The Ute Mountain Mesa Verde Birding Festival kicks off Wednesday, offering visitors the chance to experience cultural and scenic landscapes in the Four Corners area.
Running through Sunday, May 15, the birding festival includes 25 scheduled tours that connect birding enthusiasts skills with regional birding experts who serve as tour guides. Tour fees include travel by van, lunch, water, and snacks. The full-festival registration fee covers all lectures and the Saturday banquet, which features keynote speaker, Chris Parish, condor field project supervisor of the Peregrine Fund.
Single-day registrations also are available. Lectures Wednesday through Friday at the Cortez Cultural Center and Saturday’s keynote presentation are open to the general public.
A documented California condor sighting near Cortez in April 2015 inspired Dolores artist Chris Vest’s 2016 UMMV Birding Festival poster featuring California condors. This year’s festival opens with a Wednesday evening presentation by condor-vulture expert Donald Bruning, former chairman and curator of the department of ornithology at the Wildlife Conservation Society. Bruning also will lead an overnight tour Thursday and Friday to the condors’ nesting site at Vermillion Cliffs in northern Arizona.
The Four Corners area hosts a variety of migrant and resident species. Some, like Lucy’s warbler, are rare in Colorado. The tours take birders into the realms of shore and water birds, raptors such as falcons and eagles, songbirds such as vireos and warblers, and fowl such as turkeys and grouse. The festival’s tally now stands at 180 species.
Birders on the lakes tour on Thursday anticipate observing American white pelican, avocets, black-necked Stilt, white-faced Ibis, egrets, black-crowned and Great Blue herons, sandpipers, terns, gulls, flotillas of grebes, the common loon, mergansers, and ducks.
The festival also features a Friday tour to the RSL Ranch and Lost Canyon and the hope of spotting raptors, woodpeckers and early-nesting songbirds.
On Saturday, the festival goes to the historic birding site of Old Fort Lewis. The tour then travels to Blue Lake Ranch to bird riverside riparian areas, lush flower gardens and a secluded pond. A catered gourmet lunch at Blue Lake’s guesthouse is an added bonus. The Saturday trip to McElmo Canyon and Guy Drew Winery includes a catered lunch at the winery along with tastings of the local wines.
For more information, visit www.utemountainmesaverdebirdingfestival.com.
