Well, things started off on a thematically correct note. Thursday evening, Feb. 19, Hannah Floyd and Andrew Floyd and I stopped off at Neenoshe Reservoir, Kiowa County, where the very first birds we saw were Snow Geese, several hundred of them, streaming northeast. Then several hundred more, and then another couple of flocks. Well over a thousand. And that would be about it for us, goose-wise, for our entire time at the 13th annual High Plains Snow Goose Festival. Our only other sighting, of a single individual in downtown Lamar, Prowers County, was problematic (photo: tinyurl.com/2015-02-21-goose).
-- Alrighty, no more geese for us, but plenty of snow. More about that in a moment. First, the birds.
Willow Creek in Lamar was birdy, as usual. In the course of several jaunts there, Hannah and Andrew and I saw a Yellow-bellied Sapsucker (photo: tinyurl.com/2015-02-20-YBSA), two or three Carolina Nuthatches (audio: xeno-canto.org/214121), a Northern Cardinal (audio: xeno-canto.org/214446), an Eastern Hairy Woodpecker (audio: xeno-canto.org/214448) and an Eastern Downy Woodpecker, a Golden-crowned Kinglet and a Brown Creeper, several small flocks of Cedar Waxwings, scattered Yellow-rumped Warblers (all auduboni, as far as I could tell), a Great-tailed Grackle and a Brown-headed Cowbird, and a flyover Lapland Longspur. The only towhee we laid eyes on looked to be an arcticus ("Great Plains") Spotted Towhee, and five of the collared-doves we saw looked to have African Collared-Dove genes; Bill Blackburn independently reported the same five individuals.
Our field trip Saturday afternoon, Feb. 21, to "The Black Hole" (Two Buttes State Wildlife Area, below the dam, Baca County) was highlighted by a Rusty Blackbird along the creek. We saw porcupines (not birds), three of them, as we almost always do on this outing. Other birds in The Black Hole included a screeching Woodhouse's Scrub-Jay, a fussbudget Canyon Wren, 5 heavenly Mountain Bluebirds, and 4 seriously confused Canvasbacks. On the drive out, we saw 2 Scaled Quail, 2 Ferruginous Hawks, and ravens; and we pondered the wisdom of Bill Maynard.
Because of the weather, Hannah and Andrew and I had to stay over into Monday morning, Feb. 23. So, on a tip from Meredith Anderson, we headed over to Fairmount Cemetery, Lamar, where we re-found Meredith's Red-bellied Woodpecker, black-tailed jackrabbit (not a bird), dueling Townsend's Solitaires (audio: soundcloud.com/ted-floyd/toso), and swarms of Pine Siskins. The flickers in the cemetery were Yellow-shafted Flickers (audio: xeno-canto.org/214589). On the drive back to Boulder County, a gleaming male Common Grackle in Byers, Arapahoe County, was a bit of a surprise.
I mentioned the weather. By midday Friday, we were in T-shirts (Andrew, slightly less), stalking a sun-bathing mourning cloak (not a bird) along Willow Creek. Then it turned cloudy, and then windy, and then a full-on dust storm; Saturday was overcast early, then rain and sleet in the afternoon, then snow in the early evening, then heavy snow with spectacular lightning after nightfall; Sunday was cold and humid with snow showers; and the drive back Monday was frigid with freezing fog, blowing snow, and car wrecks (trucks, too) everywhere. We couldn't get from Kit Carson to Limon (road closure, accident), so we made our way along I-70 from Siebert, wending our way past spinouts and wrecks much of the way back into the Denver area.
Back to birds (and other wildlife). The High Plains Snow Goose Festival has this wonderfully à la carte aspect about it. Everybody does their own thing. I have to say, it is as much fun hearing about other people's adventures as it is experiencing our own. The folks on Laneha Everett's tour saw elk ("alk") and Greater Roadrunners and bighorn sheep; how often do you see multiple roadrunners and a herd of elk in the same place? Several participants in Duane Nelson's plover-and-tern workshop were inspired to sign on as volunteers later this year. And a White-tailed Ptarmigan was reported in downtown Lamar (photo: tinyurl.com/Lamar-ptarmigan)! There was one unifying theme, though: We were all brought together at The Cow Palace (photo: tinyurl.com/Cow-Palace-Lamar), which has to be the best hotel name in my experience. And each registrants' schwag bag was stuffed beyond capacity (video: tinyurl.com/Snow-Goose-schwag). Other than that, it was do-your-own-thing (video: tinyurl.com/Willow-Creek-hijinks), a strategy that has much to recommend.
Thanks to Vincent Gearhart and all the steering committee folks for a memorable weekend. Can't wait till next year!
Ted Floyd
Lafayette, Boulder County, Colorado
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