19th Annual UMMV Birding Festival Opens Registration for Spring Mesa Verde Tours

Somewhere in the canyon country east of Cortez, a Burrowing Owl is already sizing up a burrow for the season. It may well end up on someone's life list when the 19th annual Ute Mountain Mesa Verde Birding Festival runs May 6-10, bringing five days of guided tours, evening lectures, and a Saturday banquet to one of the Four Corners' most layered spring birding corridors. Registration opened March 30 through the Cortez Cultural Center, and an early-bird deadline of April 7 is now four days out.

The Cortez Cultural Center organizes the festival each year as its primary fundraiser, drawing on retired BLM naturalists, National Park Service veterans, and regional wildlife specialists as volunteer guides. The cumulative species tally across UMMV's history has reached 180, a number that reflects what happens when desert scrub, riparian drainages, and mixed-conifer mesa forest all fall within a morning's drive of downtown Cortez. Southwest Colorado's first birding records date to the 1880s, and the guides here carry that deep field familiarity into every outing.

Full registration runs $180 and covers the complete five-day schedule including daily lectures. Individual daily tours are $50 each. Lunches and the Saturday evening banquet are available as add-ons at registration. Complete your signup before April 7 and the organizers include a complimentary short-sleeve festival T-shirt, a detail that tends to tip the fence-sitters who were planning to register anyway.

The evening raptor and owl tours are the first slots to fill every year, and the reason is straightforward: the route through the Cortez area runs into the early night specifically to put participants on Barn Owls and Burrowing Owls near active nest sites. Daytime targets on the same circuit include Peregrine Falcon, Bald and Golden eagles, Osprey, Northern Harrier, and American Kestrel. Build extra buffer into your dinner plans.

Saturday night's keynote at the Cortez Conference Center features Montana author Sneed B. Collard III, who takes the stage at 7:30 pm with a talk drawn from his award-winning adult guide on getting into birding. Collard has written more than 100 books for children and adults, and his blend of field humor and earnest advocacy fits a festival that has always treated beginner and experienced birder as equally welcome.

That range of access is worth noting for anyone coming to the UMMV for the first time. Short morning walks at the Geer Natural Area on the north edge of Cortez run alongside full-day and overnight tours that push into higher-elevation terrain well outside town. You don't need to be chasing a triple-digit year list to justify the trip. You need layered clothing for variable spring weather above the mesas, water for long days in the field, and optics that work in low dawn light.

The Cortez Cultural Center handles registration and can accommodate dietary preferences and tour-specific logistics. Reach them at 970-565-1151.