The annual Verde Valley Birding and Nature Festival took place at DeadHorse Ranch State Park from April 24through 27, with 20 vendors, kayaking and bird-watching tours. Susan Van Norman, steward-ship director of Friends of the Verde River, said programming at this’s year festival had increased in comparison to previous years.
“We’ve gotten more nature trips,” Van Norman said. “Before we had strictly birding trips but now we havenature trips.” She added that festival events included night photography outings and educational films at the Cottonwood Recreation Center. The films included “Under the Wire,” a documentary about altering barbed wire fences to allow pronghorn and other wildlife to move more freely. It also celebrates the wildlife that call the North Platte River Valley home and the folks living and working on this land to help keep these animals around for generations to come, according to a press release.
“The panel actually made the pronghorn movie,” Van Norman said of the panelists for the film’s Q&A session, who included Walt Anderson; Joanne Oellers of Save the Dells and the Central Arizona Wildlife Alliance; producer Mariah Lundgren; film photographer Michael Forsberg; and ABar A Ranch manager Benjy Duke.
Megan Isadore of the River Otter Ecology Project spoke about otter conservation in the Verde Valley and led a nature walk around the park looking for otters. “Tell people about how important it is that river otters are returning to the Verde River because it shows us that the river is getting healthier and healthier,” Isadore told her group. “In Arizona, river otters were gone by the late 1880s and they were reestablished, repopulated with otters from Louisiana, and part of what we’re doing is discovering whether they’re thriving at this point.”
She said that there have been 62 otter sightings in the Verde River over the last year and a half.
