Mountain Plovers have inspired a conservation ethic in southeast Colorado (photo by Cristi Painter, U.S. Forest Service).

Every April, the tiny community of Karval and the Karval Community Alliance, an organization composed of local landowners and community members, comes together for what has become an iconic eastern Colorado celebration – the Mountain Plover Festival. In cooperation with the Alliance, festival leadership, and other landowners, Ryan Parker, the Bird Conservancy of the Rockies’ private lands wildlife biologist is working in nine southeast Colorado counties to ensure the long-range conservation of Mountain Plovers and other shortgrass prairie inhabitants.

The story of how the project and festival all started is as unique as the birds being celebrated: The sighting of a Mountain Plover on Russell Davis’s Wineinger-Davis Ranch has turned into a conservation story worth sharing with visitors from around the nation and abroad. Not only has the Wineinger-Davis Ranch been a recipient of the esteemed Sand County Foundation’s Leopold Conservation Award for successfully integrating livestock production with conservation efforts for short-grass prairie wildlife, but Davis and other landowners who are part of the Karval Community Alliance have spearheaded a special April event – the Mountain Plover Festival – to celebrate this unique bird species, shortgrass prairies, and to bring people to the town of Karval to experience conservation on the ground.

The Mountain Plover Festival is a distinctive event that showcases conservation, agricultural production, and a sense of community. Not only do participants enjoy memorable experiences, their attendance directly supports conservation in action. There are opportunities to meet and visit with local landowners of eastern Colorado, eat local country-homestyle meals, explore the deep-rooted culture and history of the town of Karval and eastern Colorado, participate in birding tours on private lands otherwise inaccessible to the public, inspect successful wildlife conservation measures that are currently being implemented on working private lands, and of course, observe Mountain Plovers in the midst of it all.

In the meantime, private lands wildlife biologist Ryan Parker, is learning a whole new meaning to agricultural production as he studies Mountain Plovers and the birdlife in southeast Colorado, where nearly 300 bird species have been identified across Baca, Bent, Crowley, Kiowa, Las Animas, Lincoln, Otero, Prowers, and Pueblo counties.

For more information about Ryan’s work, the Karval Community Alliance, the Mountain Plover Festival, and the Bird Conservancy of the Rockies, see https://birdconservancy.org/a-communitys-passion-for-mountain-plovers-conservation-and-agriculture/