The 2025 Ladd Marsh Bird Festival, May 16 -18, started out damp and got wetter. But I get ahead of myself. It’s safe to say that the 2025 Bird Fest held to some traditions and continued to rebuild from the COVID years. The event kicked off with the usual Friday evening gathering at the Union County Senior Center on Cove Avenue. The speaker for the Festival was Dr. Ben Vernasco, who talked about his research on Gray-crowned Rosy-finch in mountained across the western US. Ben talked to a gathering of about 130 people.
Saturday, the six stations across the Marsh opened at 6:00 am to broken clouds and rays of sunrise streaming over the eastern Valley ridge line. Rain held off until around 8:30 am, and then it came, and came and kept coming until stations closed around noon. Despite the rain, station staff reported a fair number of hardy souls moving through, but also reported lower numbers of species than usual.
The rain let up Saturday afternoon and mostly stayed away until later Sunday. Good thing as the six field trips scheduled for Sunday all went off without a hitch, starting with the Dawn Chorus trip at 4:45 am and ending with Birds and Botany of the Pine Forest.
The 2025 Festival featured three, mostly new, elements: a poetry reading at La Grande’s Cook Memorial Library on Thursday before Festival weekend; art activities sponsored by Arts Center East (ACE) on Saturday and Sunday; and the Eastern Oregon University GOSTEM trailer Saturday at the Tule Lake Auto Tour. All these elements added to the diversity of the Festival and represent an effort by the Friends of Ladd Marsh (FOLM) to rebuild the Festival after the COVID downsizing. The FOLM is excited to report that Cook Library, ACE, and GOSTEM will participate in the 2026 Festival.
