Out & About: Cranes, swans featured at festivals
OUTDO – Two festivals related to learning more about migratory birds are scheduled on the same weekend next month in the Inland Northwest.
The Othello Sandhill Crane Festival is set for March 18-20 with a series of programs, field trips and banquets based out of Othello, Washington.
The Tundra Swan Festival in Pend Oreille County will be held on March 19.
Founded in 1998, the 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.
The Tundra Swan Festival is set for March 19 in the Pend Oreille River Valley.
Bus tours hosted by the Kalispel Tribe’s Natural Resources staff are planned to Calispell Lake to view some of the thousands of swans usually resting in the area’s open waters as their spring migration kicks into gear toward arctic breeding territories.
Participants will gather at the Camas Wellness Center in Usk for lunch and a nature presentation.
Cost: $10 or $5 for kids younger than 13. Info: email info@porta.us or call (509) 589-1224. Preregister: www.porta.us.
Prof talks whitewater safety
RIVERS – Paul Green, outdoor recreation professor at Eastern Washington University, will present a free whitewater boating safety program Monday, 7 p.m., at Mountain Gear Corporate Office, 6021 E. Mansfield in Spokane Valley, sponsored by Spokane Canoe & Kayak Club.