FAIRHOPE - Events on Thursday will give wing to the fifth annual Alabama Coastal BirdFest. The four-day festival consists of dinners, lectures, trips and an all-day bird-themed fair that’s free and open to the public.

Featured presentations during BirdFest will include a slide show by ornithologist and photographer Greg Harber and a lecture by University of Southern Mississippi researcher Frank Moore.

Saturday’s Bird and Conservation Expo at Faulkner State Community College in Fairhope features the screening of a new Discovering Alabama episode by Alabama Public Television host Doug Phillips, and demonstrations with live owls, raptors, snakes and other critters.

At Thursday’s opening reception, at the Five Rivers Delta Resource Center on the Causeway in Spanish Fort, Harber will make a large-screen presentation of photos set to music called “Through the Delta and Beyond.”

The photos follow a variety of birds and their annual migrations, beginning in the farthest reaches of north Alabama and following through to the Mobile-Tensaw Delta and the Gulf of Mexico.

Harber said he hopes the exhibition will convey “the magic and wonder of Alabama’s birds and their incredible journeys.”

Hundreds of bird species move through coastal Alabama each fall, traveling along the Dauphin Island Trans Gulf Migration Flyway, one of the most important bird migration corridors in the world, Harber said.

Since 2004, the BirdFest has raised more than $40,000 toward the purchase and protection of bird and wildlife habitat in Baldwin and Mobile counties.

Eighteen guided bird-watching trips during this year’s Bird Fest required advance registration and pre-payment. Registration for those trips is now closed.

Moore is set to speak at a barbecue and seafood dinner Friday at the James P. Nix Center in Fairhope. Moore, an ornithologist, said that he and his USM team have spent years documenting and studying migration.

“Some biologists speculate that long-distance, land-bird migrants experience the best of two worlds, breeding in food-rich, competitor-poor areas in the summer in North America and spending the winter in the tropics,” Moore said.

But migration is also an exhausting, high-risk event, he said, taking a toll on the bird population and killing many younger birds.

www.alabamacoastalbirdfest.com.

Categories: Fairhope | Events | Conventions
Tags: birdfest, fairhope festivals