COBirders, Brad Steger, Alexander Steger and I headed up to check out Antero, Spinney Mountain and Eleven Mile reservoirs today, 10/16/09. Although we found no loons or scoters we did find a couple of other nice species.
At Antero there were of course more American Coots than one would really ever care to count. There were also a number of ducks, especially in the northwest corner. Four species of gull, Ring-billed, California, Herring and a single Bonaparte's. The highlights though from Antero were the shorebirds, 3 Black-bellied Plovers near the southwest corner along with 20ish Long-billed Dowitchers. In the northeast corner there was a rather late and I believe rather rare record for Park county, Marbled Godwit. While looking at the Black-bellied Plovers we had a flyover, calling Chestnut-collared Longspur. On our way to Spinney Mountain reservoir we had a Burrowing Owl fly across the road in front of us. Seems a little late for up there. Spinney has a lot of shorebird habitat but we could only find a handful of Killdeer and Baird's Sandpipers. The water level is still fairly high and most of the birds were in the far northwest corner of the reservoir basically too far away to do much with. There were many Mountain Bluebirds and American Pipits near the entrance to the park. We spent very little time at Eleven Mile and we only saw expected species. We did see 3 Prairie Falcons at different locations between the three reservoirs but little else. A quick stop at Lake George and we were able to turn up a Swamp Sparrow at the south end. I am not sure what it is about this area but Swamp Sparrows seem to like it as there seems to be at least one found there every fall. ----- Mark Peterson Colorado Springs --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ Colorado Field Ornithologists: http://www.cfo-link.org/ Colorado County Birding: http://www.coloradocountybirding.com/ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Colorado Birds" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.as/group/cobirds?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
