The High Plains Snow Goose Festival — and thousands of birds — return to Lamar
Every year during the first week of February, thousands of migrating birds stop along the central flyway, a migration route between the Rocky Mountains and the Great Plains that stretches from Canada to Mexico. The flyway includes Lamar, where birds, like snow geese, stop to eat fallen grains in Colorado’s eastern plains to fatten up for their continued journey north to their breeding grounds.
“It gets heads in beds, which is great for… the restaurants around here that see the boom,” said Jessica Medina, the director of the festival.
Like other animal-oriented festivals in rural Colorado — e.g., Karval’s Mountain Plover Festival or La Junta’s Tarantula Trek — the High Plains Snow Goose Festival plays a vital role in supporting the local economy, Medina said.
“It's one of the biggest events that Lamar puts on as far as drawing out of towners, especially from the metro areas of Colorado Springs and Denver,” she said.
When the festival first started in 2002, Medina estimates that about 100 people attended. In recent years, Medina said that this number has grown to around 500 visitors. She gives local restaurants and businesses a heads up the week of the festival to ensure they are fully staffed for the weekend. Tourists also fill hotels and visit local small businesses, Medina said.
Medina doesn’t limit the festival to snow geese; she coordinates tours to highlight the history and heritage of not just Lamar, but other small, rural towns in southeast Colorado. The Snow Goose Festival’s website advertises for tourists to see the site of the Sand Creek Massacre, Camp Amache — the WWII Japanese internment camp — and the Big Timbers Museum.
During the festival, Debbie Barnes-Shankster, a local birding expert, takes tourists on guided birdwatching tours because hundreds of migratory bird species, in addition to snow geese, make stops in Lamar. Barnes-Shankster helps tourists use their senses to spot these birds.
Snow geese, about the size of Canada geese, mostly white but with black-painted wing tips, are not as difficult to spot. They travel in loud flocks numbering in the tens of thousands. The sound of their honking and the flapping of their wings overhead is difficult to miss.
“We have something we call a spark bird,” said Barnes-Shankster, a birding expert who conducts guided birdwatching tours during the festival. “So it's the bird that got us into birding. And for me, when I was six, it was black cap chickadees.”
Because this year has been so warm and dry, Barnes-Shankster thinks attendees will see more bird species in Lamar. In colder years, she said, the birds would have gone further south.
“We’ll see some good birds,” she said.
The High Plains Snow Goose Festival takes place February 5-8. Information about tours is available at this website.
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