MONTE VISTA – This year’s Monte Vista Crane Festival was on March 6-8 and was truly one of the most beautiful festivals ever held. Each year, people visit the area to view the beautiful sandhill cranes on their migratory flight through the San Luis Valley.

The count for the number of people that attended the festival and its many events this year is not yet in, but The Ski-Hi Complex was filled with people who attended the Craft and Nature Fair, organized by the Monte Vista Chamber of Commerce, and included vendors of every type and many people who sold many personalized crane items.

Ski-Hi was the designated spot for different tours during the festival, including two Water Foul Tours. These included taking groups of people to the Monte Vista National Wildlife Refuge and to Homelake to see some interesting waterfowl.

The Waterfowl Tours were guided by Tim Armstrong, a professor at Adams State University, and a retired ornithologist and vertebrate ecologist, and by one of his students, Duane Moser, who is a biologist for the Great Sand Dunes National Park.

Armstrong stated that he felt Moser could offer many of the people on the bus a different perspective on waterfowl than he could because he was a duck hunter.

Armstrong then produced a mounted duck to everyone and called the duck Maria and stated that he wanted everyone to look at the duck and notice its features as a waterfowl animal.

“What makes this bird waterfowl is the webbed feet, the bird is water resistant, and notice the flat beak, not every waterfowl has a flat beak, but it also makes them kind of chunky, so they are good to eat,” he said. “There is one other characteristic about waterfowl that unites the group and that is these are very primitive birds.”

Armstrong said that swans and geese are also waterfowls. He stated that the most recently evolved birds are songbirds. Ducks used to be in the middle but now it has been realized that ducks have been around since dinosaurs and somehow survived the K-T extinction event that wiped out many dinosaurs. He said it could have been because they were aquatic, but there was also a winter that lasted about 3 years.

“So, exactly how the ancestors, these waterfowl survived, we do not know, but we simply know that they did survive and are around today,” he said.

He stated that there are about 180 species of waterfowl in the world with 30 species in the Valley. Waterfowl is broken down by size including the smallest which would be ducks, and then medium being geese, and then larger waterfowl would include swans. He stated these are also broken down by how some of them feed. He stated that some waterfowl ducks eat food off the land, and some dive for food in the water or catch fish.

Moser continued the conversation by stating that there are ways to tell the difference between different ducks. He said the way you can distinguish between diving ducks and puddle ducks is to look at their tails.

“A duck that orients itself with its tail up is usually a puddle duck, a duck who orients itself with is tail down is usually a diving duck,” he said.

Moser discussed other types of ducks and as the bus wound around to the wildlife refuge, it stopped just in front of an area with open water. Armstrong asked everyone to look at the water to see what types of ducks they could recognize. Moser pointed out some mallard ducks in the open water for everyone to see.

Many people on the bus looked at the water, while looking at some of the bird books they had and identified some of the ducks in the water that way too.

Armstrong stated that twice a year many waterfowls molt, losing their primary flying feathers.

He also stated that for migratory purposes, many fowls as well as other birds are banded, by US Fish and Wildlife. He stated that much of what everyone knows about migration is because of the bands.

After visiting the wildlife refuge, the group was then driven to the Homelake area where they were shown different waterfowl there before returning to the Ski-Hi Complex.