Attendance strong at birding festival despite sour economy

HARLINGEN - The 15th version of the Rio Grande Valley Birding Festival proved that birders are resilient.

Festival attendance weathered two Texas hurricanes, a tropical storm and a struggling economy.

"I think we can say the festival was a success," said Tom Pincelli, one of the original festival organizers.

"I think our numbers were fairly decent, we had more than 400 people pre-register and the street traffic has been great," he said. "We had lots of children and there was a ton of education going on, and that's what I like to see.

"I think we've done fairly well overall and I'm really pleased," he noted.

He said field trips and seminars were well attended, including Saturday night's keynote address by nationally-known birder and author Kenn Kaufman on Audubon's Warblers.

Pincelli said 50 chairs had to be added to accommodate the crowd for Kaufman's presentation in a makeshift auditorium. The auditorium where seminars are usually held was damaged by Hurricane Dolly.

There were only three field trips Sunday, so many festival-goers spent the day shopping at the birder's bazaar for T-shirts, binoculars, field guides, wildlife prints, spotting scopes, caps, native plants and even fudge.

Miriam Mispagel helped run a booth for Quinta Mazatlan in McAllen, one of the nine sites of the soon-to-be finished World Birding Center.

"What I like best about coming to places like this is meeting new people and getting our place known," she said.

Besides promoting Quinta Mazatlan, the booth had nature-related items for sale, including prints from Valley wildlife artist Gerald Sneed.

"Business has been really good," Mispagel said. "We've been mostly selling T-shirts. People are always after T-shirts."

The festival ended with a little bit of drama when a gyrfalcon went AWOL during a falconry exhibition outdoors by Jonathan Wood of The Raptor Project.

The raptor flew to the top of Casa de Amistad as Wood tried to lure it down with food tied to a string. The gyrfalcon was not interested.

"I had trouble with Tundra (the bird's name) in the morning show so I probably should not have used him for the afternoon show," Wood told the crowd.

Tundra eventually took off and it was left for Wood to find him with a radio-tracking device.

"This has happened before," his wife Susan said. "John will find him."