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The San Antonio River Foundation will celebrate the role that insect pollinators play in nature with a party on Saturday at Confluence Park.
The Foundation’s Sara Ramirez helped produce the event: “We owe a lot to pollinators. So this event is to show our appreciation, learn a little bit about how pollinators are connected to our culinary traditions, to the food we eat every day, and to learn how we can better protect pollinators throughout our everyday lives."
She added: “Pollinators matter immensely to our environment and our ecosystem. One out of every three bites of food is made possible by pollinators.”
“Confluence Park is a wonderful park here in San Antonio, known for its sustainability,” she said. “The entire park is a water catchment system, so it's really the perfect place for an event like this to show how we can be more eco-friendly and sustainable in our everyday lives, to support pollinators and other wildlife. And it's a gorgeous place. We've won several architecture awards.”
The entire structure was engineered to route all rain waters into a huge underground storage, which then is used to water the native plants around the structure.
“We're going to have tons of activities, including over 30 education tables from our partners. We're going to be doing a pollinator Prowl, recipe scavenger hunt, where you can learn about the four main types of pollinators that we have around Texas, including bats, butterflies, bees and hummingbirds.”
She said the party will also include art installations and chalk pollinator murals.
Pollinators have had a pretty tough decade, with precipitous drops in some forms of butterflies and bees. There are a lot of reasons for that, among them are the encroachment of people into areas that were previously unspoiled nature where the pollinators lived.
“[The party is about] learning more about our six-legged friends, from insects to bats to hummingbirds to bees, all of these are wonderful pollinators in San Antonio,” Ramirez said. “So we can definitely do our part to help increase numbers of pollinators throughout the world.”
Saturday’s event runs from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. and is free.
