Initiative combines city Bird City status, attractions to lure visitors

By Bruce Karnick

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The Hastings Area Chamber of Commerce, the tourism committee, and the City of Hastings joined forces with GetKnit events and Minnesota Ice Sculptures for an ice sculpture scavenger hunt throughout the metro area. This even features over 35 different ice sculptures in the greater Twin Cities area. These hidden statues were at parks, businesses, and special neighborhoods to encourage folks to get out and explore.

This is the second year in a row that GetKnit and Minnesota Ice Sculptures have partnered together for this event. Hastings joined in on the fun this year to continue excitement from the Down-

Photo by Bruce Karnick town Business Associations event last weekend. Part of the fun for adventurers and as an incentive to participate for cities, the event includes opportunities for explorers to experience local businesses with coupons or deals.

Paid explorers received a plethora of information to guide them on their adventures including a treasure map, opportunities to win prizes, fun contest information and pop-up event information all weekend long. As of Friday morning, over 1,000 people had purchased tickets for the event on their pre-sale.

To kick off the event, the Hastings group partnered Thursday with Carpenter Nature Center and The U of M Raptor center to bring “Max and Maxime” to Hastings City Hall for a crowd of invited attendees. Max Borge, the “Max” portion of the duo, is the human handler of Maxime, the 22-year-old Bald Eagle. Maxime was brought to the Raptor Center from Moorehead, MN with an injured wing and lead poisoning. The staff was able to fully solve the lead poisoning but only able to partially repair the damage to her wing. That meant she could not be released to the wild safely, so she became an ambassador for the U of M.

The event at Hastings City Hall was not publicized largely in part to not overwhelm Maxime the eagle with a lot of people and the high volume of traffic leaving Hastings. Maxime can only fly short distances because of the injury to her wing. Thankfully, she was not afraid to show off her more than 60-inch wingspan, as it turns out, she is not embarrassed by her slightly crooked wing.

Borge did a great job explaining numerous aspects of raptors to the small crowd. The Raptor Center houses many of their rescues in outdoor enclosures. It’s enough space for them to fly around, but it does allow them to enjoy being outside. When the weather turns too cold, they do get moved inside as needed. For exercise, volunteers and staff work with the birds in a specialized training arena where they can fly from perch to perch or to a trainer’s arm.

The center has four eagles currently, two males and two females. The males are actually smaller than the females and it takes up to five years for a bald eagle to fully develop the white head and white tail they are known for. The term “bald” in Old English used to mean “white headed.” That term has since morphed into meaning “no hair” but not regarding Bald Eagles.

Dave Youngren of the Hastings Chamber explained joining the event and the sculpture chosen for Hastings.

“We decided that we would this and have an actual Eagle landing in a nest because of the fact that in 2016, we became the very first city bird city in the state of Minnesota. With all the eagles that have been around this winter, we've actually noticed that there's been over 60 of them in the area when the water is open, which is very exciting. We decided that it should be an eagle,” said Youngren.

Kristy Barse, Chamber President added, “What's really cool about this ice sculpture and where it's at is the partnerships that went into it. We actually are piggybacking off of the ice sculpture event that was created by the Downtown Business Association. And the connection to GetKnit Events for the ice sculpture exploration was brought to our attention from Spiral Brewery. GetKnit Events does a lot of brewery tours and wine tours. They gave us the connection to be part of this, brand new event where 35 ice sculptures are hidden throughout the Twin Cities. It's a really good tourism attraction for Hastings. We went to our Tourism Committee, and we said, ‘what can make us unique?’ We've got the bridge, we've got the river, but a lot of other river communities have that. What makes us really unique is that we are Minnesota's first bird city. And we have some really cool resources like carpenter Nature Center. That's how this concept came about. Then we reached out to city hall and said, ‘We'd really like to highlight your beautiful building, we're seeing a huge increase in our Instagram tags of people that want to get their photo by the building.’ The City of Hastings came on board. And then carpenter Nature Center connected us with the Raptor Center to do a live Eagle for the kickoff. So, partners included Downtown Business Association, our Tourism Committee, the chamber, the City of Hastings, and incorporated Nature Center. So that's what makes this so special to me. I think it's really cool to have all those partners involved.”

What does it mean to be a bird city? The Audubon Society of Minnesota has a program that recognizes cities that are bird friendly communities. This public recognition shows that a city has taken steps to meet at least seven of 18 best practices in three different categories: habitat improvement, threat reduction and citizen engagement. Habitat improvement includes various changes around Hastings parks to rebuild the native grasslands and savannas, or threat mitigation, such as the design of the new Hastings bridge. The city must also pass a resolution recognizing a day of their choice as International Migratory Bird Day and then host a public event to celebrate the day. That day for Hastings is April 23.

Full details of the steps Hastings took to qualify can be found here. https://mn.audubon.org/sites/default/files/bird_city_-_hastings_ narrative_final_2016-08.pdf The final numbers from the various forms of social media and the visitors that came to Hastings for the event were not available at press time.

More photos from Max and Maxime’s visit are available on www.facebook.com/HastingsJournal.

Photo by Bruce Karnick

Maxime, a 22-year-old Bald Eagle from the U of M Raptor center struts her stuff showing off her impressive 60 plus inch wingspan during her visit to Hastings City Hall.