Hear, hear, Ted! Great report.
And I second your observation about young Archer's preternatural birding skills, with which he runs circles around me in our shared Denver City Park home patch.
Thanks especially for suggestion No. 3 -- except I'd say don't "consider" adding field notes. Just do it (whether wearing Nikes or not).
To me, few things are sadder in eBird than checklists of species, their number (or worse, the lazy "X") . . . and nothing else.
It's probably because I'm a retired journalist and so writing comes easily to me, but still:
The first-draft-of-natural-history value of written comments in eBird canNOT be overstated.
I try to find something to say on my checklists about as many species encounters as possible. We all should.
And when birders take 10 seconds to note WHERE in the hotspot they encountered this bird or that, they're encouraging others to come find and enjoy the bird(s), too -- whether rare, uncommon, or just a damned fine example of a year-round resident, an empty nest, a mini-hotspot, weather, behavior, etc.
Thanks again for a thoroughly entertaining and informative report.
Patrick O'Driscoll
Denver
On Mon, Aug 25, 2025 at 1:33 PM Ted Floyd <tedfloyd73@gmail.com> wrote:
--Hey, all.I enjoyed a wonderful day yesterday, Sun., Aug. 24, 2025, at Rocky Mountain Arsenal National Wildlife Refuge, Adams County, with "Bad Company": Bill Schmoker, Archer Silverman, and ringleader Peter Burke. Peter and Bill and I were supposed to get Archer at 0-dark-30, but we got lost deep in the heart of Denver; however, we found Archer eventually, or he found us, and we still somehow got to The Arsenal before sunrise, in time for a bit of nocturnal migration. At the entrance gate, we heard a latish upland sandpiper, plus a few sparrows going over, and we saw a couple of great horned owls; and then it was time to get at the back of the long queue of fisherman waiting impatiently to get into The Arsenal proper.
The morning started off with lovely, low-lying fog, hazy sunshine, and delectably non-Euclidean crepuscular rays:
Then the skies quickly clouded over as a cold front came through. One little micro hotspot was super-birdy (more on that presently), but other than that, the pace of birding was "slow and steady wins the race" the whole time we were out there: five wood ducks, a hooded merganser, black-chinned & broad-tailed hummingbirds, Virginia rail & Sora, solitary sandpiper, lesser & greater yellowlegses, Baird sandpipers, Forster tern, a magnus ferruginous hawk terrorizing the black-tailed prairie dogs, Cynomys ludovicianus, a willow flycatcher, a ho-hum 78 western kingbirds, an unidentified warbling-vireo, loggerhead shrikes in double digits (okay, barely in double digits, we saw 10—but, still, that's cool), two small groups of American bushtits, four sage thrashers, a flyover eastern bluebird, two clay-colored sparrows and six Brewer sparrows, 20 lark buntings, a beautiful orestera orange-crowned warbler, a black-headed grosbeak, and a nice showing by blue grosbeaks and lazuli buntings.
I alluded to a micro hotspot. It was where that dinky little canal cuts through the New Mexico locusts, Robinia neomexicana, and crosses the trail down to Big Havana Pond. That stretch is consistently excellent. In just a tiny little patch in there, we saw: two black-chinned hummingbirds, an unidentified Selasphorus hummingbird, downy & hairy woodpeckers, a western wood-pewee, a willow flycatcher, American bushtits, a cheddar waxwing, a spotted towhee (uncommon at The Arsenal), a Bullock oriole, orange-crowned, Wilson, and yellow warblers; common yellowthroats; a black-headed grosbeak; and five blue grosbeaks and four lazuli buntings. Dang.
The Forster tern whipping around Lower Derby in the swirling clouds and north wind was a treat. Not a rarity or anything, but just such a beautiful bird, white as a ghost and with that black "bandit's mask." We all agreed that white-tern, the hapless new name for the magnificent fairyterns of tropical oceans, would apply just as well to the nonbreeding Forster's tern. But I digress...Oh, and the true highlight, the pièce de résistance, of our visit to The Arsenal, was a transcendently beatific big sand tiger beetle, Cicindela formosa, on the trail into the Upper Derby woods:
After The Arsenal proper, we shamelessly tarried in urban Commerce City to add ticks to our list (hello, house sparrow and collared-dove!) and then Archer and I tricked Comandante Burke into driving us down to Fairfax Liquors (Bill helpfully inquired whether Archer was dropping off a job application...) in Denver. Where we saw the belovèd Mississippi kites of Park Hill! Two already nearly full-grown juveniles were perched out on a snag in the big silver maple, Acer saccharinum, catty-corner from Fairfax Liquors. One was calling constantly, audible even from ourturret gun–equipped armored vehiclejeep as we were still on final approach to the stakeout, its loud and petulant whistle out-decibeling all the other noises of the city: barking dogs, kids on hoverboards, surround-sound construction, and patrons coming and going at the booze shop. Speaking of which, Peter got the last laugh in: He emerged from Fairfax Liquors with a four-pack of celebratory ice cold ginger ales in 1970s-era green cans, and we toasted another year's successful brood of kites, a great day of birding at The Arsenal & environs, and the baddest of Bad Company in Colorado or anywhere else in the West.
We got Archer back home, about five hours after he'd told his longsuffering parents he'd be home. And, once again, the nominally grown-up representatives of Colorado Field Ornithologists succeeded in corrupting the minds of birding youth everywhere. It's okay, Archer will be doing likewise in no time at all, and he's already a better birder than any of the rest of us.
————————————————————————————
That's all I got. In the remote chance that you're still with me, I have a few thoughts about how to manage it all, eBird-wise, when birding legendary birding hotspots with a great many stops and patches within, as well as along the periphery thereof. Basically, the "mother & daughter" problem, as we call it. The problem had become essentially unmanageable until eBird came out with trip reports, which are brilliant for handling birding experiences like our visit yesterday to The Arsenal & environs. Here are a few suggestions, if I may:
1. Have a designated tick-man, as we say. That was Archer. Recent enhancements to eBird, centered mostly around tracking exactly where you are and when you went there (wait till I. C. E. gets their hands on this...), really burn down your phone's battery, and we had to recharge Archer's phone several times. So keep that in mind. Don't let being the tick-man be a thankless task; we plied Archer with oranges, potato chips, and the aforementioned ginger ale, and I made him carry my scope only part of the time.
2. Make a quick "establishing shot" (scenic/landscape photo) for each hotspot visited. This is a superb new feature at eBird. Just take a quick photo with your smartphone, upload it under "habitat/soundscape," and then designate it as the "featured image." Kudos to the propellerheads at Macaulay for making this so easy. I think a featured image of this sort has the potential to make eBird even more valuable than it already is. And, please, I beg you: horizontal (landscape) photos, not vertical (portrait). Look, vertical/portrait is great if you're Leonardo da Vinci or Annie Leibovitz, but the rest of us shouldn't be doing it. Ask me what I really think about Instagram... 😈3. Consider adding at least brief comments to each checklist. Don't worry about typos, grammar, and syntax. I don't. There's a saying, "Journalism is the first rough draft of history," and Kimball Garrett, one of the greatest birders of all time, says that "Field notes are the first rough draft of natural history." Just write something, anything. Weather...water level...phenology... When someone looks at your checklist 50 years from now, or, heck, five days from now, those checklist comments are supremely valuable.
Here's our trip report from yesterday:
ebird.org/tripreport/405557
Look, it's not perfect. You'll find a typo in probably every one of my entries; my cellphone "establishing shots" aren't perfectly straightened and otherwise digitally airbrushed; and it's conceivable that Archer missed a rock pigeon or barn swallow or two. (Although it was pretty impressive that he attempted 1x1 counts of the rock pigeon flocks going over, and endeavored to get "American" barn swallow, subspecies erythrogaster, on as many individuals as possible.) But it's all there, and anybody can figure out basically what we did, where we went, what we saw, and what the conditions & access were like.
Good birding to you all, Peace, —Ted Floyd, Lafayette, Boulder Co.
--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Colorado Birds" group.
To post to this group, send email to cobirds@googlegroups.com
For more options, visit this group at
http://groups.google.com/group/cobirds
* All posts should be signed with the poster's full name and city. Include bird species and location in the subject line when appropriate.
* Join Colorado Field Ornithologists https://cobirds.org/membership/
---
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Colorado Birds" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to cobirds+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com.
To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/cobirds/CAGk944f91p%2B6UKiAOrEvnMzR7GkG0nfOr5XQcUKKQYb4eKat8Q%40mail.gmail.com.
--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Colorado Birds" group.
To post to this group, send email to cobirds@googlegroups.com
For more options, visit this group at
http://groups.google.com/group/cobirds
* All posts should be signed with the poster's full name and city. Include bird species and location in the subject line when appropriate.
* Join Colorado Field Ornithologists https://cobirds.org/membership/
---
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Colorado Birds" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to cobirds+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com.
To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/cobirds/CAMNEzJMAft7Tw7r07fATjkW-%2BqkE9zw85vqWbxVXrxmzP00VAQ%40mail.gmail.com.
No comments:
Post a Comment