cobirds colorado rare bird

Tuesday, 1 September 2026

[cobirds] Mount Zion Hawk Watch at Windy Saddle Park (01 Sep 2026) 14 Raptors

Mount Zion Hawk Watch at Windy Saddle Park
Golden, Greater Denver, Colorado, USA

To see hourly weather data and details of migrant raptors, look up this watch at hawkcount.org. This is a new raptor migration site identified and designated in mid-September 2024. This is Colorado's 1st fall hawk watch site, and the second hawk watch in Colorado. To get to the site which is along Lookout Mountain Rd. in Golden, enter either Windy Saddle Park or Mount Zion into Google Maps on your favorite navigation app, or enter the coordinates 39.7368,-105.2454. From the parking lot ascend the stone steps to the watch site. EVERYONE IS WELCOME TO THE HAWK WATCH TO ENJOY THE SPECTACLE OF RAPTOR MIGRATION, EVEN IF YOU KNOW NOTHING ABOUT IDENTIFYING RAPTORS IN FLIGHT. We will help you to learn Raptor ID if you are interested. See https://groups.google.com/g/cobirds/c/Oznn4uc6MBk

Daily Raptor Counts: Sep 01, 2026
Species	Day's Count	Month Total	Season Total
Black Vulture	0	0	0
Turkey Vulture	2	2	107
Osprey	5	5	7
Bald Eagle	0	0	1
Northern Harrier	0	0	1
Sharp-shinned Hawk	0	0	3
Cooper's Hawk	0	0	14
American Goshawk	0	0	0
Broad-winged Hawk	0	0	0
Red-tailed Hawk	5	5	162
Rough-legged Hawk	0	0	0
Swainson's Hawk	2	2	17
Ferruginous Hawk	0	0	0
Golden Eagle	0	0	1
American Kestrel	0	0	20
Merlin	0	0	0
Peregrine Falcon	0	0	1
Prairie Falcon	0	0	1
Mississippi Kite	0	0	0
Unknown Accipitrine	0	0	0
Unknown Buteo	0	0	1
Unknown Falcon	0	0	0
Unknown Eagle	0	0	0
Unknown Raptor	0	0	1
Total:	14	14	337

Observation start time:	08:30:00
Observation end time:	13:00:00
Total observation time:	4.5 hours
Official Counter	Ajit Antony
Observers:	Liza Antony

Visitors:
3 hikers asked what we were doing, but weren't interested and asking any more questions.

Weather:
Cool and pleasant after the rain last evening, which wasn't a front going through but a "monsoonal moisture plume" which is a narrow stream of humid subtropical air flowing from south and east. As a result there was an overcast sky initially gradually improving. Cirrus, alto- and strato-cumulus clouds. A slight haziness around Denver probably because of residual moisture in the air. Very clear air today, so the sun felt very hot. Light winds from the East.

Raptor Observations:
The first raptor was a migrant OS at 9:45 a.m. DST, with another OS at a different location migrating in a different direction 4 minutes later. 22 minutes later two more OS seen migrating together. A 5th OS at a great height and a great distance in the 11:00 MST hour migrating. In the same hour I was observing a distant hawk when I saw a shadow passing near using my peripheral vision, and it turned out to be an adult Swainson's Hawk which joined another one and they migrated together. Non-migrant raptors: from yesterday we began counting RT and TV hourly and selecting the highest number seen in any hour as we were enumerating too many of them probably from repeat observations over Lookout Mountain. RT 7 with one tail-chasing a CORA, TV 13 including a group of 3 with one diving frequently on another, CH 1.

Non-raptor Observations:
Paragliders 9, starting 10:30 a.m. with excellent lift going very high. The Soaring Forecast of the NWS predicted lift at 10 ft per second but surprisingly the height of thermals was only 9,449 ft above ground level. I looked it up and the reason is that the wet ground from the rain yesterday would not heat up, as well as the rain could cause a layer of cool air at ground level as well as a subsidence inversion layer aloft limiting the height of thermals. BGGN 1, WTSW 15, VGSW 5, WOSJ 1, GTTO 1, WEBL6, SPTO 1, HAWO 1, NOFL 1, BTHU3.

Predictions:
Mostly sunny, with a high near 86. West wind 5 to 7 mph becoming east in the afternoon. The winds aloft are predicted light from the SSW changing to ESE.

Report submitted by Ajit Antony (aiantony@earthlink.net)
More information at hawkcount.org: [Site Profile] [Day Summary] [Month Summary]

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[cobirds] Bird Conservancy of the Rockies - Barr Lake Banding Report, 9/1/26

Wilson's Warblers are having a BIG year! Banded 120 of them this morning. You could stand near a net and watch 6 or 8 of them fly in. Or turn around to leave and look back and see there were more. Wild!

Also caught 25 other nice birds, including a Nashville Warbler, the first since 2021. Here's the breakdown of the 145 new birds caught today:

Mourning Dove 1

Hammond's Flycatcher 1

Western Flycatcher 1

Red-breasted Nuthatch 3

White-breasted Nuthatch 1 (FOS)

Northern House Wren 2

Orange-crowned Warbler 4

Nashville Warbler 1 (FOS)

Yellow Warbler 5

MacGillivray's Warbler 2

Common Yellowthroat 4

Wilson's Warbler 120

We are open Tuesday through Saturday, weather permitting, through October 23. Most weekday mornings there is a visitor session from 7:30 to 8:30, and on the weekends there are sessions at 8, 9 and 10 a.m. Reservations are needed; here is the link. Please join us......It is a great year to visit Barr!

Meredith McBurney

Bander, Barr Lake Station

Bird Conservancy of the Rockies

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[cobirds] Chico Basin Ranch Banding Station Report-Bird Conservancy of The Rockies- September 1, 2026

The first day of September proved to be a slow, quiet day in the olive grove. We did catch a Warbling Vireo. Measurements did not identify it as an Eastern or Western Warbling Vireo. It would not sing for us! That would have been helpful. So it had to be recorded as Unknown Warbling Vireo. We did take tail feathers and measurements that DNA could be used to hopefully in the future be able to ID them to Western or Eastern in the hand.

12 New Banded Birds

Wilson's Warbler- 4

Lesser Golfinch- 1

Western Wood-pewee- 3

Dusky Flycatcher- 1

Red-breasted Nuthatch- 1

Warbling Vireo- 1

Brown Thrasher- 1

2 Recaptures- other gained weight since day banded

Gray Catbird- gained 4 grams since it was banded on 8/26

Northern Mockingbird- gained a gram since banded on 8/29

The Banding station will e open tomorrow through Saturday from Sunrise until @ 11:30AM. If interested in visiting the ranch, please register on the Aiken Audubon Website www.aikenaudubon.com

Enjoy the Day,

Julie Shieldcastle

Chico Basin Ranch, Bander

Bird Conservancy of the Rockies

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[cobirds] Yearbirder v.2: Recordings and Community Sightings

Hi folks,

I’ve spent four months improving Yearbirder to respond to your comments, add features, and polish the app. The result is Yearbirder 2.14, now available at https://yearbirder.org. As usual, Yearbirder is a free, open-source app.

If you missed my introduction of Yearbirder in May, here’s the recap: Yearbirder is a free desktop app that lets you explore your personal eBird sightings through sortable lists, charts, graphs, and interactive maps — all filtered any way you choose. If you're a photographer or recordist, it also organizes your bird photos and recordings alongside your sightings, so you can browse, rate, and map them the way a birder thinks.

Four key new features since May:

1. Community Sightings. Yearbirder now lets you explore what the eBird community is seeing, with hotspot maps, notable sightings lists, and all-community sightings lists. Each of these lists also shows which species would be life, country, state, county, and year birds for you. I find these maps and reports really helpful for planning my next outing.

2. Recordings. Yearbirder now lets you import your WAV recordings and then sort and filter them by species, family, order, location, and date, in addition to filters for recording properties, like duration, sample rate, bit depth, channels, and recording device. Recording birds is a new hobby for me, and I’ve spent a few months polishing this new feature of the app to be as robust as the photography feature.

3. Media caching. Yearbirder can now display galleries of photos and recording spectrograms nearly instantaneously as a result of a media caching system. Even if you have thousands of photos, now you can see a grid display of, say, all your Spizella sparrows photographed in Colorado — within a second.

4. Vastly improved media importing. Yearbirder uses the date and time embedded in your photo and recording files to match them to a checklist automatically. If your media file names include the species name in any form, the app should be able to match them. Yearbirder now checks the file name against the species' eBird code, banding code, common name, and scientific name — plus a fallback for the intuitive-but-wrong four-letter codes many of us type. For most media, now you should only need to click OK to import the file. This is way faster and more reliable than with version 1 of the app.

Yearbirder currently runs on macOS (Apple Silicon) and Windows 10 and 11 (64-bit). Windows ARM machines run it under emulation, and some features will feel a little slow. You can run it from source on Linux. If you need a version for a different platform, like macOS Intel, let me know and I'll consider building it.

If you use Yearbirder, I'd greatly appreciate hearing from you — please drop me an email at rtrinkner@icloud.com. I'd especially welcome thoughts on the new recordings feature, as I'm new to the recordists' world.

Good birding,

Richard Trinkner

Boulder

[cobirds] migration activity near Fort Collins (Larimer)

It has been hard to miss animal migration in the Fort Collins area of late.

The CSU students are back in force. The streets are full of cars with 100K on their odometers. The bars and downtown sidewalks are great places to observe “Amateur Hour”, as the restaurant staffers refer to it.

Sunday August 30^th at Grandview Cemetery, Wilson’s Warblers, Townsend’s Warblers, Western Wood-Pewees, a few unidentified empids, a flock of 45 Chipping Sparrows (mostly immatures), an Olive-sided Flycatcher, a couple Western Tanagers, a heard-only grosbeak, recently fledged Barn Swallows and Broad-tailed Hummingbirds, all screamed, “We’re migrating!” or “We’re about to migrate for the first time, can’t wait”.

Back at Grandview Cemetery yesterday, my mission was photographing Townsend’s Warbler and Hammond’s Flycatcher (which I was all but certain one of yesterday’s empids was). No luck. But I did see more migrants: Orange-crowned Warbler exploring weeds enhanced by the ditch company’s channelizing of the ditch (and rape of the bank) last spring, juvenile Spotted Towhee, more Wilson’s Warblers (eliciting the beginnings of that old feeling I get every fall when they become so numerous you wish to suspend them in an aerial “penalty box” just to reveal what else is out there), more Western Tanagers, one Black-headed Grosbeak, a female MacGillivray’s Warbler and a Say’s Phoebe. 60ish Canada Geese migrated at 0.1 mph from the cemetery across Laporte Avenue to eat and fight over apples. I had never seen that before.

Yesterday, as I ate my lunch in the parking lot next to Subway on North College Avenue, a golden-mantled ground-squirrel caught my eye. This denizen of the lower mountains was out of place, to be sure. It explored under the Subway dumpster, then bee-lined straight for my car and appeared underneath my driver’s-side window. Then it zoomed straight over to another lone car parked 50 yards to my east. As I tried for a photo, it went up from the car underside into the engine compartment. And then the car drove off, without the ground-squirrel dropping down. My guess is the rodent migrated/hitch-hiked into town in the first place on a car that had been in Poudre Canyon, and then continued it’s urban adventure on another.

At the Hamilton Reservoir Overlook north of Wellington, little birds on migration came across the water n to s in reverse of the way they must over the Gulf of Mexico in spring yearning for sight of the Texas coast. The ones I could identify were all Chipping Sparrows and Wilson’s Warblers. Every tree and bush near the Overlook had a migrant or two in it.

I drove my shrike route east of Highway 85 ne of Nunn in hopes of seeing evidence of a second-nesting and some fresh impaling activity. The Pawnee is as green as I have seen it in years. The playas are full. While I saw no shrikes or recent prey displays on the wires, I saw plenty of interesting migrants on the wires and in the available vegetation! The four-winged saltbushes were full of common species in amazing numbers for the prairie. Mostly it was Wilson’s Warblers (100+), but there were a few Townsend’s Warblers (including one Tony would call “spanky”), Chipping Sparrows, Brewer’s Sparrows, Vesper Sparrows, a Lincoln’s Sparrow, at least three Hammond’s Flycatchers, a Western Wood-Pewee, multiple Sage Thrashers (mostly immatures), a Say’s Phoebe and my first Merlin of the season at low elevation.

From left to right: bright male Townsend’s Warbler, Wilson’s Warbler and Hammond’s Flycatcher (note: bullish head, mostly dark beak, gray head-green back-pale yellow undersides, long primary extension, teardrop eyering).

On Weld CR114 a mile or so east of US85, water is across the road (but drivable). Migrant Killdeers, Greater Yellowlegs and Solitary Sandpipers all frolicked in good numbers.

It has been a great couple of days, thanks for migration, to see changes in my normal patches. As I wrote in my journal this morning, I heard a familiar call but one that was not normal for the apartment complex. It was a Woodhouse’s Scrub-Jay, only the second at this location in 30 years (the first was 12 September 2005). Stuff happens. Corvids disperse in autumn. This one must have been waiting for us to turn the calendar to September and it be legal to roam. Overhead I heard a migrating Chimney Swift and an elevational-migrant Red-breasted Nuthatch.

Let’s rejoice in the fact Earth isn’t completely screwed up and migrations still happen.

Dave Leatherman

Fort Collins

Monday, 31 August 2026

[cobirds] RIVOLI'S HUMMINGBIRD, Summit County

Hi all,

Late this evening, I photographed a female Rivoli's Hummingbird at a private residence in Frisco (Summit County). The bird was only present for a few minutes and departed shortly after; it did not return in the remaining time I was there. List with back-of-camera photos here: eBird Checklist - 31 Aug 2026 - Bills Ranch Area - 19 species (+1 other taxa).

Regarding viewing: the feeders are on a private deck at Mountainside Condos. The feeders are easily seen from the public road at (39.568260, -106.092016) with binoculars. Please stay on the road and off the lawn, walkways, and the complex parking lot of Mountainside Condos, which is private. Please also be mindful of the people living here: keep binoculars on the feeder, keep voices down, and be aware that these are people's homes. The residents have not invited anyone onto the property, so viewing depends entirely on birders being unobtrusive and respectful. Thank you!

Good birding,

Jack Bushong

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[cobirds] Mount Zion Hawk Watch at Windy Saddle Park (31 Aug 2026) 25 Raptors

Daily Raptor Counts: Aug 31, 2026
Species	Day's Count	Month Total	Season Total
Black Vulture	0	0	0
Turkey Vulture	8	105	105
Osprey	1	2	2
Bald Eagle	0	1	1
Northern Harrier	0	1	1
Sharp-shinned Hawk	0	3	3
Cooper's Hawk	2	14	14
American Goshawk	0	0	0
Broad-winged Hawk	0	0	0
Red-tailed Hawk	14	157	157
Rough-legged Hawk	0	0	0
Swainson's Hawk	0	15	15
Ferruginous Hawk	0	0	0
Golden Eagle	0	1	1
American Kestrel	0	20	20
Merlin	0	0	0
Peregrine Falcon	0	1	1
Prairie Falcon	0	1	1
Mississippi Kite	0	0	0
Unknown Accipitrine	0	0	0
Unknown Buteo	0	1	1
Unknown Falcon	0	0	0
Unknown Eagle	0	0	0
Unknown Raptor	0	1	1
Total:	25	323	323

Observation start time:	08:30:00
Observation end time:	13:00:00
Total observation time:	4.5 hours
Official Counter	Ajit Antony
Observers:	Liza Antony

Visitors:
2 hikers asked what we were looking for.

Weather:
No smoke today over Denver, but there was a very mild haziness all over, even though the visibility was clear to DIA 39 km/25 miles.Completely overcast for most of the day with low stratus clouds, beautiful ground glass appearance perfect for finding hawks against.

Raptor Observations:
The first migrants were an RT ie diving onto a TV over the second antenna from the left on Lookout Mountain, and both migrated. In the 9:00 MST hour we saw an OS over North Table Mountain and once it went South of South Table Mountain against the trees and houses of Lakewood, we lost sight of it, but knowing that flight path and knowing that it would lose lift, we scanned the area at the base of the north end of Lookout Mountain where we found it, where it used the ridge lift and thermals to soar and fly SSE just west of Green Mountain. In the 11:00 hour we saw 2 juvenile CH over North Table Mountain chasing and diving on each other repeatedly seeming to be non-migrants, they then went north, then west, and finally went South over Lookout Mountain taking more than 5 minutes from the time we first saw them. Non-migrant raptors: CH 1, SS 2, AK 1, TV 8, RT 10.

Non-raptor Observations:
The first paraglider at 10:45 a.m. DST had no lift and could not even rise to our level, 3 at 11:30 caught thermals but got only a little higher than our level. The Soaring Forecast had lift at 14 ft per second with the height of thermals only 10,280 ft AGL which is only half a mile above the watch, good for us as we would be able to find hawks at that height. BGGN 1, WTSW 3, VGSW 2, WEBL 8, TOSO 1, WOSJ 1, WBNU 1, BTHU 2, MOCH 1, NOFL 1, CORA 5, AMCR 1.

Predictions:
A slight chance of showers and thunderstorms between noon and 3pm. Cloudy through mid morning, then gradual clearing, with a high near 83. Light and variable wind becoming northeast 5 to 7 mph in the afternoon. Chance of precipitation is 20%.

Report submitted by Ajit Antony (aiantony@earthlink.net)
More information at hawkcount.org: [Site Profile] [Day Summary] [Month Summary]

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