Front Range
Birding Blog

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…

As many of you know, male ducks have been going through their period of eclipse plumage for the last couple of months and they are finally starting to emerge from that flightless, cryptically-colored phase, and starting to look like their showy selves again. Also, we’re on the cusp of that period when many species of…

We had a warm morning along the South Platte in the vicinity of the Audubon Nature Center, and bird activity was a bit slow.  However, if one just shows up there will always be cool things to observe.  For starters there has been an apparent influx of Woodhouse’s Scrub-Jays into Chatfield State Park, which from…

We have come to recognize that during the summer, when it comes to ducks in the Denver area, the story is pretty much Mallards and more Mallards, and we count ourselves lucky when we stumble across something else.  And, then during the latter part of the summer,  male ducks go through about a 1-2 month…

We led our first Front Range Birding Company bird walk to Beaver Ranch just a year ago at this same time. Somehow it seems much longer ago given the strangeness of the intervening twelve months.  The ranch is located just off US 285 a bit southwest of Conifer and is operated and managed by a local…

We had a beautiful morning at Hudson Gardens, and managed to see a variety of fun stuff.  For starters we had two groups of juvenile Wood Ducks for a total of six females and one male.  The juvenile male can be distinguished from the females by his bright white “bridle,” a feature that persists on…