Stikine River Birding Festival.

• Author: Anderson, Tasha
• Position: TRAVEL

The Stikine River Birding Festival is organized by the City and Borough of Wrangell in cooperation with the US Forest Service and community members in Wrangell, says Corree Delabrue, district interpreter for the US Forest Service. "[The festival] has morphed over time from a general spring celebration to focusing what is unique about the Stikine [River] in the spring," Delabrue says.

She says that, in addition to being a celebration of spring, the festival was originally founded as the Garnet Festival in the '90s, trying to promote Wrangell in the spring shoulder season. "We changed the name to focus on the many bird species that visit because that's a spectacular resource. That's also when it became a partnership between the Forest Service and Wrangell.

This year, Delabrue says, she's excited to reintroduce an event that the festival had in the past and says it is "an introduction to birding so that people in the community who appreciate birds but are not that confident in their bird identification can learn." The introduction to birding would take place in an evening with an actual bird walk the following day for...