17 May One Month At YHONA (World Migratory Bird Day 2023)

It has been a little over a month since I started my internship at Yaquina Head Outstanding Natural Area through Environment for the Americas. I have learned so much, and yet, I have barely touched the tip of the iceberg of information about wildlife, land management, park and visitor services, etc…

It has been nothing but interesting during my time here. It is my first time moving away from home (Los Angeles, CA) and it has taken some time to get used to the way of life here in Newport, Oregon, but I’m enjoying the process. I have experienced so much rain, 25 mph winds, hail, thick fog, and a few warm and sunny days. My boss and the acting site supervisor here at Yaquina Head Outstanding Natural Area, Chris Papen, told me that “we wouldn’t get all this amazing greenspace and vegetation without a little bit of rain.”
Here at work, it has been a lot of fun learning and planning for World Migratory Bird Day 2023. I have planned a bird day event before at a small park in North East Los Angeles with Audubon, but nothing as big as the event I was planning here. My activity line-up for World Migratory Bird Day 2023 (May 13th, 2023) consisted of an hour-long bird walk for the public and an assortment of educational and interpretive migratory bird games held at the Yaquina Head Oustanding Natural Area Interpretive Center. Unfortunately, nobody was able to join me on my bird-walk that day. It could have been due to a multitude of factors such as it being Mother’s Day weekend, as well as Audubon Lincoln City chapter hosted a huge WMBD event that day, and the fact that the weather was very warm and not ideal to go birding during the time it was held. However, I did not let that bring me down, I still did the bird walk at the Yaquina Bay Estuary Trail where I was able to polish my shorebird identification skills as well as see new birds such as the: Purple Martins, Cackling Geese, Ospreys, Dunlins, etc. I still see it as a successful event; it gave me very useful event planning experience, and taught me to not plan another future event during a jam packed weekend again.
Back at Yaquina Head Outstanding Natural Area, I had more success! Many visitors were enjoying the bird migration games I had prepared for World Migratory Bird Day. I prepared a total of three games, along with an arts and crafts table.
Game 1: Migration – It’s a Risky Journey: (Visitor gets to play a real life version of Monopoly where you get to move spaces along an enclosed area. The goal is to help your bird successfully migrate through all the hurdles that birds typically encounter during their journey.)
Game 2: Migration Game – Daphnie the Dark-Eyed Junco: (Visitor answers a series of eight questions. Each correct answer helps Daphnie the Dark-Eyed Junco migrate from her winter home in Tijuana, Mexico to her summer home in Vancouver, Canada and travel along the map to stopover sites like wildlife refuges and forests.)
Game 3: What Bird Are You Most Like – Personality Quiz: (Visitor answers a series of fifteen short personality questions to determine what kind of bird they are most like according to behaviors ranging from twenty two species of birds.)

I learned a lot throughout the process of managing and hosting this World Migratory Bird Day. There were a lot of ups and a few downs during this time, but I can gladly say I tried very hard on this event and I want to really thank all the staff here at Yaquina Head and my supervisor at Environment for the Americas, Stephanie Loredo, for helping me make this event possible!