Nick Komar and I spent the whole day birding Larimer County. We started the morning off at Annex Reservoir #8. Like Austin reported earlier today, it was devoid of loons. If anyone is interested, I posted a few photos of the loon from Thursday on my Flickr page here: https://flic.kr/p/qa5q99. From Annex 8 we headed to Cobb Lake where we found 2 Common Loons and a possible Thayer's Gull. The gull was on the darker side and the undersides of the primaries looked too dark for us to comfortably call it a Thayer's. After Cobb Lake we went to Poudre Reservoir #3. Nick mentioned to keep an eye out for black ducks, and I got excited when I spotted a darker Mallard-like duck. It wasn't a black duck, but it was a Mexican(ish) Mallard. I am still not very sure how to determine a pure/pure enough/obvious intergrade, but there was no green in the bird's head and there was not a whole lot of white in the tail. We also had 5 species of geese on the reservoir. We made a quick stop at Douglas Reservoir where we spotted the continuing Black and White-winged Scoters and Long-tailed Duck. We also relocated an interesting gull I found on Thursday, and as I suspected it turned out to be a small first-year Ring-billed Gull. Although we counted over 300 goldeneyes, we could not pick out any Barrow's. Another check of Annex #8 still did not produce the loon from earlier in the week. Our next stop was Timnath Reservoir where the second goldeneye I saw was a male Barrow's and Nick spotted a first-year gull with what looked like fairly uniform gray primaries. The gull flew away, but after we didn't find anything else out of the ordinary we tried to find the gull. It may have stopped at the Wal Mart on Harmony, because we found a first-year Thayer's Gull there along with a nice assortment of ducks and an interesting Herring Gull that showed a paler rump and more white in the tail than the average American Herring Gull. From there we met up with Georgia Doyle at Fossil Creek Reservoir. Although we did not find much of anything out of the ordinary, there was a decent number of birds including almost 50 American White Pelicans and over 500 Common Mergansers. As the daylight was fading we headed south to the northern part of Horseshoe Lake where we found likely the same Thayer's Gull from Wal Mart along with the continuing Mew Gull and 2 Mexican(ish) Mallards. One of the Mallards didn't have as much white in the tail or chestnut in the breast as the other one did. I also got very excited when I saw a dark gull that looked tiny. I was hoping for another species, but it turned out to be a late Franklin's Gull. We ended the day at Lake Loveland where we added our final species of gull for the day with 2 Lesser Black-backed Gulls. Nick also spotted and photographed (maybe poorly in the fading light?) a California Gull that had a noticeably paler back and a whiter head that was possibly from the northern Great Plains population. Overall it was a really fun day of birding highlighted by 26 species of waterfowl and 8 species of gulls.
Good Birding,Andy Bankert
Fort Collins, CO
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