Photo by Carla Stanley - Western Sandpipers arrive in large flocks of over 15,000 this week in Kachemak Bay, along with many other shorebirds, surfbirds and seabirds. Since the festival was founded in 1992, more data has been accumulated to help with habitat conservation. Biologist Poppy Benson will talk about the originations of the festival 2-2:20 p.m. Friday at Alaska Island and Ocean Visitors Center.

When the Kachemak Bay Shorebird Festival was conceived, Homer was only a few seasons outside the doldrums of the 1989 Exxon Valdez Oil Spill.
It was a time of concern about the future of Mariner Lagoon, the habitat where shorebirds rested and ate – locals talked about filling it in for a park.
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service occupied offices in the small mall by the Best Western Bidarka Inn – it lacked the presence of the Alaska Islands and Ocean Visitor Center that later, once constructed in 2004, would combine many federal agencies under one scientific roof. It lacked an auditorium for the big-name featured speakers.
But that didn’t much matter at the time. They had a million shorebirds, said Poppy Benson, one of the festival’s originators.
“I was at a training session, and I remember someone was talking about putting on a festival – a carp festival. And I thought, Really? A carp festival?” Benson recalled.
Kachemak Bay filled with surfbirds, seabirds, shorebirds in the early spring. Biologists knew this to be a rich area of nutrients where birds bulk up en route to distant locales way up north and points in between.

Photo provided - U.S. Fish and Wildlife biologist Poppy Benson, public programs supervisor, helped form the first Kachemak Bay Shorebird Festival 20 years ago, along with Johnny Bushell, Sally Oberstein, Celeste Fenger and Charlotte Rogers. Here Benson is pictured with Rogers holding Cedar Cloyd, Benson's newborn son.

“I thought, we should have a shorebird festival to celebrate this,” she said.
A Homer Chamber of Commerce tourism committee bandied about ideas for bringing in more visitors. At that same meeting, Benson mentioned a shorebird festival – but she foresaw starting it the future. Not that same year. Only John Bushell, himself the chairman of the committee, grabbed hold the idea and liked it.
“In that next year I was expecting a baby with a March due date – that was the year Cedar was going to be born. I thought we could have it sometime in the future when I have time,” Benson said. “But by then there was no stopping Johnny.”
Bushell said the committee had been puzzling over how to find more events for visitors as a way to draw them to Homer. It needed the shoulder season economic development.
“Poppy’s idea was an enlightenment to me at the time. Local people who knew the birds were involved – I was in on the art gallery migration.
One reason I got so involved is that I had a bed and breakfast,” Bushnell said. “The chamber at that time received so many letters – not emails in those days – from people interested in what could you do in Homer. And nobody was doing anything with those.”
Before long, an art walk was organized as one of the first Shorebird Festival events. A bus took visitors from gallery to gallery where they could look at art. There were bird viewing opportunities, and informative talks.
Then they needed a keynote speaker. A professional storyteller came but didn’t fill the entire alloted time. Since it was a Mother’s Day Brunch, Benson reasoned, there were some thematic opportunities in the topic. “We were new in the festival business. He told one story and went back and sat down. So now I needed to expand my talk.”
“I spun philosophical stuff about motherhood – I was in a glowing new-mother period when Cedar was 6 weeks old. I talked about the future and children and birds coming back for our children and the children’s children. We were homegrown but boy did that take off,” Benson said.
The event has evolved from a one-sheet schedule to a small booklet of detailed events numbering close to 100. Certain trips to the head of the bay and to the Barren Islands are offered at no other time of the year, offering rare opportunities for visitors and locals alike, Benson said.

What it takes

Christina Whiting, now in her 8th year of organizing the event, said it takes a full nine months to plan out the annual Shorebird Festival. “That’s like giving birth and the same amount of time,” she noted. It also takes more than 100 volunteers.
Enrollment is slightly up this year over last. The core audience is from Anchorage with about 20 percent from the Lower 48. In previous years, people came from Europe and Asia, but not so many in recent years.
It’s organized for fish and wildlife experts to coordinate educational events. Local operators are coordinated in as well to supply visitors with transportation. Van tours are offered also by other agencies, such as the Kachemak Heritage Land Trust to show areas designated for conservation. And, there are the nonprofits and art galleries who get involved to provide entertainment opportunities in concerts, art shows, bird calls and poetry events linked into the bird migration.
“The events, if you notice, are organized around the tides. That’s the first thing we do when we’re getting ready to schedule events,” Whiting said. “And it’s timed around the peak migration of birds arriving on May 9.”
Benson explains the best time to view birds is at high tide, generally speaking.
“You can see birds easiest at high tide, and Mud Bay is one of the best places. That’s when people can see the most birds, about a half hour after high tide exposes clams and invertebrates, and they feed following the tide out.”
Low tide is sometimes good for viewing birds at Beluga Slough and below Lighthouse Village. But essentially you need to be there at high tide.
“You don’t want to put the keynote speaker at high tide, because then we’re drawing people away from the birds and that’s what they are here to see.”
Since the mission is educating the public about these fragile, athletic birds and the many challenges they face in a changing climate, much of the festival focus is on raising funds to pay for the education events, Whiting said.
“Every year we have collectible T-shirts, mugs, fundraising events. This year we have Carla Stanley’s 20 Birds for 20 years,” Whiting said. In addition to the $10 posters of Stanley’s work, the t-shirts, hoodies, hats and cups, there is also a silent and live auction that culminates Friday night at the Homer Council on the Arts.
A quilt raffle this year features 20 years of t-shirts sewn into a quilt by Donna Hinkle that will go to a lucky winner. All these funds help support the festival, bring up keynote speakers like the internationally famous George Archibald and the bestselling writer, Mark Obmascik, author of “The Big Year.”
And attendance has grown to match the ambitions of the festival. From a few dozen that first year, 1992, to well over 1,500 attendees, the Shorebird Festival has become the largest single Homer event.
“When you have something good, and if you have people who care, it is going to keep growing,” Bushell said. “It has grown to such a wonderful place, thanks to fantastic coordinators. As long as the chamber gets funds to fund a coordinator, that’s what it takes. It will be growing as long as the birds keep coming back.”

HOMER TRIBUNE/Sean Pearson - Homer school teachers rallied at “Honk for Education,” an event April 30 during contract negotiations.

As Kenai Peninsula Borough School District funding settles into a rosier outlook than expected, the district is hoping to get its expenses squared away in its budget, as well, before the 2012 fiscal year calendar turns a page to 2013 on June 30.
A big part still up in the air is ongoing negotiations with employee unions over three-year contracts to start in fiscal year 2013.
Negotiation teams for the district, the Kenai Peninsula Education Association and Kenai Peninsula Education Support Association, meeting since January, had not come to agreement by the end of April, prompting a two-day session of mediation May 1 and 2 that also ended without agreement on the big remaining sticking points — salary and health care. Generally, the next step after mediation is for the parties to enter advisory arbitration, which would occur in the fall.
However, as soon as mediation concluded the district invited the union teams back to the negotiations table, and on Friday announced a financial carrot to encourage agreement on the contracts before the fall: Settle by June 30, and all KPEA and KPESA employees will get a one-time payment of $600, for most employees, or $1,000 for the longest-serving, highest-educated employees at the far end of the salary schedule.
“Through mediation we were able to settle a number of outstanding items, and the process allowed us to make progress with several unsettled items by exploring new and different solutions. I look forward to continue working toward the settlement of all items and coming to agreement on a new contract,” stated Dave Jones, assistant superintendent for instructional support, in a KPBSD press release issued last week.
As of May 2, the unions had not accepted the offer to return to the table.
“Given the fact that the mediator had barely ‘left the building,’ the associations did not see that going back would produce any favorable results. A request for arbitration has been submitted by the associations. This arbitration will more than likely take place in the fall,” stated LaDawn Druce, KPEA president, in a May 2 update to employees.
The previous Saturday, April 28, found school district employees and supporters on busy street corners in Kenai, Soldotna and Homer waving signs and hands at passing vehicles in support of public education and the associations’ negotiators heading into mediation.
“Basically, we’re just showing support for our bargaining team. They’ve got staff behind them, and they’re supporting them. And, as we go to mediation, raising awareness in the community,” Druce said April 28 while holding a “Honk if you love teachers” sign at the “Y” Intersection of the Kenai Spur and Sterling highways in Soldotna. “We’re staying positive and we’re out here with positive messages that the community supports education and our employees. We just wanted an opportunity to be out here this weekend and show that, and hopefully make the team feel encouraged.”
State funding for education — still pending the governor’s signature — actually ended up bestowing an unexpected windfall on the district.

Showing the numbers
The district started out its projected fiscal year 2013 budget expecting about a $2.4 million deficit, but now is looking at having a bit of extra money to spend, thanks to a few boosts in funding — $1.75 million in one-time capital funding in the governor’s budget, and changes from the Legislature in the state’s education “Foundation Formula.” The Legislature changed the formula for figuring how much local governments could contribute to their school district, which lowered the amount the Kenai Peninsula Borough could provide to the district by about $2.7 million. Now there was no net loss for KPBSD.
The district also stands to get an increase of about $413,000 in funding for career and technical education targeting 7-8 grades, and a boost in transportation money. Last year the district dug $750,000 out of its general fund budget to cover a shortfall in the transportation account when busing costs with provider First Student came in higher than anticipated.
Since the district no longer has to spend money from its general fund on transportation, it has some extra money in the budget for the current fiscal year. That’s where the money is coming from for negotiations.
“Because of the funding by the Legislature, we will no longer need to do that transfer, that means we now have $750,000 that we did not expect to have in the general fund, that has allowed us to offer some items in mediation and negotiations that we ordinarily wouldn’t have been able to,” Jones said during a school board meeting Monday in Seward.
The district’s most-recent offer to the associations included an annual raise built into employee contracts, based on longevity and education, of 1.78 percent to 4.82 percent for certified employees, and 3.44 percent to 12.34 percent for classified employees, as well as a 1 percent salary increase each of the next three years. The district also is offering two additional paid workdays with no school in session, and a 1 percent, per year for three years, increase in extracurricular salary schedule ranges.
In health care, the district’s most-recent offer amounts to an $840 annual reduction in the amount employees contribute to health care, with the district shouldering more of the per-month cost. Any health care expenditures that exceed the set, proposed contribution levels, will be split with the district paying 60 percent and employees 40 percent in the first year of the contract. If an employee participates in the district’s Wellness program, that split would change to the district covering 65 percent of those additional costs in the second year of the contract, and 70 percent in the third year, or 50 percent both those years if an employee does not participate in the Wellness program.
The unions have been holding out for “inflation-proofing.” The associations’ most-recent offer asks for a 3 percent raise each year plus whatever the consumer price index for Anchorage is for that year (currently it’s 2.8 percent). In health care, the associations would like a cost sharing of a $160 per-month employee contribution (that would cover the employee and their dependents) and $1,400 per-month district contribution, with any costs exceeding that split 90 percent from the district and 10 percent by an employee.
As of 10 a.m. Tuesday, it had not yet been announced whether the offer of the one-time $600 and $1,000 payments would change the associations’ minds about coming back to the table. Druce on Tuesday said the associations’ team was discussing whether to return to negotiations but had not yet decided. The district is hopeful to have its invitation accepted.

Photo by George Matz - A Surfbird perches on a jetty off the Homer Spit.

It’s always interesting to Kachemak Bay Shorebird Coordinator Christina Whiting to hear what a person’s lifetime bird is.
“A woman told me the other day what she really wants to see is a Yellow-billed loon, and I was able to tell her, well, there’s one in the Barge Basin right now,” Whiting said. “For others it’s the warbler or eider or a Sandhill crane.”
Which fits in perfectly with one of the big name attractions to the festival: Mark Obmascik, the author of “The Big Year” a bestselling novel whose book was made into a hilarious, richly layered movie starring Jack Black, Steve Martin and Owen Wilson.
It tells the story of three men who abandon their normal duties to spend a year viewing birds in one of the world’s quirkiest sporting contests. With few rules and no referees, there is one goal: to see and identify the most species of birds in a single year. The three main characters will spend a grueling, exhaustive year traveling hundreds of thousands of miles and spending thousands of dollars.
Obmascik was part of a Denver Post team of journalists who won the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for a series on the Columbine High School shooting massacre.
In an interview with the Homer Tribune, Obmascik said during his 17-18 years with the Denver Post, he alternated during election years covering politics and in the off-years, focused on the environment.
“Our place is like your state – issues aren’t settled yet. There are strong opinions on both sides. I went back and forth between senate, governor, presidential campaigns and the great public land fights,” Obmascik said. “We have the Rocky Mountain arsenal here, the U.S. army chemical weapons for World War II and (environmental catastrophes) such as the guy who built a gold mine in one of the most inhospitable environments on earth 10,000 feet up a mountain – and sure enough, he screwed up.”
That resulted in a cyanide spill that killed 30 miles of river inhabitants.
Then one year, a different kind of assignment landed on his desk.
“I had finished covering a campaign, another Senate campaign that I knew was going to be ugly. I picked up the phone and it was a call from the American Birding Association – who knew? They were in Colorado Springs,” he said. A New Jersey industrialist had spent a “Big Year” chasing across the continent after fragile, delicate little birds.
“And I thought, a competitive bird watch? Who could make up such a thing. In one year, three guys had spent a year of their lives covering 270,000 miles and spending over $200,000 – including getting to the island of Attu where they awaited these Asiatic birds taking flight into air space,” he said.
Obmascik got to know the three men: the New Jersey industrialist and a CEO of big companies who had a dream home near Aspen who suffered 40 years with his repressed bird obsession. He was married to a marriage counsellor and the first year of their long-awaited retirement, he announces it is going to be his “Big Year.”
The third man was a software technician hunting down Y2K bugs at a nuke plant in Maryland. His divorce had just finalized, and he was teaching himself to live again.
“I had spent a career writing about murders, politicians and rapists. I felt like the luckiest guy around to get to write about these three men, whom I actually liked,” he said.
The movie is more “inspired” by Obmascik book. The names are different, the places have changed. Characters’ problems and flaws are altered. “But the movie is beautiful. The cinematography was great – they actually went to the Yukon and built a replica of Attu where they did the filming.”
Obmascik’s next book, “Halfway to Heaven (2009) was about 54 mountains – all over 14,000 feet – that he climbed.
“I climbed all of them. The premise was that my body’s best days are over and this could be the crowning achievement of that. I was fat, 44, and in the market for a vasectomy,” he said.
To get ready, he joins a exercise class of mostly peri-menopausal women. When he begins to slack off, the women prod him into keeping at it. He reciprocates by adjusting the wall fans for them when hot flashes hit. Then summer comes, and off he goes, chasing his dream to climb all 54 summits.
Two discussions and the movie feature Obmascik. The panel discussion “The Role of Environmental Journalism in Today’s World,” is 11 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. Friday moderated by History Professor Mike Hawfield, with panelists Nancy Lord and Tom Kizzia.
On Saturday, at the Mariner Theatre, Obmascik gives a brief talk introducing “The Big Year” movie at 2:30-3 p.m. followed by a book signing.

Photo provided - HoWL's DiRtBaGs (Discount Rates to Boys and Girls) program involved 45 kids collecting trash and recycling products for pledges to raise money for summer camp scholarships.

They’re dirty, they’re stinky, and they’re picking up your trash. For six days, the HoWL DiRtBaGs have been wading through ditches and trudging through town, picking up litter to raise money for their HoWL summer camp scholarships.
The DiRtBaGs picked up 4,444 pounds of trash this year. They took home the top prizes at the Chamber of Commerce-sponsored Clean-Up Day for both litter picker-uppers and recyclers. The DiRtBaGs hauled in 386 bags of trash, 66 of which were just recyclables. They also rolled over two dozen abandoned tires up and out of the ditches.
How did they do it? With a LOT of help from the community of Homer. Forty-five kids, called DiRtBaGs, and a dozen more adults collected trash last week, April 30-May 5, weighing in their haul each day and storing it at their mountain of trash. The community has been supporting these kids by giving them pledges to encourage them to pick up more litter.
Why did they do it? To climb mountains, of course. That’s what DiRtBaGs do. (And not just the mountain of trashbags they’ve collected.)
DiRtBaG stands for Discount Rates to Boys and Girls, and it’s HoWL’s way of providing scholarships for kids to go on wilderness expeditions this summer. HoWL ensures that every kid can go across the bay to camp and hike and learn leadership and survival skills, regardless of how much the trips cost. By picking up trash, the DiRtBaGs earn their trips and clean up Homer too.
HoWL’s mission is to provide outdoor experiential education to young people in Alaska and they offer multi-day expeditions and day trips to kids all summer long. Information about HoWL can be found at www.howlalaska.org.

The Alaska Volcano Observatory’s latest status report from Saturday afternoon said “seismic activity at Iliamna Volcano remains slightly above background. Nothing unusual was observed in the webcamera and there were mostly cloudy satellite images over the past 24 hours. The current activity at Iliamna does not indicate an imminent or certain eruption.”
Iliamna Volcano, 70 miles northwest of Homer, experienced increased seismic activity, causing concern among some Cook Inlet area residents. But according to the Alaska Volcano Observatory, an eruption is considered not imminent or certain.
A similar seismic “swarm” at Iliamna in 1996-1997 was not followed by an eruption, and historically the mountain hasn’t exhibited volcanic activity. According to the “webicorder” streaming seismic data from a monitoring station about two miles from Iliamna’s summit, a band of new seismic activity began Saturday a little before 3:30 a.m. Saturday, and ended by 10:30 a.m.

HEA members re-elect Levine

Homer Electric Association members elected three directors at the cooperative’s Annual Meeting in Homer on Thursday evening.
David Thomas of Kenai won the race for the seat in District 1, Dave Carey of Soldotna was elected to the seat in District 2, and incumbent Jim Levine of Homer was elected to the seat in District 3.
In District 2 Soldotna-Sterling-Kasilof, Dave Carey received 880 votes. Ed Oberts finished with 674 votes. In District 3 South Kasilof-Kachemak Bay, Jim Levine received 1,082 votes and Carl Martinez received 330 votes.
HEA members approved a ballot proposition amending the Bylaws to allow for electronic voting in cooperative elections. The ballot proposition received 3,130 yes votes and 1,121 no votes.
Debbie Debnam of Sterling was selected to serve as president, Bill Fry of Homer, named vice-president, Dick Waisanen of Soldotna secretary-treasurer and Jim Levine of Homer deputy secretary.
The annual meeting also featured recognition of the winners of Homer Electric’s Scholarship awards for Homer High School of $500 each: Sarah D’Water, Kathleen McNary, Kirsten Swanson, Victoria Vaz and Robin Wettach-Glosser.

Governor approves revenue sharing

Gov. Sean Parnell signed legislation that provides additional funding for community revenue sharing. An additional $25 million is included for revenue sharing, which will increase community funding to $85 million in Fiscal Year 2013.
Parnell also signed House Bill 250, reauthorizing the Renewable Energy Grant Fund Program through 2018. Since the program’s inception in 2008, it has issued grants for more than 200 renewable energy projects across the state. With an emphasis on making grants accessible to those with the highest energy costs, the program has demonstrated that investing in renewables can lower the cost of energy for many small communities that are otherwise totally dependent on diesel fuel.

Correction on this release:

Come MAPP new health results

From 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. May 18 at Kachemak Bay Campus Pioneer Hall, the latest round of MAPP meetings is open to the public. Come share and learn about current community efforts and hear new results of community health data. Lunch is provided. For more information or to RSVP, contact Megan Murphy at mappofskp@gmail.com or 235-0570