STORY AND PHOTOS BY KAREN BOSSICK

The Wood River Valley’s fine feathered friends appear to be in good hands, thanks to valley teens, while others are making an effort to help out local insects.

Students in Scott Runkel’s ornithology class at Sun Valley Community School took part in the 2025 Earth Fest held last week in Hailey where they showed attendees how to make bird feeders using coffee creamer and Gatorade bottles that they filled with Nyjer seed, sunflower seeds and other types of seeds.

The students have been birdwatching along Trail Creek near the school campus, and they’ve been raising duck eggs.

Kelsey Parfitt shows the makings of a Bug Hotel.

“I’ve learned that some birds don’t migrate—they will stay here all winter,” said Torin Vandenburgh. “And I saw a black-bellied plover that spend their summers in the Arctic, then migrate as many as 10,000 miles to places like South America or Australia during winter.”

The duck eggs that the students are watching over are due to begin hatching any day. They include an assortment from mallards, pintails and Pekin ducks.

“It’s pretty cool—we can put them under a light and see their embryos. We started with 14 and some died. The survival of ducks in the wild is just 15 percent,” she added.

While Vandenburgh and her fellow students, including Naomi Gorringe and Ashlyn Brown, showed adults and children how to make bird feeders, Kelsey Parfitt, communications director for the Wood River Land Trust, shows passersby how to build a Bug Hotel

Hannah Harris handed out composting charts.

Insect hotels, or bug houses, are built out of natural and recycled materials to provide shelter and nesting sites for various insects, Parfitt said. They serve such populations as ladybugs and lacewings, both beneficial insects preying on aphids and other garden pests; solitary bees, which nest in tunnels and cavities of bug hotels when not pollinating, and spiders which help control insect populations by consuming the insects.

Event as Parfitt talked, Cory McCaffrey created his bug hotel by layering a small container with twigs, leaves, pinecones and woodchips. He added a little moss and hay and created tunnels and hideaways with hollow stems and bamboo stalks.

Once done, it was ready to be put in a dry sunny place in a garden or on a patio. Come winter it can be moved under a roof or into a shed.

While some attendees busied themselves with the hands-on activities, Hannah Harris of Sun Valley Resilience Institute handed out composting charts. Cathy Tyson, a member of the Climate Action Coalition showed a pizza she had constructed with various size slices showing how much food people throw away on average versus other things.

Cathy Tyson made a pizza showing the percentages of things we throw away.

Tyson, it appeared, doesn’t throw much away—she wore a bracelet made of recycled typewriter keys and a belt made of bottle caps and a seat belt buckle.

Thirteen people took part in an alleyway of mini garage sales, selling clothing, shoes, even Yeti coolers and a telescope out of their car trunks.

And Town Center West was buzzing with people mending clothing and ironing patches on ski wear to save them from the landfill. Todd Mandeville and Ashton Wilson, meanwhile, kept busy repairing people’s lamps.

“My father’s an engineer who didn’t want to buy anything so if something fell into disrepair he took it to the garage, and I’d follow him,” said Wilson. “It’s come in handy today!”

Ashton Wilson kept busy repairing lamps while others showed people how to sharpen knives and fix wobbly chair legs.