Hudson River Eagle Fest

This weekend, we went to the Eagle Fest events at our local park. Unfortunately, the promotional literature we received about the event made a big deal about buying bus tour tickets (which we didn't care about, because they didn't want little kids along for the ride for some reason) in advance, but said nothing about the other events... Well, they were sold out of all of the educational programming tickets, which was a huge disappointment. There were live bird demos and storytelling and eagle ID information sessions, all of which we were not able to take part in. Sigh. Next year we'll know better... At least they had some very good kid's books available for purchase. We've been reading Bald Eagles at bedtime. (In addition to the now obligatory menu of dinosaur books.)

We still had a fun day, because they had many craft stations for the kiddos, both at the park itself and at and at historic Van Cortlandt Manor. Mikro got to make a clay eagle, play with feather (not eagle!) quills and ink, punch an eagle design in a piece of tin, and build a mini bird's nest (all with help from mama and daddy). He also added a few twigs to a huge eagles' nest built outdoors by the park's Nature Center staff. We wandered the VCM grounds trying to find eagles, but it was a snowy and rainy day, and alas, we had no luck. Which makes me doubly glad I spotted the eagle at the Nature Center last Thursday...















Tomorrow is Nature Class again (weather permitting) and we'll be checking the trees in hopes of another raptor sighting. So far the trees right near the Nature Center have given us up close views of a red tailed hawk and a bald eagle. And of course, there are the small birds at the feeders- grackles, cardinals, red wing blackbirds, sparrows, chickadees, etc.