WILDLIFE WATCHING -- The main attraction is already arriving for the Othello Sandhill Crane Festival, which is set for March 18-20 with a series of programs, field trips and banquets based out of Othello, Washington.

Birder Becky Lyle of Ritzville visted the Scooteney Reservoir  area yesterday this week and found large flocks in two corn stubble fields. She also found more than 200 sandhill cranes along the south side of Hwy 26 east of Othello between the irrigation canal overpass and Irby Rd. in corn stubble with cattle.

Founded in 1998, the Othello Sandhill Crane Festival highlights the spring return of migrating sandhill cranes that stop over to rest at the Columbia National Wildlife Refuge and feed at surrounding farm fields.

Other birds, including long-billed curlews, are enjoyed by viewers on festival field trips.

Field trips include birding tours by vehicle, boat and bicycle.

Several tours are geared specifically to seeing sandhill cranes. One of the crane tours is for bicyclists.

Seminars by experts touch on about three dozen topics such as photography, songs birds, native plants for the garden, bats, sage and sharp-tailed grouse, pollinators of the shrub-steppe, fire ecology, trumpeter swans, burrowing owls, Ice Age floods, ground squirrels and animal nests.

Several programs on birding and insects are especially for kids.

A film about raising a young sandhill crane will also be screened, as well as “Winged Migration.”

The banquet speaker on Friday is a geologist with a program entitled, “Central Washington is Disneyland for a Geologist.”

The Saturday banquet program, “Wildlife of the Pacific Northwest,” will be presented by biologist, photographer and outdoor educator David Moskowitz.

Sign up for activities in advance.

Info: (866) 726-3445, othellosandhillcranefestival.org.