Festival of the Cranes 2022

Award-winning musician/artist/songwriter John Paul White and band will be performing Friday night, January 14th at 7 pm at the Princess Theatre to kick off the 2022 Festival of the Cranes

For ticketing information please click here.

Lauren McGough has been a licensed and practicing falconer since age 14 and has been particularly enamored with golden eagles as hunting partners - a unique branch of falconry that has only a handful of practitioners in the United States. After spending nearly two years as an exchange student in the United Kingdom and learning the strong European tradition of eagle falconry, she graduated from the University of Oklahoma with dual degrees in Zoology and International Studies.

In 2009, she was a Fulbright Scholar to Mongolia, where she apprenticed herself to local eagle masters and trained eagles for hunting foxes off of horseback. She loved Kazakh eagle culture so much, that she earned a Ph.D. in Social Anthropology from the University of St Andrews in Scotland on the subject. She was featured in a CBS 60 Minutes segment in 2019.

www.laurenmcgough.com

Award-winning photographer Paul Bannick presents a new program featuring video, sound, stories from the field, and several dozen new images from his brand new book: Owl: A Year in the Lives of North American Owls. Paul uses intimate yet dramatic images to follow owls through the course of one year and in their distinct habitats. Audiences will witness the four seasons on territory, as each stage in an owl’s life is chronicled through rare images: courtship, mating, and nesting in spring; fledging and feeding of young in summer; dispersal and gaining independence in fall; and, finally, winter’s migrations and competitions for food. His program shows how owls use the unique resources available to them in each habitat to face those challenges.

https://paulbannick.com/

Conservationist and owner of Connecting with Birds and Nature Tours, LLC. Christopher Joe will be leading the Birding 101 tours at the refuge Visitor Center. Christopher Joe is a 3rd generation farmer that raises Black Angus Cattle, and avid outdoors man.

He started his company on October 31, 2018 in order to diversify the family’s award winning Black Angus cattle farm which has been in the family since the early 1900s.

www.connectingwithbirdsandnaturetours.com

President Theodore Roosevelt as portrayed by Joe Wiegand entertains audiences nationwide with his reprisal of President Theodore Roosevelt. As a one-man theater show, Joe’s T.R. shares stories full of adventure, laughter, and inspiration. T.R. will be in character throughout the day.

www.teddyrooseveltshow.com

Timothy Michael Joe is an American self taught, representational artist from the rural southern town of Greensboro Alabama. He participated in his first art festival in his mid teens and since completed many commission pieces. Timothy creates art based on themes associated the southern rural culture loving God, family, and heritage. He has experience with many mediums over the years including; graphite, calligraphy, charcoal, gouache, acrylic, and oil paints and soft pastels. He enjoys using his gift to educate, uplift, and encourage his audience.

www.timothymjoe.com

Richard serves as President & CEO of the International Crane Foundation and has more than 30 years experience leading community-based conservation efforts for cranes, other wildlife, and people across many countries in Africa and Asia as well as in the US. Rich will explore the role of cranes as inspiring and endangered ambassadors for conservation worldwide, bringing people together to save the amazing places where cranes dance. He will share conservation stories from the field in Vietnam and Zambia, and the struggle to bring back Whooping Cranes from the brink of extinction and maintain the successful recovery of Sandhill Cranes across the US.

www.savingcranes.org/richard-beilfuss/

The Auburn University Southeastern Raptor Center presents its educational program to teach about birds of prey. You can see these birds up close while learning about habitats, conservation, and ecology. Hawks, eagles, falcons, and owls will educate and excite audiences of all ages.

www.auburn.edu/main/welcome/visitorsguide/raptorcenter

Filmmakers Revere La Noue and Elisabeth Haviland James will join the film’s featured falconer, Lauren Mc Gough for a Q&A after the screening.

For more information on the Overland film, click this link.