EMPLOYEE SPOTLIGHT: GET TO KNOW THE TEAM
JAY DICKISON
SENIOR AQUATIC BIOLOGIST
Meet Jay Dickison, Senior Aquatic Biologist, a 2024 addition to our Blue Heron Environmental team.
Jay is a Senior Aquatic Ecologist with Blue Heron’s Sudbury office. He has accumulated over 25 years of work experience in the environmental consulting industry. Jay has been involved in carrying out: fish habitat assessments, fish community surveys, fish health assessments, monitoring of spawning runs, pit and floy tagging, mark/recapture surveys, fish removals/relocations, benthic invertebrate taxonomy and benthic invertebrate sampling. He is also experienced in the collection of supporting variables including water quality samples, lake profiles, sediment samples, stream flow measurements and physical habitat measurements and observations.
We continue to share the stories of the remarkable additions to our hard-working team at Blue Heron Environmental (BHE). In the past couple of years, we’ve hired a number of new professionals to help reach new heights for our business.
To introduce these new Blue Heron members, we thought we’d sit down and ask them a few questions about their professional career (and a few personal ones too).
Join us in welcoming Jay to the team!
#mining #forestry #biology #exploration #compliance #environment #teambuilding #sudbury #Redlake #tbay #ThunderBay #timmins #ontario
GET TO KNOW JAY DICKISON
I first noticed Blue Heron years ago, when I was in Timmins doing work for the consulting company that I was employed by at the time. Blue Heron had an employee on secondment at our worksite. A number of years later, my wife Serena joined the Blue Heron team in the Training Department. My former employer worked collaboratively with Blue Heron on a number of projects over the years as well.
When I joined Blue Heron in 2024, I was reunited with a few former coworkers that had migrated to Blue Heron over the years’ so, I already had lots of familiar connections on my first day of work!
Over my career I have had the fortune to travel to some spectacular places and work on a variety of interesting jobs. A few highlights include a summer in remote north central British Columbia doing stream inventory work. A couple of trips to Peru collecting pre-development baseline aquatic information at the Antamina Mine and a job in Newfoundland monitoring Atlantic Salmon smolt outmigration around a hydroelectric facility on the Exploits River in Grand Falls.
Along the way I have met and worked with a wide variety of people that have contributed to some great memories and experiences.
Some folks have an unrealistic image of an aquatic biologist. They like to think of someone that goes fishing every day, sitting in a boat, in the warm sun catching fish. They often don’t consider the black flies and mosquitos, carrying boat motors through the bush, the long hours and weekend work or the frozen hands and sideways snow in November.
There is also a lot of deskwork associated with the position. It’s a great job, but like anything, it has to be something you love, if you are going to make a long career of it.
When I was 16, I took a summer job with the Ontario Junior Rangers. This was a government funded program through the Ministry of Natural Resources. I spent the summer at a remote camp about an hour and a half from Terrace Bay Ontario with 20 other teenagers from southern Ontario. It was a great experience that introduced me to northern Ontario and working in the outdoors.
The program was a mix of physical work as well as recreational and educational experiences. We did everything from picking up trash, to installing docks at a remote island in Lake Superior and clearing canoe portages.
So, this is completely unrealistic, but I wish I could throw a baseball at the major league level.
“A fisherman is always hopeful – nearly always more hopeful than he has any right to be.”
– Roderick Haig-Brown
“When you come to a fork in the road, take it.”
– Yogi Berra
“The last word in ignorance is the man who says of an animal or plant: what good is it.”
– Aldo Leopold
GET TO KNOW JAY DICKISON
I first noticed Blue Heron years ago, when I was in Timmins doing work for the consulting company that I was employed by at the time. Blue Heron had an employee on secondment at our worksite. A number of years later, my wife Serena joined the Blue Heron team in the Training Department. My former employer worked collaboratively with Blue Heron on a number of projects over the years as well.
When I joined Blue Heron in 2024, I was reunited with a few former coworkers that had migrated to Blue Heron over the years’ so, I already had lots of familiar connections on my first day of work!
Over my career I have had the fortune to travel to some spectacular places and work on a variety of interesting jobs. A few highlights include a summer in remote north central British Columbia doing stream inventory work. A couple of trips to Peru collecting pre-development baseline aquatic information at the Antamina Mine and a job in Newfoundland monitoring Atlantic Salmon smolt outmigration around a hydroelectric facility on the Exploits River in Grand Falls.
Along the way I have met and worked with a wide variety of people that have contributed to some great memories and experiences.
Some folks have an unrealistic image of an aquatic biologist. They like to think of someone that goes fishing every day, sitting in a boat, in the warm sun catching fish. They often don’t consider the black flies and mosquitos, carrying boat motors through the bush, the long hours and weekend work or the frozen hands and sideways snow in November.
There is also a lot of deskwork associated with the position. It’s a great job, but like anything, it has to be something you love, if you are going to make a long career of it.
When I was 16, I took a summer job with the Ontario Junior Rangers. This was a government funded program through the Ministry of Natural Resources. I spent the summer at a remote camp about an hour and a half from Terrace Bay Ontario with 20 other teenagers from southern Ontario. It was a great experience that introduced me to northern Ontario and working in the outdoors.
The program was a mix of physical work as well as recreational and educational experiences. We did everything from picking up trash, to installing docks at a remote island in Lake Superior and clearing canoe portages.
So, this is completely unrealistic, but I wish I could throw a baseball at the major league level.
“A fisherman is always hopeful – nearly always more hopeful than he has any right to be.”
– Roderick Haig-Brown
“When you come to a fork in the road, take it.”
– Yogi Berra
“The last word in ignorance is the man who says of an animal or plant: what good is it.”
– Aldo Leopold
ABOUT BLUE HERON
Blue Heron is an environmental consulting firm based in Timmins, Ontario, with satellite offices in Sudbury, Sault Ste. Marie, and home-based offices throughout the province. The company was established with the express interest of providing practical, trusted, and cost-effective assistance to resource-based industries for all aspects of environmental management.
Blue Heron staff have extensive experience working in the environmental field, primarily in Northern Ontario. The company offers a wide array of specialized expertise to support organizations’ environmental management needs. Our professionals are currently engaged in a variety of environmental studies and permitting initiatives and are actively involved in different facets of project management and implementation of environmental compliance programs, as well as providing assistance with external stakeholder engagement.