Re: [cobirds] Estes Park on 26Oct2010

[Jim Nelson]

We're visiting in Estes Park for a few days. I had never checked out the bird sanctuary area at Lake Estes so I braved the very gusty winds and took at look on Tuesday midafternoon.  The only birds I saw around the crabapple trees by the utility yard were Dark-eyed Juncos.  On the pine-covered peninsula that Dave mentions below, in addition to Mountain Chickadees and Brown-headed Nuthatches, I had great veiws of a Dipper along the edge of the Lake.

Jim Nelson
Bethesda, Maryland

On Oct 26, 2010, Dave Leatherman <daleather...@msn.com> wrote:

We (Mary & Tom France and I) blew off the weather report and went to Estes Park today.  Then the wind did the same to us.

 

North of the Power Plant utility yard at the west end of Lake Estes, we checked the crabapple trees that hosted good warblers last weekend and found 5 Yellow-rumped Warblers eating aphids.  Not sure if these aphids were dead from the freezing temps last night or not, but the point is these trees and the insects are still attractive to insectivorous passerine birds and the trees would warrant checking over the next few weeks.

 

A little ways east within the Matthews-Reeser Sanctuary, specifically the pine covered peninsula, were 1 Yellow-rumped Warbler, a few Pygmy Nuthatches, a few Mountain Chickadees, and 1 mountain race, female Hairy Woodpecker.

 

At the north end of the Dry Gulch Road north of US34 in the northeastern part of Estes Park, we found about a dozen cooperative Brown-capped Rosy-Finches feeding along the roadside on what appeared to be the pink flower heads of a tiny, low-growing plant.

 

Between the upper and lower switchback on the Devil's Gulch Road as it descends north into Glenhaven was one female (I think) Pine Grosbeak.  The bird's crown was intermediate between what Sibley calls "russet" and what his guide shows for the normal corn-yellow coloration of a female.  Russet birds can either be females or young males.  Since the rump of this bird was gray, perhaps that makes it a female.

 

Dave Leatherman

Fort Collins

 

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