This past week, I attended the first birding and nature festival of 2024 in Arizona—the Wings over Willcox Festival. I drove down on Thursday, and the weather was wild, just like it was here last Thursday. It even snowed in Willcox!
While Willcox may not seem like a very birdy destination (it’s not), and January may not seem like an ideal time of year for a festival, it is actually a really great festival because of the birding in the surrounding area. Willcox is nestled between several sky islands—the Chiricahuas, the Huachucas, and Mt. Graham.
Additionally, south of Willcox is White Water Draw, property owned and managed by the Arizona Game and Fish Department, to support wintering sandhill cranes, snow geese, and other wintering waterfowl. Approximately 30,000 sandhill cranes winter each year in this area, which explains why the festival takes place in January.
It is an amazing spectacle to see thousands of sandhill cranes early each morning, and late each afternoon, moving between their feeding grounds and their roosting locating. From almost anywhere in town (it’s a small town!) you can see flock after flock of noisy cranes flying overhead in vee formation. Personally, it is a moment of wonder and awe.
I was a vendor, not a festival participant, so, unfortunately, I didn’t get to do any bird watching while I was there. This was really disappointing, as there is one place in town that is really good for birding—Twin Lakes Golf Course and Cochise Lake. This small reservoir is a birding hotspot in eBird—330 bird species have been observed at this location!
The next offsite event I will be attending as a vendor will be the Hawk Watch event in Tubac, south of Tucson, in March. This will be followed by the Verde Valley Birding & Nature Festival at Dead Horse Ranch State Park in Cottonwood which runs from April 25-28. I will also be attending the Ute Mountain Mesa Verde birding festival in May, then the Hummingbird Festival in Sedona in July and the Southwest Wings festival in Sierra Vista in August.
I share this information with you to encourage you to participate. I was very pleased to see how many people from Prescott were at the Willcox festival last week! Festivals provide so many opportunities for both new and seasoned birders to participate in guided field trips, with workshops and seminars to help one grow in birding interest and knowledge. I invite you to consider attending one or more of these festivals this year.
Registration for the Verde Valley festival is already open at verderiver.org/birding-festival. For more information on the other festivals, you can just Google the name of the event, and it should come right up.
If you didn’t see the big announcement and the unveiling of Swarovski’s newest product last week—I can finally talk about it. Back in November of last year, I participated in a pre-launch event hosted by Swarovski. This new, revolutionary product was released on Monday of last week in Las Vegas at the Consumer Electronic Show, and received rave reviews!
What is this new product? It is the world’s first smart binocular, the AX Visio. It combines a 10x32 EL binocular with a camera, along with the Merlin app for bird identification. Over 9,000 species of birds are loaded in the binocular. When you see a bird, you click on a button, and it compares the image you are looking at with the database in the binocular and identifies the bird!
I was able to showcase this new product in Willcox and I sold out of them—however, we are taking orders.
Until next week, Happy Birding!
Eric Moore is the owner of The Lookout, in Prescott, where you will find a Hallmark Gold Crown Store, wild bird products, and Vortex and Swarovski optics. Eric has been an avid birder for over 55 years. Eric can be contacted at eric@thelookoutaz.com.
