Vancouver International Bird Festival is offering up a series of tours that give the public the chance to get a closer look at some of the hundreds of birds that call B.C. and the Lower Mainland home.
Bird watching is the fastest growing activity in the U.S., it’s worth more than $55 billion a year, and organizers of this year’s Vancouver International Bird Festival and 27th International Ornithological Congress are hoping to tap into that market.
British Columbia is home to 573 species of birds and many can be found in and around Vancouver and the Lower Mainland — the Fraser River estuary in Delta is considered one of the most important bird areas in the country.
Vancouver is hosting the congress and bird festival Aug. 19-26. Tours of significant bird areas in the host city and country are a usual feature of the International Ornithological Congress but organizers in Vancouver decided to open the tours up to the public.
“We got provincial funding and we’re now working with the Indigenous Tourism Association of B.C. to create as a legacy bird tours as a way for people coming to Vancouver to enjoy themselves and get into nature and also create a local industry and business around birds,” Bob Elner, one of the event organizers, said in a previous interview.
Now more than 50 tours are planned — from one or two day trips in and around the Lower Mainland to multi-day excursions to Haida Gwaii, the Okanagan and Vancouver Island.
While the plan is to have the tours remain as a permanent aspect of the province’s tourism offerings, the first one this summer gives members of the public a unique opportunity.
“The opportunity on these ones, these first ever ones, is to go on those tours with world famous ornithologists,” Elner said. “We don’t require you to bring bird books or know anything about birds. You don’t even have to bring binoculars because we’ll have spotting scopes. We want you to come experience nature, the environment through the medium of birds and we’ll have guides there to bring you through that.”
For more information about the tours, or to sign up, visit www.iocongress2018.com/tours.
For more on the Vancouver International Bird Festival, visit vanbirdfest.com.
@JessicaEKerr
