Teika Newton monitors Breakneck Lake in Ontario

The Lake Blitz Volunteer Spotlight series gives us the opportunity to show appreciation for our remarkable Lake Blitz volunteers. From B.C. to Nova Scotia, 442 volunteers signed up to create a snapshot of lake health from May to September 2023 by collecting temperature readings and taking photos of the lake they’ve decided to monitor to better understand climate impacts.

We are excited to present our latest volunteer to be featured in this series: Teika Newton, who is joining in on the Lake Blitz from Ontario!

Q – What is your background?

A – Currently, I work as the International Watershed Coordinator for the Rainy – Lake of the Woods watershed and am based out of my hometown, Kenora, ON on Treaty #3 territory. I’ve spent most of my professional career focused on developing networks of people and organizations at the intersections of local environmental and human rights advocacy, national and international climate policy development, and climate activism. I have a Master’s degree in Botany from UBC, where I specialized in population-level genetics and evolutionary biology in flowering plants.

Q – What lake(s) are you monitoring (include province)?

A – I’m monitoring Breakneck Lake (a somewhat gruesomely named lake!) where I grew up and now live with my own family, just outside of Kenora, Ontario.

Q – Do you have a personal connection to your lakes?

A – When my sister and I were little kids back in the early 1980s, our parents bought this piece of remote, unserviced rural property on the shores of Breakneck Lake, just east of Kenora. We moved out here in 1985 and maintained a subsistence hobby farm throughout my childhood. 

Because we grew up with no telephone and only one channel (CBC) on our television (and there was no internet yet!) and we lived too far from town to conveniently participate in extracurricular activities, I spent most of my spare time outdoors, and most of it on or in the lake, through every season. My sister and I built many questionable watercrafts that we used to poke around the shallow bays in summer, and in winter, we had skate and ski trails all over the lake. 

Nearly 40 years later, this lake is still so intimately familiar to me. I know every bay, every cliff, every beaver lodge, and I like to think there’s real rapport between the humans in my family and the eagles, loons, otters, beaver, turtles and other critters who share this place with us.

Q – What motivated you to volunteer with the National Lake Blitz?

A – I’ve casually monitored key environmental parameters on this lake for many years – dates when ice forms or the lake opens up in the spring; the arrival of migratory birds; unusual weather phenomena such as heat waves, nearby wildfires, winter frigid spells, heavy snowfall or rainfall events and so on. I’ve always hoped such information could someday be coalesced into a national, public record that helps to chart a chronology of anthropogenic climate change impacts. So when I learned about the National Lake Blitz, it seemed like the perfect way to more systematically contribute to creating just such a widely scoped public data collection.

Q – What concerns do you have about the future health of your chosen lake?

A – All the concerns I have about the future health of this lake stem from ecosystem impacts we’re already seeing due to climate change. In recent years, we’ve had a lot of variability in summer temperature and precipitation levels and that’s really hard on wildlife and riparian vegetation that requires a bit more consistency from year-to-year. I’ve noticed loon nesting success has plummeted. Turtles and amphibians seem to have boom or bust years, depending on weather and water levels conditions. 

Although we’ve not yet seen evidence of cyanobacteria (toxic blue-green algae) blooms that are a dreaded nuisance on other area lakes, drought conditions in two of the past three years have led to far more rock slime and pond algae and general eutrophication in this shallow lake than I’ve seen at any time since the 1980s. 

Shoreline vegetation has changed, too, with dozens of century-old pines succumbing to drought and toppling in high winds over the past couple of seasons, while invasive species like purple loosestrife and orange hawkweed have popped up in some of the marshy bays and rocky points around the lake. They were presumably introduced by birds, animals or wind since there’s no public access to our lake and no watercraft on it. 

If highly variable weather and climate conditions become the norm, I am concerned that ecological pressure on niche specialists – things like loons that need consistent water levels for successful nesting – are going to lose out to species that are more adaptable to dynamic conditions, leading to overall biodiversity loss and ecosystem degradation for this otherwise intact, undisturbed lake.

Q – What is your favourite bird, fish or other wildlife species you see at your lake?

A – I don’t have one favourite. I love all the critters here! Loons have a precious place because they’re so graceful, smart, and have a perfect balance of aloof disinterest and unbridled curiosity about what the nearby humans are doing. Hooded and common mergansers are my favourite ducks. We also have Trumpeter swans, white pelicans, and a very robust and talkative family of bald eagles making their summer homes on our lake. Though these species aren’t all very good neighbours to one another (the eagles eat lots of bird babies!), it’s amazing to see so much bird diversity on this little lake. There are two enormous snapping turtles occupying a couple of shallow bays near our house, and oodles of smaller painted turtles who pop up near us as we swim.

Q – What is one thing everyone can do to protect their local lakes?

A – I think in our area, because we have such an abundance of lakes all around us, we sometimes take them for granted, or fail to respect their inherent value. Lakes are marketed as places of recreation for fishing, boating, swimming, or in winter, ice fishing or snowmobiling. I think we are socialized to forget that they aren’t just places for human convenience and enjoyment, but they are homes to hundreds of species of plants, animals, insects, bacteria, fungi, fish, molluscs and more.

Humans need to remember that we’re part of wild ecosystems when we visit lakes, and to treat the lakes, marshes, wetlands and nearby forests with due respect, leaving behind minimal disturbance when we visit, whether that be leave-no-trace camping, boating or ice fishing, or sticking to a single, established snowmobile route and not joy riding through dormant marshes.