Our first guided tour of the festival is at eight in the morning so we plan to arrive at the registration site about half hour earlier. So we wake up really early, for us, to make the drive just to encounter a completely closed registration site in the Maumee Bay Lodge lobby. We ask the receptionist but she doesn’t know anything more and then we find out that the desk only opens at ten in the morning, quite weird, how are you supposed to attend the morning tours without a badge?
We decide to still try it and drive to the meeting site and do our best to hide that we have no badges. In the end there is also a list with participants so we are on that one and no one really checks the badge luckily. Maybe it is also due to the confusion as there are two groups here both leaving in different directions and finding our group takes a bit of research and asking around.
The tour is advertised as being led by one of the festival presenters but in fact the main lead is a relative child who while knowledgeable is easily distracted. While the presenter seems not really interested in leading anything.
Most birds that we see in the beginning are mostly due to luck or being near other participants as the guides are very much distracted by talking with other people and really do not care of pointing anything out to the whole group.
At least the trail is beautiful enough through a nice forest but what this means is that most birds are really high up and hard to see or photograph. You can barely point them out and then they flit to another location which can be quite enervating.
Some of the warblers we see here are the most common ones that we will see quite often in the next days, American Redstarts and especially the Yellow Warblers.
Another common bird is the Red-Winged Blackbird which is seemingly everywhere, while surprisingly Wood Ducks are the most common ducks we see here.
The only rarer bird we see, pointed out by our young guide, is an Orchard Oriole which sits right next to a Common Yellowthroat which can be quite difficult to see out in the open on most days.
Raptor wise the Bald Eagles are quite common now something we haven’t seen often when leaving close by more than twenty years ago. The group is also quite excited about an Indigo Bunting singing from top of a tree but unfortunately the light is not good for photos.
We continue on with the leaders not being that interested in leading or pointing birds so after seeing a raccoon sleeping in a tree trunk right next to the trail we decide to return on our own and get our badge and then join a free tour at Magee Marsh which we hope is better than this one.
Returning we find one more special bird, a red-breasted Nuthatch, not something that common in Arizona. And then we are back at the parking and it is time to return to the registration office.
This time the registration office is open and we can get our badges and then we walk around a bit looking at the few exhibitors that are open.
In fact we will return multiple times here as vendors are open at haphazard hours, usually only in the evening so whenever we are passing by we stop one more time to see what is open and what free trinkets we can get.
When the vendors are open the goods they sell are quite beautiful and we really enjoy browsing through the goods, too bad that they are open so rarely and only at inconvenient times.
The registration and vendors are all in the lobby of Maumee Bay Lodge which seems quite friendly to birders. We even get free coffee a couple of times before buying some souvenirs from our preferred vendors.
On the second day after the guided tour at Pearson Park we stop here before exploring other parks and even eat lunch at the restaurant. While not exceptional and with a restricted range of choices the food is good enough to keep us going for the day so overall the festival experience was reasonable if we exclude the fact that registration was not open in the morning and that the booths were not manned even when officially they were open.
