PREMIER EVENT OF THE SUMMER:  Enjoy Unlimited Wine Tastings, Fabulous Food Pairings, Culinary Demonstrations, Live Entertainment and MORE! Get your Valparaiso Food & Wine Festival tickets while they last! Epicurean's looking for a one-of-a-kind summer evening in the park need to look no further! The Valparaiso Food & Wine Festival, which sells out every year, has been upgraded to a true VIP experience for 2016. "Taste & Sip" Tickets are $75 each and include unlimited wine tastings, food pairings from local upscale eateries, live entertainment by the Jeff Brown Trio, culinary demonstrations and artistic aerial performances! Gather your friends, celebrate a birthday or plan that perfect date night.  This great event is slated for Saturday, July 16 from 5 to 8pm. Get your tickets (click here) and then sit back and raise your glass to giving back to the community! Valparaiso Events is proud to be a non-profit organization that hosts over 80 days of events in the community each year. The majority of our events are family friendly and free. So your tickets to the Valparaiso Food and Wine Festival not only get you a VIP experience and a fun evening in the park, but you are supporting the year round efforts of an organization that works to create a vibrant and thriving community! Cheers! For more information on the Valparaiso Food & Wine Festival,  click here.

• If you are not an experienced birdwatcher, it can be tricky to glimpse a Brown Thrasher in a tangled mass of shrubbery, here at Songbird Prairie and once you do you may wonder how such a boldly patterned, gangly bird could stay so hidden. Brown Thrashers wear a somewhat severe expression thanks to their heavy, slightly down curved bill and staring yellow eyes. Brown Thrashers are exuberant singers, with one of the largest repertoires of any North American songbird.
  Brown Thrashers are fairly large, slender songbirds with long proportions—the legs are long and sturdy, and the bill is long and slightly down curved. The tail is long, too, and often cocked upward in the manner of wrens.
  Brown Thrashers are foxy brown birds with heavy, dark streaking on their whitish under parts. The face is gray-brown and the wings show two black-and-white wing bars. They have bright-yellow eyes
  Brown Thrashers skulk in shrubby tangles or forage on the ground below dense cover here on the certified natural habitat of Songbird Prairie. They’re most obvious when they sing their loud songs from shrubs and treetops. The song is a complex string of many musical phrases (many copied from other birds’ songs, with each phrase typically sung twice before moving on). They also make a distinctive, harsh tsuck note
  Scrubby fields, dense regenerating woods, and forest edges are the primary habitats of Brown Thrashers. They rarely venture far from thick undergrowth into which they can easily retreat. Come to scout out this amazing bird here at Songbird Prairie.