[cobirds] Park County, June 22

Hello, Birders.

First things first. There was no Pomarine Jaeger, as far as I could tell, for Hannah and Andrew and me at Antero Reservoir, Park County, yesterday, Saturday, June 22nd. We could have missed the jaeger, of course, but we spent a fair bit of time along the stretch of shore described previously by Eric DeFonso et al. Then again, we spent most of our time there beachcombing...

Jaeger or no, Antero is hopping, and surely well worth the visit. Some of the stuff we found out there: 1 Great Egret, 2 Snowy Egrets, 1 Black-crowned Night-Heron, an early-ish Marbled Godwit, 139 American Avocets, 140 White-faced Ibises, 95 Eared Grebes, 364 American Coots, ~50 California Gulls, a Clark's Grebe amid ~50 Western Grebes, 182 American White Pelicans, 88 Double-crested Cormorants, 1,000+ Canada Geese, and a great throng of ducks. Ducks included 65 Gadwalls, 6 American Wigeons, ~75 Mallards, 2 Blue-winged Teal, 11 Cinnamon Teal, 8 Green-winged Teal, 1 Northern Pintail, 52 Lesser Scaup, 6 Redheads, 34 Common Mergansers, and 9 Ruddy Ducks.

[On a non-birding note, we witnessed a horrific pit-bull attack in the campground. Antero's aquatic insects were spectacular, highlighted by a plague of some caddisfly, perhaps in the genus Triaenodes. Leatherman?]

Over at High Creek Fen [PRIVATE], we joined up with botanizers from The Nature Conservancy in Colorado, and saw such goodies as chiming bells, autumn willow, Greenland primrose, shooting stars, Indian paintbrush, and many others. Birds were scarce, but we saw several male Wilson's Phalaropes, including one vigorously defending a nest--a behavior I'd never seen. Also typical fen birds like Wilson's Snipe, Lincoln's and Savannah sparrows, and Brewer's Blackbird. Insects: The dark and beautiful Erebia epipsodea (an alpine, a kind of butterfly) was ubiquitous; we also saw Melissa blues (butterfly), lots of Hesperia skippers, and an excellent "sawyer" in the long-horned beetle genus Monochamus.

We wandered a bit on the way home and wound up in Frisco (Summit County), where I heard an unbelievably vocal county life bird Sora.

A final thought: The male Mountain Bluebird ought to be the national bird of Park County. The species was never out of sight, it seemed.

Ted Floyd

tedfloyd57@hotmail.com

Lafayette, Boulder County, Colorado