The Berkeley Bird Festival Might Be Calling You This Weekend (and It’s Free)

Still looking for weekend plans (and want to avoid the chaos of the coast during the Half Moon Bay Art and Pumpkin Festival)? 

You could head east instead and check out the Berkeley Bird Festival on Sunday. 

This free annual event is back with a packed schedule of guided birding tours, performances, arts and crafts and presentations on topics from birdsong to bird-inspired folklore.

This year’s theme is “myth and memory,” said Ryan Nakano, communications director for the Golden Gate Bird Alliance, which is hosting the event alongside the California Institute for Community, Arts, and Nature. With the exception of the birding walks, the event will mostly be held in or near the David Brower Center on the UC Berkeley campus. Allston Way will be closed this weekend for one block between Oxford and Shattuck streets.

“The idea behind it was to try to address the fact that our relationship to birds can be very personal, but they can also be very community-based,” he said. “Different communities have different relationships to birds, and oftentimes, it’s through the stories we’re told, or we grow up with.”

For birders especially interested in exploring those themes of myth and memory, Nakano suggested checking out the hands-on writing workshop with author Ashia Ajani, scheduled for 1:25 p.m. in the Goldman Theater. Here, participants will discuss African storytelling and come ready to creatively write.

Nakano also suggested a 12:30 p.m. presentation from Berkeley poet laureate Hanan Masri and educator Walker Brents III, who plan to discuss the poem “Sunbird,” by Fady Joudah in the Tamalpais Room. Plus, the 4:15 talk on wild parrots in San Francisco is sure to attract a crowd, he said.

The biggest can’t-miss moments of the event, he said, are the 4:35 p.m. “Splitting Skies” dance performance and the 3:15 keynote conversation between authors Ed Yong and Lauren Markham. 

The conversation “will be focused on the climate crisis and how we reckon with that on an interpersonal, inter-communal level,” he said.

For those who aren’t already hooked on birding, Nakano suggested taking advantage of all the local birding groups that will be tabling there, like the American Birding Association and Queer Birders Bay Area. 

Plus, while many of the birding walks are already at capacity, more free tours will be running all afternoon on campus, guided by Bears for Birds, the Cal birding club. 

And don’t miss the afternoon tours of the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, where you look at bird specimens up close.

“Obviously it’s a little bit macabre, but it’s science,” Nakano said.

The entire event is free, and most of its talks and workshops don’t require any registration. There won’t be food at the event, but a few local Berkeley restaurants will be offering attendees discounts during the festival.

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There’ll also be a raffle where participants can win birding gear and merchandise.

For the less experienced birders or birding-curious attendees, Nakano said to come with an open mind, ready to learn about the breadth of species of birds and habitat here in the Bay Area.

You may even learn a thing or two about how to help protect birds, he said.

“Really, you can kind of find birds everywhere, even in your own neighborhoods and backyards,” he said, “but also just in these very surprising locations that unless you were birding, you might not even really go out there.” 

“It gives you this fun excuse to explore the Bay in a completely different way,” Nakano said.