By Richard Bell
Do you live on Porters Lake? Would you like to win a $250 gift certificate from Mannette’s Nursey?
Earlier this summer, people who own homes on Porters Lake got a survey from Love Your Lake, a growing national program assessing the health of the country’s lakes. The project is based on a three-way partnership between two national environmental non-profits, Watersheds Canada and the Canadian Wildlife Federation, and the locally based nonprofit, Re-imagining Atlantic Harbours 2050.
Love Your Lake conducts a boat-based survey of all properties on a given lake, and then provides homeowners with an individualized report on the state of the shoreline on their property, with suggestions about voluntary actions to improve the shoreline and make their lakes healthier. Since 2013, Love Your Lake has assessed 41,000 properties on 173 lakes.
The survey is a values survey, with questions about the importance to people of water quality, scenery/views, wildlife viewing, dark skies, tranquility/quiet, fishing, ice fishing, hunting, swimming, power boating, and non-power boating. (You can read the survey at https://loveyourlake.ca/survey.)
To encourage Porters Lake-front homeowners to complete the survey, District 2 City Councillor David Hendsbee has arranged for a homeowner randomly selected from those who fill out the survey by October 31, 2021, to win a $250 gift certificate from Mannette’s Nursery to buy native plants.
The Love Your Lake website also has detailed information about a wide range of subjects dealing with the interactions between shoreline property and the health of the abutting lakes. For example, the section on “Natural Shorelines” contains striking “before-and-after” photos showing the effects of naturalizing shorelines with native plants, which reduces erosion, creates wildlife habitat, and add property value.
