WOW! What an incredible weekend for our 19th anniversary festival! With over 500 registrants, those of us organizing the festival were amazed at how well everything turned out. Even the weather was incredible, with beautiful clouds and colorful sunsets setting the backdrop for the crane tours - a majestic weekend all around.

As a festival, we were proud to be recognized as a Centennial Event celebrating Arizona's statehood, and the related presentations and tours were excellent. It was amazing to learn about the local history, not only about our communities, but also the birds that we have here. Then the weekend was capped off with Ted Floyd's unique talk about migratory birds and introduced us to the relatively unknown world of birds at night.

The weekend resulted in 135 species of birds, with highlights of Short-eared Owl, American Bittern, Lewis's Woodpecker, Williamson's Sapsucker, Mexican Chickadee, and Lapland Longspur. One of the most amazing sightings was a flock of easily 20,000 Lark Buntings (no exaggeration) sway, and swirl, and wing their way back and forth across the dirt road. Tour leader Vivian MacKinnon wrote this haiku about the experience:


            a sea of plowed earth
            the dirt road winds on and on
            sparrows rise in waves


As excellent as this year was, we are all very excited about planning for our 20th Anniversary in 2013. Please be sure to check back and see what tours we have planned and register for another spectacular weekend of learning and fun!

Presentation:"Birding in Outer Space"

Kenn Kaufman is an American author, artist, naturalist, and conservationist, known for his work on several popular field guides of birds and butterflies in North America.

Born in South Bend, Indiana, Kaufman started birding from the age of six. When he was 9, his family moved to Wichita, Kansas, where his fascination with birds only intensified. At age sixteen, inspired by birding pioneers such as Roger Tory Peterson, he dropped out of high school and began hitchhiking around North America in pursuit of birds. Three years later, in 1973, he set the record for the most North American bird species seen in one year (671), though this record included regions like Baja California that are no longer ornithologically considered part of North America, and it has since been surpassed. His cross-country birding journey, covering some eighty thousand miles, was eventually recorded in a memoir, "Kingbird Highway."

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The crane oil triptych painted by Kristi Koser was used to promote, "Crane Song," an NET documentary produced several years ago.  Every year some 80 percent of the world's Sandhill cranes make their way through a 75-mile stretch of Nebraska's central Platte River Valley, a critical stopover in their 5,000-mile spring migration.

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