Why this group wants Waterloo to become a bird-friendly city

So an official bird is required for the bird friendly city application and it's a good way to teach people about a certain species of bird and help them kind of identify with one and it makes them feel like it's important to have a bird friendly city. How extensive is it to get Waterloo to become a bird-friendly city? It's a lot of work and it requires a group of volunteers to all work together a lot to help. It's a 54-page document. There are three main sections which are reducing threats to birds, community education and outreach, and protecting and restoring habitat. Every year we have to keep meeting criteria and renew the application every year. Constantly working together, doing programs and doing different initiatives to reduce threats and hopefully change bylaws and just influence the city to become more bird friendly. Tell me a little bit about the birds that are the runner ups here for this vote. Yeah we have the American Woodcock which is a plump brown bird which inhabits the grassy meadows and probes for worms with its long bill. The red-bellied woodpecker, which is a beautiful red, black, and white woodpecker. And we're actually almost at the northern limit of their range. They have the smallest range in Canada out of all the woodpeckers, but their range is expanding north with climate change. We have the chimney swift which is a species at risk. It nests in chimneys and it's an aerial insectivore which means it flies around all day catching insects. Thanks. And then we have the red-tailed hawk which is the most common raptor in the area. We often see them perched on poles and branches along highways hunting for rodents and they're also one of the largest raptors. They're beautiful. The adults have a nice reddish orange tail. And then we have the cedar waxwing, which is a medium passerine that looks really silky, soft, and has a cool crest and black mask and beautiful waxy red tips on the wings.