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Highlights from 2010

The sixth annual Monterey Bay Birding Festival drew international, national, California and local birders, featuring full-day, half-day expert-lead field trips, workshops, nightly featured speakers, and Family Days at Wetlands of Watsonville Nature Center with specialized birding activities for beginners and outings lead by a bilingual birding expert.

The final tallies are in for the 2010 Monterey Bay Birding Festival, with a whopping 214 species reported from the event's 45 field trips. Highlights included a Sage Thrasher and a Clay-colored Sparrow at the Salinas Rivermouth Wildlife Area, Bobolink at the Carmel Rivermouth, a Blackpoll Warbler at Pinto Lake, and a Dusky Flycatcher at Pajaro Dunes. The Friday night owling trip reported an impressive five species of owls, including Spotted. Day trips added Burrowing & Barn Owl, for a festival total of seven species of owls! Owling trips remain the most-requested and fastest to sell out offering, and we hope to add even more owling adventures in the future.

In addition to a great list of seabirds, pelagic trips added three species of whale (Blue, Fin, Humpback) and Pacific White-sided, Risso's and Northern Right-whale Dolphins.

In all, 18 "write-in" species were found, plus a number of "easy to miss" birds on the festival checklist.

Participants from 20 states plus Ontario and the United Kingdom visited the festival and local venues.

Our evening featured events were better than ever - Scott Crocker, producer/director of the Ivory-billed Woodpecker documentary "Ghost Bird" not only arranged for a screening of his film but was present to introduce the work and answer questions afterwards. Allen Fish presented the latest and greatest news on everyone's favorite bird topic, raptors. Allen shared the findings and highlights of his decades of long work at the Golden Gate Raptor Observatory. And Alvaro Jaramillo returned as our Saturday night featured speaker, presenting "California: A Bird's Eye View". Alvaro's ability to discuss scientific discoveries and observations in a manner that is interesting and understandable to everyone, coupled with his great sense of humor make him one of the outstanding bird presenters in the nation.

Afternoon workshops received nothing but positive comments. Kellier Kyle, Jim Danzenbaker, Kriss Neumann, Daniel George, Allen Fish, and Alvaro Jaramillo all conducted outstanding presentations.

Adding an art component to the festival was a new feature of the event, and one that we plan to expand in the coming years. Susan Matulich and the Pajaro Valley Arts Council were instrumental in making this happen. Photo workshops by Larry Selman and sketching courtesy of Susan Dorf were a result of this effort, as were the Andrea Rich art exhibit and reception.

Thanks to all of our volunteers, sponsors, presenters, vendors, and participants! A special thanks go to all the field trip leaders - you're the heart and soul of this event, and year in and year out continue to receive rave reviews from the participants.