Festival celebrates the birds in Northeast Iowa

It’s for the birds, well, the bird lovers — a festival this weekend in far northeast Iowa. Rick Zarwell is an organizer of the Rivers and Bluffs Fall Birding Festival in Lansing. Zarwell says last year 227 people from 12 states and Canada attended the three-day, bird-focused festival. Zarwell says there are thousands of swans in the area and hundreds of thousands of ducks. There will be three guided trips to look at the birds, with forays into Iowa and nearby Wisconsin and Minnesota, too. A 49-passenger excursion boat will be floating on the Mississippi River to provide another tour option for bird-watchers. Kee High School in Lansing is the center point for the festival. For a complete schedule, surf to: www.iowabirds.org/festivals.