Front Range
Birding Blog

What a great morning, and great crew of folks!  Wow!  We saw so many cool birds today it’s hard to know where to start.  However, we’ll begin with the waterfowl.  Based on what we saw on Saturday it appears that some of our ducks (and Cackling Geese) may have already begun moving north out of…

Walden Ponds, Sawhill Ponds and Boulder Creek – February 27, 2021 – with Sheridan Samano Last Saturday morning, there was enough interest for two different bird walks at the Walden Ponds/ Sawhill Ponds Complex in Boulder. Both groups met at Cottonwood Marsh, but with different start times and routes. The avian highlights varied substantially between…

  It was an honor and a pleasure to lead my first bird walk for Front Range Birding Company this morning. Although the temperatures never quite got above 4 degrees Farenheit, our small group had a fantastic time braving the elements in search of birds at Sandstone Ranch. A lone American tree sparrow greeted us…

We visited two main areas this morning, South Platte Reservoir and the smaller ponds just to the east of the reservoir along the South Platte River.  The reservoir had very little action, but we did get to have excellent views of a pair of Long-tailed Ducks.  These guys were historically known as Oldsquaws, evidently because…

What a great morning!  A bit on the chilly side, but we saw some cool birds. We started with one of the classic bird identification conundrums.  Was our group of five scaup Lesser or Greater Scaup?  These two members of the Aythya genus are very similar in appearance and can cause no end of headaches.  There are…

Saturday at South Platte Park was a memorable one.  We had great weather, a great group, and OUTSTANDING birds!  We began at Blackrock Lake where we spent time working on the finer points of Greater Scaup identification.  These diving ducks belong to the Aythyagenus along with Canvasback, Redhead, Tufted Duck, Ringed-neck Duck, and Lesser Scaup. …

While I’ve been telling you guys that the number of duck species will increase dramatically as we get into winter, we only had four species on this morning’s walk.  While some male ducks, e.g. Northern Shoveler, are still emerging from their eclipse plumage, the four species we saw looked all spruced up and ready for…

The size of Harriman Lake continues to be as small as any of us on Saturday have ever seen it.  Evidently, the last time it was this low was back around 2011-2012 when Denver Water drained the entire lake to do maintenance on the dam.  We did notice on Saturday that water was being brought…

I hope that I’m not offending anyone if I use the phrase “Indian Summer.”  It’s always been one of my favorite times of year, and I use the expression with great respect and fondness (anyone know the Poco song Indian Summer?).  Saturday was definitely an Indian Summer morning starting quite chilly but then eventually warming…

Visiting the Barr Lake banding station operated by the Bird Conservancy of the Rockies is always a special treat.  This fall they’ve been limiting group size to just six people, but we managed to book two back-to-back hour-long sessions, so we were able to get two groups of six out there, and it was well…