01 Apr Winter Wildlife Field Days!

All our previous planning has finally come into action this month with Winter Wildlife Field Days!!! Winter Wildlife Field Days is a month-long event that happens throughout the month of March every year here in the Willamette Valley of Oregon. It is a family nature event that aims to be as inclusive and accessible as possible with all the materials also being offered in Spanish and online. This event is possible not only through the Willamette Valley National Wildlife Refuge Complex but with the help of over 20 other partners this year!! Pop up Field stations with different nature related activities occur throughout the Valley and I got to participate in all of them.

I was very excited to be a part of this event. I played a big part in organizing, building relationships with the community and partners, translating and overall bringing in diversity to this event. The field stations were pop up tents and tables with activities that we took to local city parks and spaces. At these field stations there were activities such as owl pellet dissections, a newt obstacle course where kids learned about the life cycle of newts, an eDNA science experiment, and other water and wildlife learning activities. We also had a welcome table where kids were able to receive an event sticker, take home activity kits, and other take home materials such as coloring sheets. Some field stations also had a live raptor, pond studies, and other partners showed up with their own activities.

It was great that we were able to reach the local community this way instead of having them come to the refuges, which can be hard for many. This way we have reached over 1000 people!! This year was a recording breaking year and hopefully in the future they are able to reach even more!

This event definitely required a lot of work from organizing, to outreach to traveling around to the different places but it was all worth it in the end. Now not only do more people know about their local public lands that they can visit but we were able to spark some more interest in nature and hopefully inspired some future nature explorers 🙂