipalities in Quebec
TerraHumana Solutions is proud to announce a project which aims to create a guidebook for Quebec municipalities to ensure their activities are geared towards bird conservation. “This project has been in the gestation stages for the past few years”, says Dr. Isabelle Bisson. It began in 2017 when she and her colleagues noticed that their respective municipalities would kick into high gear with cutting down trees and maintaining hedges during bird breeding season. As a result, bird nests were being knocked down. Migratory birds, along with their nests, eggs, and young are legally protected under the Migratory Birds Convention Act (MBCA, 1994) from April to August in Montreal. TerraHumana Solutions decided that they needed to act, so they applied for a grant from Bird Protection Quebec. Having successfully received funding from Protection des Oiseaux du Quebec, TerraHumana Solutions wanted to understand the exact issues associated with the non-application of this important environmental law. To their surprise, they discovered that municipalities had little to no knowledge of it.
Consequently, there was no enforcement of these kinds of environmental laws in the municipalities involved in the study. ‘Instead of an offensive stance, we decided the best position was to see how to work with municipalities. So to help them out, we decided to create a guidebook that spoke their language,” said Dr. Bisson.
This major milestone work – a guidebook to help Quebec municipalities work towards bird conservation – was made possible with financial support from the ECHO Foundation (echofoundation.org) because of a collaboration between TerraHumana Solutions and the Sierra Club Canada Foundation (sierraclub.ca). The city of Terrebonne has agreed to pilot the project. This guidebook will provide different mitigation methods, as well as a training workshop. Municipal leaders and key employees will learn how to better plan work activities while ensuring the safety of urban and peri urban avian fauna, and TerraHumana Solutions will be taking on a supervisory role. The project will be underway shortly, with two biologists assigned - Nathalie Gendron and Alexandre Choquet.
“We are very excited about this guidebook. We dream that other organizations will take it on and mould it to their work with other municipalities,” added Dr. Bisson.
About TerraHumana Solutions
TerraHumana Solutions is a consulting firm, which specializes in helping community and business leaders to find sustainable solutions to environmental and social issues. Our approach is simple - we listen. Bringing 20 years of international experience in natural resource sciences, strategy, project conception, and management, we can find the right strategic approach for you. At TerraHumana Solutions, we contribute to informed decision-making on community and business engagement projects, and conservation projects with Indigenous and non-Indigenous communities.
For more information, please contact:
Isabelle-Anne Bisson, PhD.
President
TerraHumana Solutions
+1 514 654-7835
ibisson@terrahumanasolutions.com