(Courtesy photo).

MONTE VISTA — The 37th annual Monte Vista Crane Festival had another successful year. First-time crane festival attendees and seasoned Crane Fest veterans flocked from far and near to come see these beautiful and unique cranes that have been visiting the Valley every spring for thousands of years.

This year’s Crane Fest provided fun and interesting things for birders of all ages to enjoy. There were daily tours covering a vast number of subjects like the BLM Elephant Rocks tour, Crane tours, RiGHT conservation tours and many more. In addition to the tours, there were also several talks for festival participants to attend. Including a keynote address by Teddy Roosevelt as portrayed by Kurt Skinner. There was also a kid’s coloring contest Friday.

The Monte Vista Kiwanis club hosted their annual “Birder’s Breakfast,” serving over 200 plates Saturday morning. They also had their annual “Crane Quilt Raffle,” and raffled off their 23rd Crane Festival Quilt. This year’s quilt “Time to Take Flight,” was pieced, designed and quilted by Raydene Plane. Proceeds from their annual quilt raffle mainly go to funding the Monte Vista Key Club Scholarship Program and the remaining funds are used for community service projects.

As usual, there was a huge craft fair at the Ski-Hi Complex. This year 82 booths offered unique and handmade goods ranging from fine art, jewelry, clothes, food, books and more!

This year’s festival also featured the new “Swoop of the Cranes,” art installation. The 5 foot, 12-gauge metal birds, uniquely designed by local artists hung on 50 light poles around 160 and Madison. Ken Hamko, was the visionary for the installation. In Oct. Hamko shared that he was inspired by similar installations that were done in other cities like the “Trail of the Painted Ponies,” which was put up in Santa Fe, or the “Cow Parade” in Denver.

“I started researching it and the fiberglass statues that those places used were quite expensive. I had to figure something else out in order to do something like that here. Someone mentioned that we had a local metal cutter, Ecodynamics. They have a laser cutter so they could cut out just about anything we wanted. I went and talked to them. I gave them a layout of what I wanted and they cut them out,” Hamko told Valley Publishing adding, “Then we went out to get sponsors, and went out to get artists. Artists multiplied pretty quickly we had 30 to 40 artists on the list really quickly. Sponsors took a little bit longer but I was originally thinking maybe 10 to 15 cranes the first year and we ended up with 50 sponsors.”

The “Swoop of the Cranes,” project was done through the Monte Vista Chamber of Commerce. Hamko shared that they would like to do the art installation again next year for the festival. This year’s cranes will hopefully be up all summer for people to come enjoy and vote for their favorites. After the cranes come down, they hope to host an auction in Sept. and auction off the cranes. The money made from the auction will be used for a beautification project for Monte Vista’s downtown.