Long before the population here began to boom, the birds already knew Central Texas was a special place. This area is a central passage along which millions of birds fly as they migrate. To celebrate and raise awareness about this phenomenon, the City of San Marcos and the Discovery Center is hosting its third annual Migratory Bird Day Festival on Saturday, May 11, from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. at the Discovery Center.
“We’re basically a Buc-ee’s for birds,” Niki Lake, Discovery Center specialist said. “We’re located along the central flyway, and we’re a great stopover site. We have water and food for them to fuel up on, and all the good things they need to stop over.”
The Migratory Bird Day Festival is an interactive event for the whole family that features bird walks, music, games, partner booths, activities and a migratory bird obstacle course to encourage people to engage and learn more about the importance of our bird populations.
“Birds are like a canary in a coal mine,” Lake said. “They are an indicator species to let us know if a habitat is healthy.
We’ve lost about three billion birds since the 1970s. Anything we can do to help birds will also help us in the long run.”
As a family-oriented event, The Migratory Bird Day Festival is designed so that everyone can learn about birds no matter their age or level of experience.
“A lot of people don’t know that one night last year, we had a billion birds flying overhead. Bringing attention to things that people don’t know helps, like knowing to turn your lights out during peak migration,” Lake said. “A lot of people don’t know about that.”
This year, the festival’s theme is “Protect Insects, Protect Birds,” because in addition to the loss of billions of birds to the global ecosystem, the world is experiencing a decline in the insect population as well, which birds depend on for food, and we depend on as pollinators.
“The Discovery Center mission is to protect habitats, which has a lot to do with native plants,” Lake said, emphasizing the vital link between birds, insects and plants. “Those plants have berries and foliage that things like to eat, but also they attract insects that birds will eat. Native plants are easy to take care of and they attract the beautiful wildlife we want to enjoy.”
The festival will hold four 45-minute bird walks throughout the day, starting at 9:15 a.m. Discovery Center volunteers will play various games to teach how to use binoculars and observe birds in the wild.
“We will have a migration obstacle course, where you can pretend to be a bird and fly through it,” Lake said. “We have Molly Hayes singing bird music. We have a mobile zoo called Once In A Wild. We have a lot of photo ops and an osprey fishing game.”
Ahead of The Migratory Bird Day Festival, the City of San Marcos will have a Bird Day proclamation on Tuesday at 1:30 p.m. at City Hall. “We’ll be there with our bird hats on,” Lake said. This proclamation ties to San Marcos’ efforts to become a designated Bird City of Texas through Audubon Texas and Texas Parks and Wildlife. “It’s a hard designation to get, but we’re going to keep on applying until we get it.”
The city and Discovery Center are partnering with many San Marcos organizations in order to achieve this community- focused certification, including Texas State, Centra de Cultural Hispano, the San Marcos River Foundation, the San Marcos Greenbelt Alliance and Hays County Friends of the Night Sky.
“I think it’s really great because it gives us a reason to be more environmentally friendly,” Lake said. “It will help us be a healthier community, not just with birds but with people too.”
The Migratory Bird Day Festival highlights the links between birds and our environment, but it aims to foster a deeper appreciation for birds on a personal level as well.
“It’s about learning how to enjoy watching birds,” Lake said. “There are studies that say that just listening to bird songs for ten minutes brings down your blood pressure. There are so many ways we’re connected to nature that we don’t even realize. Plus, the amount of diversity of birds in our area is really quite amazing.”
The Discovery Center will provide drinking water during the festival and encourage participants to bring a snack in order to enjoy the full day. Which birds visitors might see is always a mystery and largely dependent on the weather. However, the Discovery Center does have a recurring cast of resident stars that regularly visit, including red-shouldered hawks, cardinals and mockingbirds.
“It’s really dependent on the weather and time of day,” Lake said. “We have been having some yellow-ruffed warblers, downy woodpeckers, black-crested titmice. Painting buntings have arrived, so hopefully we’ll have a lot of those around. One of our birds is the golden-cheeked warbler. They spend their winter in Central America — Guatemala and Nicaragua — and come here to nest.”
The Migratory Bird Day Festival is part of a global effort to further migratory bird conservation by creating a worldwide campaign organized around the planet’s major migratory bird corridors. Interested in volunteering? Sign up here: bit. ly/4aGXEyo. For more information, visit sanmarcostx. gov/migratory.
