Our experience in the 1st Vancouver International Bird Festival

By Erika Jiménez, José Lamberto Hernández and Mirna Borrego

We attended the first Vancouver International Bird Festival, in Canada, from August 19 to 26, 2018 and it was an unforgettable experience

The adventure began when we arrived to the airport. While walking around to pick up our luggage we stopped to take a photo with a flyer that promoted the activities of the festival and the International Ornithological Congress that was celebrated at the same time. We were very excited!

Terra Peninsular and the Commission for Environmental Cooperation (CEC) gave us the opportunity to experiment a week full of outdoors activities, museums, passion for birds and a lot of creativity.

In this travel participated:

• Erika Jiménez, Head of the Environmental Education Department of the government of Ensenada.
• José Lamberto, professor at La Chorera high school in San Quintín, mentor of a group of students involved in conservation activities that protect their home environment.
• Mirna Borrego, Education and Community Outreach Officer at Terra Peninsular and coordinator of the Bird Festival.

To organize a festival, it is essential to join forces, not only with the institution that supports it with academic sense, but also with the government agencies that support and boost the promotion of conservation activities and citizen science. The key piece that makes the perfect triad is the community element, and during this trip we discovered that more than friends with common interests, we are a strong work team.

Our main objective during our visit to Vancouver was to absorb like sponges the experience and learn as much as we could to enrich our contributions to our bird festivals.

The festival began with a parade of over 200 birds from different ecosystems, represented by people of all ages who walked on stilts and flew along the shore of the breakwater to the Vancouver Convention Center to officially start the grand opening. The parade was led by natives of the region, who also performed a ceremony to bless the beginning of the week of activities accompanied by a group of aerial acrobats. This inauguration represented the beginning of three simultaneous events: the Vancouver International Bird Festival, the International Ornithological Congress and the annual Artists for Conservation Festival. Certainly all three of us agreed that it was something extraordinary and it was our favorite activity.

On Wednesday morning we visited the Science Museum where we met Jody Allair, an ornithologist from Bird Studies in Canada, who gave a talk on how to start on birdwatching, and he also shared tips and anecdotes.

That same day in the afternoon we attended the opening of a large exhibition of 62 modules and a lecture series called Nature and Bird Expo at the Convention Center, where they also unveiled a mural called “Silent Skies”, a 100 feet long mural composed by a large mosaic of drawings of 678 endangered birds made by recognized artists of nature and wildlife. Some of these drawings were for sale to raise funds and support bird conservation and education projects.

We had the opportunity to attend a guided tour at the Beaty Biodiversity Museum where Ildiko Szabo, a taxidermy expert, showed us the second largest scientific collection in British Columbia; this collection has more than 40,000 organisms representing around 2,500 species including birds, mammals, reptiles and amphibians.

We attended different lectures; we met incredible people like Purnima Barnman, a conservationist woman who showed us the strength of community work. We spoke with Rob Butler, a very recognized ornithologist who danced at the inauguration dressed as a bird and who is also coordinator of the Festival in Vancouver. We realized that we are on the right track; it was a really exciting week.

This festival was more than we have ever imagined, it inspired us more than we thought and it made us value the growth opportunities even more; we want to see more people from the community participating, birdwatching and promoting respect for nature. We want to inspire others, the community, festival organizers and more visitors who travel throughout the migratory route, because birds have no borders, birds inspire us.

This article was published in the 2018 November issue of the Mediterranews magazine.