REMINDER: Bird Fest will be held at Burien’s Dottie Harper Park this Saturday, Feb. 19, 2022, from 9 a.m. – 1 p.m.

This FREE event will offer families, friends and neighbors an opportunity to learn about local birds and plants while participating in the annual Great Backyard Bird Count, which goes for four days, from Feb 18-Feb 21, 2022.

There will be counts, conversations, activities and resources to help you learn identification and counting tips, have your questions answered, and simply be awed by birds.

Join Ed Dominguez (Seward Park Audubon), and Kevin O’Malley (South Sound Nature School) alongside Environmental Science Center naturalists to learn bird identification skills and put them to practice during guided walks at Dottie Harper Park.

Please note: To ensure the safety of our communities, total attendance is limited to registered event participants. Each of the walks and live lectures will be capped at 20 people and you will need to register for each event separately.

This annual event is sponsored by the City of Burien to help folks help their watershed.

WHY BIRD FEST?
The Environmental Science Center has coordinated Bird Fest with sponsorship from the City of Burien to spread awareness on watershed health through creating native habitat for birds. It promotes the Great Backyard Bird Count (GBBC), a joint project of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and the National Audubon Society with partner Bird Studies Canada and is made possible in part by founding sponsor Wild Birds Unlimited. In 1998, this was the first online community-science project to collect data on wild birds and to display results in near real-time. In 2020, 268,674 worldwide bird watchers helped in the four-day count to create an annual snapshot of the distribution and abundance of 6,699 species of birds. In 2019, 224,781 people took part. In 2018, it was 192,456. Join in to keep the numbers rising!

If you help count during this GBBC weekend, or any other day, you’ll enter species into eBird, which is a global online program for collecting bird observations every day of the year (and is a phone app!). Researchers can’t be everywhere, including your backyard, so just 15 minutes can make a big difference for your local birds!

More info here: https://envsciencecenter.org/bird-fest/.

Dottie Harper Park is located at 421 SW 146th Street:

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