Mark Good Friday on your calendar and plan a trip to Beamer Memorial Conservation Area in Grimsby. Every year on this day, rain or shine, sleet or snow, volunteers with the Niagara Peninsula Hawkwatch host this special day of activities with chances to see raptors (hawks, owls, falcons, vultures and eagles), way, way up - or if we are lucky, close, close up. 

 
Throughout the day there are educational and informative talks about the migration by Niagara Peninsula Hawkwatch members. Niagara Nature Tours has volunteered for many years to run the children's programmes that brighten the spring landscape. The Mountsberg Raptor Centre (www.raptorcentre.ca) in Campbellville will be attending in 2011 with a few of their non-releasable birds of prey, which cannot return to the wild due to injury suffered via human impact on the environment. This is a wonderful opportunity to see a raptor up close.