The Pelican-- Bird Festival Vacations

By Tina Nappe (With help from Linda St-Cyr) 

Bird festivals are flourishing lately, which isn’t unexpected. There are an estimated 96 million birders in the US (1). That amounts to around 37% of the whole population over the age of 16 engaging in birding activities. The elder population 65+ years is 23% of the birding population. This often-retired population with time and a sufficient income is a ready market for leisure birding festivals and appreciates a little guidance. Bird festivals are a vacation with a purpose. My takeaway from the two festivals I attended is that many festival attendants are over 60 years old and white. However, the US Fish & Wildlife survey indicates that a significant percentage of birders are actually Asian American. Many birders are neighborhood or backyard birders only. Amy Tan’s popular new book “The Backyard Bird Chronicles” fits this demographic. She is 73 years old and Chinese American. She became a birder partly to avoid distressing national news. She observed birds at her window, learned about them, and then expressed her interests as an author and artist by writing a book. Her book was on the bestseller list for five weeks.

I became a fan of bird festivals this year after attending two of them with Linda St-Cyr. The first, in early August, was the Southeast Arizona Birding Festival sponsored by the Tucson Bird Alliance…yes, it was hot. The other, “The Sandhill Crane Festival,” was in Lodi in early November. I recommend both. In fact, I am researching when and where my next bird festival trip will be. Over 750 people attended the Tucson Bird Festival. Because of the valley heat, vans left festival headquarters at 5:30 a.m. either for long day trips into the mountains or half day trips in the valley. There were also “drive there yourself” trips where a guide awaited your arrival. At the headquarters, there were 40 exhibitors and a speakers list as well. The afternoons were hot, too hot to get in the pool where one could burn. But in the ballroom exhibit area were vendors offering binoculars and scopes, promoters for birding trips, and bird artists. Two other rooms provided a variety of speakers. So much temptation! Hard to leave a festival without a memento, which I didn’t.

While seeing a variety of birds during a tour is the priority and ideally seeing the bird before it flies off is the goal, I was not successful all the time—but I was happy when a bird would nicely stay in place until I located it. Another service of the guide is to post the full list on eBird. This list jogs the memory. I relied on the guide and also good birders within our group to both find and name the birds. Some were common for Tucson and its environs like the Gila, Arizona, Acorn, and Ladder-backed Woodpeckers; Purple Martin; Curve-billed Thrasher; Gray, Zone-tailed, and Harris’ Hawks; Mexican Duck; Common Ground, White-winged, and Inca Doves; Yellow- breasted Chat;, Abert’s Towhee; Greater Roadrunner; Phainopepla; Hooded and Scott’s Orioles; Summer, Hepatic, and Western Tanagers; four species of kingbirds; five species of vireos; eleven species of sparrows; nine species of flycatchers; and eleven species of hummingbirds, some on nests!

A whiteboard in the exhibitor’s room noted the unusual birds and other wildlife for the day. On one of my trips, we walked near a diamondback rattlesnake, which let us know its presence. Linda’s group saw Arizona Whiptail Lizards with a strikingly bright blue tail used to distract predators.

By contrast the Sandhill Crane Festival in Lodi is smaller. But popular tours such as boat rides in the Sacramento River Delta or touring via boat on the Pardee Reservoir to see Bald Eagles (we saw six) can fill quickly. Being with an experienced birder especially knowledgeable about Sandhill Cranes is a great introduction, so the first afternoon seeing Greater and Lesser Sandhill Cranes together was helpful. Also, I was amazed by flocks of Killdeer, far from the few scattered small groups as they are often here in Reno. Another plus for us were the wetlands near the Consumnes Refuge where waterfowl swim unafraid of people. We especially enjoyed the flocks of hundreds of Northern Pintail ducks that are so rare to see here in Nevada. And on our Delta boat trip we enjoyed a long look at a mink hunting along the shore. Our trip to a Bureau of Land Management facility on the Consumnes delta area was moved to a Nature Conservancy property because of the federal shutdown. A first-time bird for me there was the White-tailed Kite which obligingly sat on a bush for over an hour.

An unexpected sight at the The Nature Conservancy's Consumes wetlands was a Bald Eagle intent on a meal swooping down on resting Greater White-fronted Geese…several thousand of them. They rose in unison with loud cries while the coots dived under water, and the Canada Goose (too heavy to be carried off) never moved. The eagle swooped several times with no success, then landed to rest. Once aloft again, the eagle seemed to half-heartedly try one more time before flying off.


References:
1. Birding in the United States: A Demographic and Economic Analysis, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. https://www.fws.gov/sites/default/files/documents/2024-11/2022-birding-in-the-us-demographic-and-economic-analysis.pdf Report 2022-4/November 20
See Bird Festivals.

2.https://www.allaboutbirds.org/news/birding-festivals/


​