Join Lane County Queer Birders at Alton Baker Park for a morning of winter birding grounded in reflection, history, and community. This is one of our only weekday birding events of the year, and it falls on Martin Luther King Jr. Day—a time that often brings up big feelings alongside big questions about where we’re headed.

From the late 1800s until 1949, the land now known as Alton Baker Park was home to the Across the Bridge community—a segregated neighborhood where many Black residents of Eugene lived during a time when housing discrimination, and Eugene’s well-established reputation as a sundown town, severely limited where African Americans could rent or buy homes. In 1949, the Lane County Commissioner voted to bulldoze the community to rebuild the Ferry Street Bridge. Residents were given little to no notice before being abruptly displaced.

While the neighborhood was physically erased, its legacy of care, shared life, and deep-rooted community endures—reminding us that the fight for racial justice Dr. King called for is ongoing, unfinished, and unfolding right now.

This will be a gentle-paced, beginner-friendly walk with space for observation, conversation, and collective breathing room. Instead of promising a flashy species list, we’re offered something steadier: community, care, and a little light in the middle of winter.

Bring binoculars if you have them, warm layers either way, and whatever you’re carrying into the new year.