Morro Bay Winter Bird Festival canceled amid COVID omicron surge
For the second year in a row, the pandemic has caused the cancellation of the Morro Bay Winter Bird Festival that was set to begin Thursday.
The last-minute decision made in a split vote Saturday by the board of the sponsoring Morro Coast Audubon Society sent rippling waves of disappointment and sorrow across the birding community, businesses countywide that depend on the festival for a shoulder-season boost in income and others.
All registration fees will be refunded, according to the festival board’s website announcement.
“This is a bird town,” Scott Collins, Morro Bay city manager, said by phone Monday. “The festival is a favorite of our community, so we’re bummed about the cancellation that will be a disappointment for those who come to visit annually from all over the place,” and for locals, including his own family.
Unfortunately, the decision reflects “the times we’re in,” he said, and will affect not only “the organizers who pour themselves into putting on the event,” but those who provide hotel rooms, meals and shopping opportunities for the visiting bird watchers.”
“Birders are a very caring group, and very smart,” Jeanette Stone, president of the festival board said by phone Monday. “They know their own personal risk, but they don’t want to risk infecting anybody else.”
However, in a quick pivot, the Morro Bay Winter Bird Festival organizers has been rallying many of its presenters, including some of the most popular ones, who have already agreed to participate in free online Zoom lectures and appearances during the festival period.
Anybody can log on to morrobaybirdfestival.org to see the free presentations, according to Stone, Audubon board president Judy Neuhauser and festival chairman Chris Cameron. The site will also have updates throughout the week about the rapidly evolving situation.
By noon on Monday, among the remote presenters who’d already agreed to participate via Zoom will be keynote speaker John Muir Laws and Jessica Griffiths, Stone said.
That means some attendees who had planned to participate in the festival in person could still come to Morro Bay, go birding on their own during the peak winter birding season and learn from some experts in the field who had been part of the original five-day program.
Presentations from previous years are already on the website, and Stone expects that others from this year will be added sometime after the holiday weekend, as soon as necessary formatting can be finished.
People can also make donations there to help defray costs that festival organizers will have to swallow from the late cancellation, although its parent Audubon group plans to backfill some of those expenses, according to Neuhauser.
While the festival is a separate nonprofit organization, it operates under the auspices of the Audubon nonprofit.
It’s been a whiplash news cycle for Morro Bay recently, with the tragic death of a body surfer from Sacramento who had been bitten by a shark bookended by the selection of the community by the FishingBooker website as the second-best U.S. winter fishing destination in 2022. Kenai, Alaska, took first place.
Festival organizers call cancellation ‘heartbreaking’
Leaders of the Audubon Society and its subset, the Morro Bay Winter Bird Festival Committee, told The Tribune regretfully Monday that their “heartbreaking” and “agonizing” decision was based on predictions from immunology physicians and scientists that the omicron spike in the pandemic could hit its peak in this week or in the next few weeks.
A turning point for some board members, Neuhauser said, was learning that there’s a national shortage of the monoclonal antibody treatment that’s effective against the Omicron variant.
She said other details from Stanford infectious disease specialist Cybele Renault that helped to sway the board majority toward canceling were that: the Omicron wave could peak during the festival period; Omicron is thought to be about three times as contagious as the Delta variant; the average age of festival attendees (60 and older) puts them among those most vulnerable to serious disease (along with those who are immuno-compromised); and people who have had the vaccines and boosters can get the disease, be asymptomatic and have the capacity to spread COVID.
While many festival events are held outdoors, Neuhauser said, some are not, and “the constant mixing,” remixing and combining of individual groups throughout the many events “increases the potential for infection.”
San Luis Obispo County Health Department officials “encouraged us to cancel or postpone” the multi-day event, she said — but postponing an event of this size and complexity was just too daunting a concept.
“Based on the information we had,” she said, the Audubon board decided that, sadly, “this is the wrong week.”
Financial hit to Morro Bay tourism
The fiscal impact to the community could be substantial, with the festival itself now in the process of refunding more than $100,000 in registration fees for about 670 attendees, and local motels and restaurants gearing back down. The organizers are also negotiating with lodgings, bus companies, printing firms and various venues, so the cancellation is a big logistical nightmare.
Neuhauser said that, of those attendees, 275 were from San Luis Obispo County, 340 or so were from other California locations, 62 were from out of state, and one was from British Columbia, Canada.
When told about the cancellation, Erica Crawford, president and CEO of the Morro Bay Chamber of Commerce called it “such disappointing news, but understandable,” given the recent rapid spread of the coronavirus variant deemed much more transmissible than previous COVID strains.
“The festival is such a great shoulder-season event for Morro Bay,” she said. Organizers and birders alike “are so enthusiastic, but they have such a big heart for the community,” so wanting to protect others is something she’d expect them to do.
However, tourism from the Martin Luther King Day holiday weekend could take some of the sting out of those business losses, depending on how potential visitors view their individual omicron risk levels.
Some festival attendees might come to Morro Bay and the Central Coast anyway, to experience the area’s vast influx of winter birds and enjoy the area’s famous scenery, waterfront, fishing and other sports.
This story was originally published January 10, 2022 at 1:05 PM.
