By MIKE COURSON
Great Bend Post
If September is one of the busiest months at the Kansas Wetlands Education Center, October is the spookiest. Following a full return of the Butterfly Festival and Education Day for area second graders last month, the facility will stay busy later this month with a bird mask WILD Club activity on Sunday, Oct. 30, and Turtle Tots Preschool activities on Halloween.
Oct. 8 is World Migratory Bird Day. So KWEC Director Curtis Wolf and staff picked bird masks to tie that day in with Halloween for a WILD Club activity on Oct. 30 at 1:30 p.m.
"Their theme for this year is 'Dim the Lights for Birds at Night,'" said Wolf. "Light pollution is one of the things that birds, when they're migrating, it will really mess them up. They can run into things and whatever else."
Light pollution is a big threat to birds that migrate at night. More than 100 million birds in the United States alone die each year after colliding with buildings. Artificial lights are also known to affect feeding and other important bird behaviors.
Along with creating bird masks, participants will also have access to KWEC's recently-purchased tablets and the Merlin app. The app helps users identify birds based on simple observations like size and color.
"It's a free app for anyone to download," Wolf said. "It's a great bird identification app. One of the features it has, it has a record feature where you hit a button and it will record the bird sounds that are going on around you, and it will identify them."
The Turtle Tots program for children ages 3-5 returns on Oct. 31. In keeping with the Halloween theme, participants will build parachutes for spiders and ghost rockets, and meet a live bat.