Sunday, January 27, 2019

Clear Creek/Summit Counties to Arapahoe County

January 27, 2019

Richard Stevens:

High temperature today was 49 degrees.  Winds were 12-13 mph with gusts to 22 mph at Cherry Creek Reservoir.

Dave King and I took two Pennsylvania birders up to Loveland Pass (Clear Creek/Summit Counties).  Winds were quite high with anomometer readings of 38 mph.

We discovered two White-tailed Ptarmigan hunkered down at the ragged rocks on the east side of the summit.

Later we visited a friend's yard (closed to the public) and found three species of Rosy Finches, White-breasted & Pygmy Nuthatches, Mountain Chickadees, Pine Grosbeaks, Evening Grosbeaks, Pine Siskins and a Clark's Nutcracker.

Note: heading into and out of the mountains on a Sunday can result in many hours spent in traffic returning to Denver.  We returned well before 1:00 pm.

After dropping everyone off I passed by Cherry Creek Reservoir (Arapahoe) on my way home.  The Rusty Blackbird was again along the western stream flowing into the swim beach pond.  

There was not sighting of the Brown Thrasher today.  I did find tracks, which were similar to those I photographed when last seeing the Brown Thrasher walking around in snow.

I scoped the less than 100 gulls off the Pelican Point.  One Iceland Gull was with one Herring Gull and many Ring-billed Gulls.

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