I was there from 8:30am to 4pm today. The pair was spotted around 10:45am or so by Liz Pruessner in a spruce at the west end of Section 9 (i.e. the southwest corner of the cemetery). Ed Arenson and another man whose name I never got also witnessed them. They fed for a time, then the female apparently moved quite a bit within the spruce tops while the male went into an elaborate, lengthy (almost an hour long) jam session of singing in a big 50 yard circle all around her that took him into several types of trees, including Austrian pines and American elms and other trees, both coniferous and deciduous. At one point the male went down to a shrub out on City Park Nine golf course due south of the portapotty, apparently to get soft snow on the ground along the north, shady side of this plant (lilac?). The show went on until about noon, when all got quiet. I went and had a bite to eat, then came back. Nancy Drilling and I saw the female at 3:13pm atop a spruce a short ways north of the portapotty in the south part of Section 1 just north of the divider road with Section 2. The bird flew off with siskins to the south around 3:25.
Also of interest, a pair of Hairy Woodpeckers (mountain race) was along the south border road today, spending most of their time in Austrian Pines. In looking at the area where they seemed to concentrate, it looks like they either made their own sap wells, or opened up and enlarged old Yellow-bellied Sapsucker sap wells. If I had to guess which, I'd say the latter. Not seen that before. At other times, I saw the female working on old dead, shaded out and/or Valsa-killed spruce limbs with tracks of twig beetles (small bark beetles) and wood borers (bigger beetles in the family Cerambycidae). Valsa is a canker fungus. Total of 23 spp. today (which is a very respectable total for the place and date) Dave Leatherman Fort Collins
