Another Ute Mountain Mesa Verde Birding Festival has come and gone. This year, the raptor-themed event marked 18 years.
The festival remains the Cortez Cultural Center’s biggest fundraiser, usually bringing in anywhere from $10,000 to $15,000. They have yet to tally totals for this year.
“It supports us staying open and offering classes and education to the community,” said Sherry Owens, a barista and board member at the Cortez Cultural Center.
“We survive on grants, donations, memberships and fundraisers,” she said.
According to the festival website, “Each year new tours, and repeat favorites, explore an array of birding hot spots that attract avian species from loons and grebes to sparrows, grosbeaks, and finches.”
This year, 24 tours went out during the five-day festival, which went from May 7 to May 11. An estimated 160 people attended from across the country, said Diane Cherbak, the festival chairperson.
“Montezuma County is somewhat unique in that it has a wide variety of habitats,” which draws people in to bird here and attend the festival, Cherbak said.
A lot of people come from the Four Corners region, she said, but some came in from California, Texas, Illinois and Pennsylvania.
An ad in Living Bird, a nationwide magazine, helps attract people from all over, she said.
“Serious birders and even the not-so-serious birders have a life list of all the bird species they’ve seen,” she said. “They also have a target list of species they hope to see.”
Lucy’s Warbler, a bird found here and nowhere else in the state, is often on people’s target lists, though seeing them “is a stretch,” said Cherbak.
“Any warbler is hard to find,” she said.
Target species are different for everyone. “Some people’s target bird is a magpie,” she said.
Often, those lists will influence which tour people go on. They’ll see which species have historically been seen on any given tour, and book based on that.
“How many species you see depends on the area. On one tour Saturday (May 10) they saw 99 species,” she said. “Thursday and Friday counts were low.”
Two tours saw sandhill cranes and two colts, which are baby sandhill cranes.
In addition to the tours, they always bring in a keynote speaker and have a banquet and silent auction, too.
This year, the raptor theme was inspired by the keynote speaker, Scott Harris.
Harris, in addition to owning “the largest collection of John Steinbeck’s Travels with Charley in the world, playing harmonica in a blues band” and writing more than 50 books in the past seven years, is a dedicated birder, according to the birding festival’s website.
One of the books he wrote is called RaptorQuest: Chasing America’s Raptors and details “his yearlong adventure tracking down every species of Raptor in the Lower 48 states,” the website reads on.
He chased 53 raptors across 34 states and shared about that experience on Saturday night, at the banquet, said Cherbak.
“I learned that barred owls are vicious,” she laughed. “I knew that great horned owls are. They’ll go for great blue herons, cats … it was interesting.”
She said that planning the festival is a “12-month endeavor.”
“As soon as one ends, planning for the next one begins,” she said. “We’ll debrief how this festival went later this week.”
Owens said the center is “always looking for community partners to put things on,” like this festival. If you’re interested in collaborating or putting on an event with them, reach out to the Cortez Cultural Center at (970) 565-1151.
