DURHAM — Despite the avian nature of the Snow Goose Festival, attendees flocked to the event’s NorCal Bats exhibit booth Saturday morning, fawning over the winged mammals.
Patrick Ranch Museum housed the festival headquarters with exhibitors such as Sierra Club, Sacramento National Wildlife Refuge, Plumas Audubon Society, California Watchable Wildlife and NorCal Bats, a rescue organization based in Davis.
The NorCal Bats exhibit displayed live bats hanging upside down in see-through containers. Corky Quirk, founder of NorCal Bats, held bats for attendees to view while she explained the animals’ eating habits.
“We fear what we don’t understand,” Quirk said while holding a pallid bat.
The small pink and brown pallid bat — recently named the state bat — has disproportionately large ears, beady black eyes and a pig-like snout. Because of the bat’s uniquely cute appearance, making it the state bat might make people more comfortable with wildlife they perceive as scary, Quirk said.
Many exhibitors at the festival harped on the importance of bringing people together, especially children, to learn about wildlife. Barbara Steinberg, California Watchable Wildlife outreach coordinator, highlighted two reasons for having events like the Snow Goose Festival: tourism and youth education.
During COVID these festivals couldn’t take place. Nature tourism, which is a big part of smaller towns like Chico, brings in billions of dollars each year, Steinberg said. On top of tourism, she said, educating children on land conservation is what makes these events important, “because if they don’t protect it, then who will?”
This focus on the youth is why first time attendee Hannah Burdette brought her 5-year-old daughter Avery to the festival. Burdette especially enjoyed an outdoor exhibit that set up telescopes so attendees could peek at a large owl, high up in one of the ranch’s pine trees.
The Audubon Society hosted a variety of educational children’s games including one called “Hazards and Hurdles,” teaching children about the challenges birds face in migration. The game simulated light pollution, which can disorient birds, by having the children look through a kaleidoscope before moving to the next obstacle in the game.
“This is like a nice showcase of what this community has to offer,” said Raquel Elander, human wildlife conflict biologist with the California Department of Fish and Wildlife. Elander came with her friend Sequoia Williams who is trying to get more into “birding,” or bird watching.
To Elander, birding means to have “a community that’s not based on anything except what’s just given on the land.”
The snow goose, for which the festival is named, travels thousands of miles from Alaska and Russia to feed for the winter in the Central Valley, said Nikki Meunch, park ranger at the Sacramento National Wildlife Refuge.
The Sacramento Wildlife Refuge closed its visitor center in 2022 for remodeling, but Meunch said they are hopefully having a soft opening “soon.”
The Snow Goose Festival concludes today at Patrick Ranch.
