Sign Up Early for the Trips You Want
For anyone who likes to be outdoors with experts
sharing their knowledge of the wilderness, the Florida 
Birding and Nature Festival is like letting a kid loose in a candy store. Participants – mostly in groups of less than 20 people – can tour west-central Florida’s best-protected habitats with some of the most-respected guides in the region Oct. 11 to 14.
Registration opened late last month, and I lucked out and got all the field trips I wanted – although I had to make some hard choices about exactly where I wanted to be when because the speakers and trips are all so inviting.
A project of the Tampa Audubon Society (TAS), the birding festival is now in its third year, and attracting attention from across the state and country. For one thing, says TAS president Mary Keith, it’s peak migrating season for Tampa Bay and experts can see up to 180 species of birds – including some they might have to otherwise travel to Chile or Alaska to see.
Most of the trips are set up for comfort – yes, closed-toed shoes are required but you won’t be hiking five miles through a jungle in hopes of seeing a single rarity.
Evening keynotes feature internationally-renowned speakers, including:
- University of Florida professor Jack E. Davis, a native of the Tampa Bay region whose book The Gulf: Making of an American Sea recently won a 2018 Pulitzer Prize
- Photographer Mac Stone, who has travelled the world but is most well-known in Florida for his book The Everglades: America’s Wetlands
- Steve Kress, executive director of the Seabird Restoration Program, who will be speaking on his work restoring puffins to breeding islands in Maine where the species had been absent for nearly a century.
The Florida Birding and Nature Festival is still one of the least expensive birding festivals in the country, in large part because the region has so many experts who are volunteering their time. As Mary Keith notes, “All the workshops – a total of nearly 40 speakers on topics ranging from dragonflies to tegu lizards – are included in the $40 entry fee and most of the field trips are in the $20 range.”
The festival outgrew its location at the Hillsborough Community College (HCC) in Ruskin last year and relocated to the larger HCC campus just off Interstate 75 in Brandon. Along with workshops, it offers field trips to places like Se7en Wetlands in Polk County, created using reclaimed water; “extreme birding” for advanced birders at Fort De Soto Park; Terra Ceia Aquatic Preserve via boat; Cross Bar Ranch in Spring Hill; and the Celery Fields in Sarasota, the county’s primary stormwater collection area which has been restored with more than 200,000 plants and offers easily accessible views of wildlife from two boardwalks.
“We really tried to highlight places where people couldn’t get by themselves,” Keith said.
One of those is the Fred & Idah Schultz Preserve in Ruskin, proposed site for the controversial ferry between SouthShore and MacDill Air Force Base,. It will be opened for two tours – one focused on the mosaic of ecosystems and other animals that use them, with a second looking specifically at pollinators that use the habitats.
“Because of the ferry controversy, we’ve been surveying the site on a monthly basis to document the birds and animals that use it,” Keith said. “So far we’ve documented 169 species of birds – both migrants and breeders. A bio-blitz last January brought even more experts to the site, with entomologists, botanists and experts on fish and spiders – turns out it’s the northernmost site for a colony of Julia butterflies and we saw a western bumblebee for the first time east of Texas.”
New activities also are planned for children this year, both at Mosaic’s Education Center and a special tent at HCC set up for families and children. The Mosaic center, usually only open for school classroom events, exposes expose kids to estuaries and mangroves from the safety of wide boardwalks.
Space on field trips is extremely limited – some events already are full — so make plans early to take the top trips! Learn more and register at https://www.floridabirdingandnaturefestival.org/
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