Families are invited to flock to Frank Lake for educational fun.
Ducks Unlimited is hosting a Duck Day event at Frank Lake Conservation Area, east of High River Sept. 9 from 1 p.m. to 4 p.m. There will be critter dipping, building bird and bat houses, ATV tours of the area, bird identification and bird watching.
LeeAnn Singleton, volunteer co-ordinator of the Ducks Unlimited Marsh Keepers program, said they will provide some conservation and environmental education and inform families about what the organization does.
“It’s just an opportunity to reach out to people and see what kind of feedback we get,” said Singleton.
This is the first event of its kind Ducks Unlimited has ever hosted, she said. If the pilot event goes well, it will expand to other areas of Alberta next year, she said.
She said there will be binoculars on site so people can look out over the marsh and try to match the birds they see with an identification book. There will also be identification and information sheets about the insects around the marsh and how birds feed, she said.
The nesting boxes built on Duck Day won’t be mounted at Frank Lake, she said.
“It’s not a good location to put up bird boxes, but we’ll build them there and then I’ll get volunteers to put them up at different projects where we need them, where the habitat isn’t as welcoming for nesting,” said Singleton.
Many of the volunteers are part of the Marsh Keepers program, she said. Marsh keepers help the organization keep tabs on all its conversation and project areas, she said.
The keepers do site inspections, bird and wildlife identifications and watch out for broken gates and fences or people riding quads on the property who shouldn’t be there, she said.
“Basically they visit our projects and report back to me anything they find, and then I pass that along to our field staff and we deal with it as time and resources allow,” said Singleton.
Volunteers are provided with some training on what to look out for and how to identify wildlife, she said. The time commitment is up to individual availability, anywhere from several times per week to once every few months, she said.
Anyone interested in becoming a marsh keeper can check out the website at www.ducks.ca
