- Elizabeth
Pollinator Champion Feature: Susan Blayney
Susan Blayney is the former chair of the Pollinator Action Committee for Bee City Kawartha Lakes. Susan has always had a love for the natural environment, joining a field naturalist club in her 50’s and taking an interest in things such as bird and butterfly identification.
After retiring from nursing in 2008, she was able to invest more time into her interests. Her efforts with another field naturalist to put forward a project to protect provincially significant wetlands gained attention and in 2012 she was invited onto the Environmental Advisory Committee (EAC) for the City of Kawartha Lakes (the former Victoria County).
Her work with the EAC enabled her to take on local causes inspired by the agricultural community of the area. “It was the Environmental Advisory committee work that prompted me to take on causes and issues,” Susan said. “And to me the whole [pollinator] decline and neonicotinoids, was the issue that I decided needed to be addressed, because…we are an agricultural community up here. Corn and soybeans! So anyway, that’s how I got into environmentalism, you know, evolved from being a field naturalist.”