I led a small field trip into Weld County for the Boulder Bird Club yesterday and we had a great time of it. It would probably be as easy to describe what we didn't see beyond what Steve Mlodinow, Charlie Nims and Gary Lefko have already mentioned from yesterday. It was a great day to be out in the greater Beebe and Pawnee areas.
We started off at the ponds outside St. Vrain St. Park at CO 119 and I-25. The rookery there is hosting about 30 or so Great Egret nest and maybe 50 Great Blue Heron nests, but no other species seems to have joined the colony yet. There are also two occupied Osprey platforms. Next came a look at several Burrowing Owls east of Platteville on Rd. 32 just before it turns to miss Milton Res. The Beebe Draw area had little of great novelty or numbers but the marshes south of Lower Latham (Joe, does that then make them Upper Latham?) has at least 3 and maybe 5 pairs of Northern Harriers. One thing that we did see there that hasn't been mentioned otherwise was a Peregrine Falcon perched on a pole south of the road. Of the shorebirds mentioned by Steve at Loloff we saw the Solitary (and some Leasts elsewhere) plus a few Baird's and a single Lesser Yellowlegs. Black-necked Stilts were in several spots, almost as numerous as American Avocets. Does anyone else remember when this was a somewhat unusual bird? BBA I reports them from exactly 5 priority blocks! Montfort Marsh (aka Rd 59 ponds) were a disappointment, and it was somewhere around there that me must have passed Steve and Christian as we were doing their route sort of in reverse. We headed up to Crow Valley after not getting much around Barnesville. The ski lake off CO 392-it is a turn off about a mile NE of 61.5 and usually worth a look-had a Ring-necked Pheasant on the back shore. Our stop at Crow was not productive. However, CR 96 through Murphy's Pasture ended up being Class A birding. We started off slowly in the wind with only looks at a single Vesper Sparrow, a pair of Sage Thrashers and a Say's Phoebe before we caught up with others leaving the intersection of 96 and 69. There we saw the otherwise mentioned pair of Mountain Plovers plus a pre-territorial flock of about a dozen McCown's Longspurs. We also heard about the congregation of Long-billed Curlews at 96 and 61 and so went for them where we counted 22. Next we stopped at "Norma's Grove" (57 & 100) with a single Gray-headed Junco before heading to Black Hollow Res. Here we tallied most of what Steve reported giving us a total of 7 gulls for the day-we were silly to not try for the Kittiwake and I bet Steve must have had a Bonaparte's somewhere that we did not. Bill Kaempfer Boulder -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Colorado Birds" group. To post to this group, send email to cobirds@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to cobirds+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/cobirds?hl=en.
