Re: [cobirds] Greater Prairie Chicken (2) in Morgan County

This report is north of the Platte corridor, and I was interested to see in eBird that this species is fairly seldom reported much north of the Platte corridor in Morgan, Washington, and Logan counties. Grreat Prairie-Chicken eBird map.  I presume it reflects some habitat differences south and north of the corridor? Less sand-sage habitat north of the corridor?

David Suddjian

Littleton, CO

Screenshot of the GPCH map, showing the Antony's report as the western red pin 

On Wed, Feb 5, 2025 at 8:41 AM aiantony <aiantony@earthlink.net> wrote:

Yesterday evening, we were near the end of one of the four Winter Raptor Surveys we do for HMA (the Hawk Migration Association, formerly HMANA) on CR2 going South toward Jackson Lake, when we espied two distant binocular birds which did not look like raptors on a utility pole along the road, and after a quick glance, passed them off as pigeons.

When we got closer, they looked like grouse, but which one? Liza said the only ones around here were Sharp-tailed, but when we looked in the Merlin app at images, it didn't look like that species, in that

it was strongly and heavily barred both dorsally as well as ventrally.

I took a cell phone picture from about 30 yards away from inside the car and submitted to Merlin, (which I've never done before to identify a species), and its first attempt was 'Red-tailed Hawk', and another picture could not be identified by it at all.

 

We backed up in the car, got our 'scope out, and using the car as a blind, studied it, as well as well as got better cell phone images through the scope.

This time when Liza sent it to Merlin, it said it was Greater Prairie Chicken!!!!

I sent in two digiscoped images as well and got the same answer.

Looking at the images of that species on Merlin we knew that Merlin was correct.

Liza entered it into eBird, and there was a solid red circle for rare, and the comment said 'Unreported.'

https://ebird.org/checklist/S211997030

We had only seen the species once at a lek on a CFO trip in 2019 led by Bill Kaempfer, and obviously, since we couldn't identify the species ourselves yesterday, we had been focusing on the spectacle rather than how to identify the species if we saw it again elsewhere.

Ajit and Liza Antony

Central Park Colorado

Sent from my Galaxy

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