(Florida Today) – Citing an explosion of COVID-19 on the Space Coast and a warm winter without many migratory birds, the Space Coast Birding and Wildlife Festival — the premier ecotourism event in Central Florida — has been cancelled for the first time in its quarter-century existence.

The event, based in Titusville, draws hundreds of birders and venders from around the globe and is an important yearly economic boost for local businesses. But this year, COVID-19, a warm winter and coastal waters blooming with algae made it an easy call to cancel the event that longtime Indian River Lagoon activist Laurilee Thompson started 25 years ago.

“I’m sad,” Thompson said Thursday after the executive committee of the nonprofit that runs the event voted unanimously to cancel this year’s festival. “Our registrations were way down. There’s not a lot of birds here right now.” She added: “We didn’t want to disappoint people.”

Typically, about 600 people would register for the event. For this year’s event, which was planned for Feb. 2-6, it was about half that, she said.

Thompson cited increased fears over COVID-19, given recent cases from cruise ships and the fact that this year’s birding festival was for the first time going to be based out of the Radisson Resort at the Port in Cape Canaveral.

For the first 23 years, home base for the birding event had been Eastern Florida State College campus in Titusville.

The six-member executive board of the nonprofit Brevard Nature Alliance, which organizes the event, voted unanimously Thursday to cancel this year’s festival, Thompson said. While COVID was a main reason, Thompson emphasized that there’s a bigger, longer-term ecological picture.

Bart Gaetjens, chairman of the BNA executive board and a spokesman for Florida Power & Light Company, said it was a moral and ethical imperative to cancel the event. Gaetjens, said he decided to call Thursday’s emergency meeting to cancel the event after hearing what local emergency managers where saying about the local COVID-19 risk.

“We had a lot of cancellations,” Gaetjens said. “And the last thing we want to have our vendors disappointed … We want to live up to the expectations.”

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Thompson said she also could not in good conscience try to l birders to come to Brevard County during an ongoing mass manatee starvation and a dearth of birds.

“I’m embarrassed to try to entice people to come here and see what we’ve allowed to happen to our beautiful environment here,” Thompson said. “We have created a desert.”