Katrina Stowasser and I were birding Timnath Reservoir this afternoon when we found a group of 5 terns standing on an island towards the northeast side of the reservoir. We were standing on the southwest shore. I noticed of the terns standing on this island there were terns of 3 slightly different sizes. One was noticeably smaller than the others. We started looking closer at them all and noticed the 2 largest had orange bills and legs which makes them Forster's Terns, the 2 middle sized ones had red bills, red legs, and gray wing tips, belly, and breast which makes them Common Terns. The other appeared to have an all black cap (which would eliminate Least, it also wasn't small enough to be a Least) we couldn't see the legs as we watched it walk a little bit on the shore, we couldn't see any details on the bill even when we were able to tell it was moving its head around, it did have gray wing tips. The fact that we couldn't see detail on the bill and legs suggested that the bill and legs we relatively short. Everything I could tell about the bird suggested Arctic except the only thing that I am worried about is that the breast and belly didn't appear to be gray, but that also could have been the lighting where it was standing. The other thing is according to ebird this would be the earliest fall migrant Arctic Tern in CO (this list is not complete, so I don't know if this would actually be the earliest record), but Long-tailed Jaegers and Sabine's Gulls start showing up around this time, so this would definitely not be out of the picture. There were also several terns flying around the reservoir, all that we identified were adult Forster's Terns and about half of those had the head color of non-breeding birds, but with mostly orange bills. We didn't find anything else of interest while we were out there. There is a lot of shore showing now, but the only shorebirds we saw were Killdeer and Spotted Sandpipers. I have been checking Timnath Reservoir about every other day for over two weeks and today had by far the most birds on the reservoir so far. Although, last week there were far more migrating land birds around than today. Cole Wild Loveland
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