Conservation and Community - The San Diego Bird Festival (2024)

The San Diego Bird Festival of 2024 was nothing short of a triumph this year and I am proclaiming this just based on the quality of the keynotes. The outings and talks were outstanding too and the 1000+ people who had registered must be on cloud nine now. I have been attending the festival since 2013 when my daughter was 8. We only did the Family Sunday the first year, started attending a few talks the second, and then added in keynotes and trips as her interest grew. I remember we did a birding by ear workshop in 2017 which also led us to seeing the beautiful owls of Tecolote Canyon and one year we went on an amazing pelagic trip. This year was bittersweet for me as I was by myself as she is away in college but she asked me to quit moping and appreciate how lucky I was to be at the festival!

The festival's star attraction was Christian Cooper of Extraordinary Birder fame - a show that we love at our home. Parents with Disney+ subscription should watch it with their kids of all ages! (Some of the episodes are also available on Nat Geo Wild's youtube channel.) Not only did they feature some truly remarkable birds but the emphasis on conservation efforts resulted in the show featuring some remarkable birders too. Cooper's keynote at the Bird Festival delivered what it promised! It was funny, heart warming, inspiring and was a clarion call to all the groups working to protect biodiversity to expand their tent and incorporate multifactorial diversity in their approach.  The opening night keynote was by writer and birder Julia Zarankin who was very funny with a self-deprecating humor which was perfect for her messages -  it is never too late to get into birding, it is OK to make mistakes, and there is no one particular way to be a birder.

But the highlight for me this year was the keynote by Tiana Williams-Claussen who spoke about her 17 year journey to reintroduce the California Condor to the wild in the ancestral territories of the Yurok tribe and the Pacific Northwest. I think if there was ever a perfect talk this was it! It had everything - culture, chronicles, conservation, courage, continuity, and most importantly Condors. Graduating with a BA from Harvard, Tiana returned to work for her tribe and listening to elders felt that bringing the condors back would be the panacea for all things the ecosystem and her people needed. 

Condors hold an important place in the Yurok's foundational stories and their songs and feathers are an integral part of their world renewal ceremonies. The soaring Condors were said to carry the prayers of the Yurok upwards to the creator. She talked about how they were an indicator species to the ecosystem because of the important services (not just ecosystem but also cultural and spiritual) they provide and drew parallels between what happened to Condors and what happened to Native Americans.

The story of California Condors went from being a tragic one (when the birds were reduced to 27 in the wild in the 1980s) to one of conservation success  which has led to reintroduction of condors to their native habitats in the hundreds. San Diego has been at the heart of this effort with the San Diego Zoo playing a critical role in the conservation program. Tiana speaking at the San Diego Bird Festival was just perfect as she is part of the long line of conservation biologists who have worked tirelessly to bring these birds back into our landscape. Her work is by no means done. I was shocked to learn that even today DDT is having a huge impact on mortality of these birds. I mean - Silent Spring was published in the 1960s and these chemicals are still persistent in the bodies of marine mammals which become food for condors.

Condors being obligate scavengers can be seen as conjurers who create life from death and folks like Tiana are doing the same to the condors - snatching them from the brink of extinction and bringing them "back to life". The birds she shared with us were each given names according to their personality and what they meant to her people and my favorite was Ney-gem' 'Ne-chweenkah whose name in English was "She Carries Our Prayers." Tiana closed her lecture with a picture of her 5 year old and said how thrilled she was that her child was growing up in a time with condors circling the skies. I am not ashamed to admit that I teared up at that!

I left this festival with a lot of hope. Julia's keynote reminded me it is never too late to become a birder and find the sense of humor to laugh at ourselves, Tiana showed me how cultural connections forge strong links to conservation and communities and Christian asked us to expand our tent and be more inclusive as it is an all-hands-on-deck kinda moment. 

It also made me nostalgic as I looked back to 2013/2014 when my daughter and I started attending San Diego Audubon events - birdwalks, lectures, restoration events and the festival itself. We were an odd couple - my daughter and I. I was a forty year old who couldn't tell an osprey from a cormorant trying to keep up with an eight year old. We were welcomed by the SDAS community who made room for both of us and gave us our very first birding lesson in Tijuana estuary - how to tell great and snowy egrets apart! I am grateful for that and all the lessons we have been learning ever since and the 2024 festival was another step along that journey.