Highlights from Grandview Cemetery, Fort Collins, on 6/3/2010: White-winged Crossbill - First heard, and then saw, the female at about 5pm feeding on spruce seeds in cones at the top of a tall Colorado Blue Spruce with 4 siskins in Section 7 (the section just west of the southeast corner, which is Section 9). A few minutes later I heard a crossbill near the spruce harboring the second nest (in the southeast corner of Section 1). I positioned myself underneath this tree so I could see a bird entering the area where the nest is, and sure enough, at 5:25 in she went. Because it has been so hard to detect ANYTHING related to this nest of late, I now think the female, at least for this portion of the nesting cycle, is doing everything solo. Perhaps the male is off with the juvenile from Nesting #1, or perhaps he is totally gone for whatever reason.
Eastern Wood-Pewee - One bird singing off and on for 4 hours, moving around quite a bit but usually in the south-central part of the cemetery along the south boundary road (which is where the one was detected on May 22). Other observers since the initial sighting on the 22nd have been fairly certain there are two Eastern Wood-Pewees based of somebody watching a singing bird and somebody else hearing another one in another part of the cemetery that had to represent a second individual. At one point, the pewee was singing in a elm adjacent to the crossbill nest tree. Not a bad pair of birds in one spot! I think the pewee is mostly eating yellowjacket wasps, which are attracted to the sugary honeydew emanating from European Elm Scale insects in the American Elms. Common Nighthawk - saw large numbers of them moving directionally ne to sw, then w to e, then just milling around up high. First time this year I've seen anything other than singles. Western Tanager - 1 male, in a Green Ash, doing his best to carry the banner for migrants still on the move. Chipping Sparrow - few territorial singers (not a normal place for this species to nest prior to the last few years) Chimney Swift - few flying over (where do they go when they leave downtown and head west?) Golden Eagle - one fly-over Cedar Waxwing - several feasting on European Elm Scales in American Elms Total of 29 species [Miscellaneous Feeding Note: Tom Halverstadt recently posted about Yellow-bellied Cuckoos at Louviers (Douglas County just southeast of Chatfield State Park) in the DuPont Open Space (an "open" space that's not open to the public, I believe he said) in a stand of Boxelders with "silk worms". He just sent me pics of the dark-striped caterpillars and they are Fall Cankerworms (Alsophila pometaria). This is a Great Plains/Eastern species of "inchworm" or "looper" in the moth family Geometridae that in my experience has not been common in CO, at least not in large numbers. I once saw them doing a fair amount of defoliation of Siberian Elm in Sterling. This is a most-interesting food record for cuckoos that are usually associated with "hairy" caterpillars such as members of the so-called "tent caterpillar" genus Malacosoma. Geometrids are essentially hairless or "naked". Yellow-billed Cuckoo is a species of special interest throughout Colorado. Jason Beason and the RMBO folks have made some wonderful discoveries on the West Slope in recent years, and the type of info Tom's reports provide is very helpful to our understanding of their life styles away from the West Coast and East, where most cuckoo studies have been. Very cool.] Dave Leatherman Fort Collins -- 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.com/group/cobirds?hl=en.
