Hi CoBirders,
-- Friday January 28 I made the long journey from home to spend the morning at Cottonwood Canyon along the border of Baca and Las Animas Counties. This iconic Colorado birding spot is pretty far out there and far off paved roads. It took me about 5 hours to get there from home, arriving at the canyon just before 8 am. Yes, a five hour drive. It's good to travel it in the dark, though, or you'd never get there for all the birding on the way. The area is mostly visited in the spring and summer, when birds are more diverse and some fun migrants and nesting species live there. There are three eBird hotspots for the Cottonwood Canyon area, and these offer a perspective on sparse winter birding coverage. Collectively these three hotspots had only 10 prior complete checklists ever submitted from the area for January, and none of the three hotspots had any complete lists reported since last September. The CFO County Birding page has an account for Cottonwood Canyon on its Baca County page. The description begins encouragingly, "This remote and beautiful canyon is one of the most unique in the state. It is home to plants, butterflies, and even birds that regularly occur nowhere else in Colorado." Directions and some more info are here: https://coloradocountybirding.org/County/BySite.aspx?SiteID=36&CountyID=5
I had been to Cottonwood Canyon once before, in early October. Although January is "off-season" I wanted to go see what was there and to be in that lovely country. In winter, with the cold temps and late sunrise, it is not worth getting there too early. When I arrived about an hour after sunrise, much of the canyon was still in morning shadow. Cottonwood Canyon is similar to the other canyons of southeastern Colorado. It is relatively shallow, with rimrock above canyon slopes with varied and often sparse juniper cover, and a riparian corridor. Las Animas County Road 24.4 drops you quickly into the upper canyon area, where the surrounding slopes come down near to the drainage. Here the canyon has a unique character with large full-on tree-size Gamble oaks, fat cottonwoods and junipers growing densely in the canyon bottom, with oak scrub and junipers fairly dense along the side slopes. The oaks add a different character. The stream flows all year, and had many open water areas on my visit. A Baca County road follows the canyon downstream to south-southeast, as it broadens out and the riparian corridor is isolated amid grassland, and the side slopes become more sparsely vegetated with juniper and less scrub oak.
I sampled the canyon's birds along about five miles over three and a half hours. I noted 35 species, which I've listed below with my counts from the checklists I made. The biriest areas were along the canyon slopes where there was scrub oak, and locally in some weedy patches along the road. The large trees had relatively little now, except for woodpeckers. Rare birds were a Black-throated Sparrow with a large White-crowned flock in Baca County, and a Green-tailed Towhee in Las Animas County. I had the three towhees together there, and towhees were one of the delights of my canyon tour. Spotted Towhees were ridiculously common, with small parties everywhere there were scrub oaks. I tallied 102 Spotteds! Sometimes there were flocks of 8-12 birds. I'd pish and they just kept coming up. No doubt a thorough count of all the Spotteds in the whole canyon find several 100s. Species characteristic of the southeastern canyons were represented with 2 Greater Roadrunners, 16 Ladder-backed Woodpeckers, 2 Juniper Titmouse, 2 Canyon Wrens, 24 Canyon Towhees, and 5 Rufous-crowned Sparrows. A total of 26 woodpeckers was a satisfying result. The local junipers did not have many berries, so Mountain Bluebirds and American Robins were not especially plentiful, but there were a moderate number of Tonsend's Solitaires. I enjoyed finding 2 Mallards in a large open pool along the stream; knowing how limited open water is out in that area, I imagined that maybe they were the only two ducks for many miles around.
The most striking and memorable thing at Cottonwood Canyon was the silence. But for the occasional breeze, the mewing calls of Spotted Towhees, the carrying croaks of ravens, and the shallow new snow under my boots, it was... silent. I didn't see another person until after 11:30 am., although I was on county roads all along. It was a bit of paradise.
David Suddjian
Ken Caryl Valley
Littleton, CO
Mallard, 2
Wild Turkey, 41
Greater Roadrunner, 2
Golden Eagle, 2
Red-tailed Hawk, 1
Great Horned Owl, 1
Downy Woodpecker, 1
Ladder-backed Woodpecker, 16
Hairy Woodpecker, 6
Northern Flicker, 3
Woodhouse-s Scrub-Jay, 7
American Crow, 9
Common Raven, 38
Juniper Titmouse, 3
White-breasted Nuthatch, 2
Rock Wren, 2
Canyon Wren, 2
Bewick's Wren, 2
Curve-billed Thrasher, 1
Sage Thrasher, 3
Mountain Bluebird, 17
Townsend's Solitaire, 21
American Robin, 19
House Finch, 14
American Goldfinch, 2
Black-throated Sparrow,1
American Tree Sparrow, 12
Dark-eyed Junco, 48
White-crowned Sparrow, 96
Harris's Sparrow, 1
Song Sparrow, 9
Canyon Towhee, 24
Rufous-crowned Sparrow, 5
Green-tailed Towhee, 1
Spotted Towhee, 103
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