WildBird Recovery
12:00 festival opens 12:30 – tour of the facility 1:00 – Speaker Katie Fallon – Vultures! (She will have books to purchase if you would like one signed!) 2:30 – tour fo the facility 2:45 – Monarch release in memory of our friend Duane 3:00 – Speaker Roxanne Swann – Native Plants 4:15 – tour of the facility 4:40 – raffle basket and silent auction winner announcement winners 5:00 – festival ends You will have plenty of time to see the educational booths – Terry Lobdell, All ABout Bats, Steve Repasky with Meadow Sweet Apiaries and Julia Schwierking with Beneficial Pollinators. Also wonderful vendors! Donna Caroline Designs, Women of the Cloud Forest, The Birdwatchers Store, Village Garden Club of Sewickley and Pawtree Natural Products with Tracy Gualtieri.
This is one of our favorite days of the year – we cannot wait to see you all!
Katie Fallon is the author of the nonfiction books Vulture: The Private Life of an Unloved Bird (2017) and Cerulean Blues: A Personal Search for a Vanishing Songbird (2011), which was a Finalist for the Reed Award for Outstanding Writing on the Southern Environment. Katie is also the author of two books for children. Her essays and articles have appeared in a variety of journals and magazines, and she has taught creative writing at Virginia Tech and West Virginia University, and in the low-residency MFA programs at Chatham University and West Virginia Wesleyan College. She is a founder of the nonprofit Avian Conservation Center of Appalachia and has served as President of the Mountaineer Chapter of the National Audubon Society. Her first word was “bird.”
Roxanne Swan is an Environmental Botanist and Horticulturist with the Audubon Society of Western Pennsylvania. As Coordinator of the Audubon Center for Native Plants her mission is to propagate plants for the landscape and promote awareness of the importance of native plants.
Over the years I have worked with several South Hills nurseries. I also owned and operated ‘Roxanne’s Organic Gardening’ for 12 years coordinating and performing sustainable garden maintenance, native plant landscape design and organic plant care, as well as horticulture lectures, soil testing and consulting.
We are so excited to have Terry Lobdell back with us! He will be hosting an educational display all about Bats! He participates in Citizen Science with the PA Game Commission and others to learn all about the bats of Pennsylvania and how to build and mount successful bat houses on your property.
Stephen Repasky of Meadow Sweet Apiaries will also be hosting an educational display. He is a second-generation beekeeper, certified Master Beekeeper and is the current President of the Pennsylvania State Beekeepers Association. Stephen has been involved with bees since the age of four when he would help his father tend to the honey bee colonies on their small farm in western Pennsylvania. After a brief hiatus and graduating from The Pennsylvania State University he began keeping bees again, this time on his own. Those few colonies have since turned into over 100 colonies of honey producing hives, a queen rearing operation and the selling of nucleus hives each summer to those interested in starting or expanding their own beekeeping adventure!
Another educational display will be done by our friends at Fern Hollow Nature Center. Julia Schwierking will help you understand more about the beneficial pollinators that may be known as “unloved”. Julia has a strong interest in entemology – so much so that she is headed back to school to get her Masters!
