Weld County drive

[Cathy Sheeter]

I drove from my place east of Firestone up to Lower Latham Reservoir today, via mostly county roads. I did find an adult HARRIS'S SPARROW off of CR 52 going in toward the reservoir and then my first WHITE-THROATED SPARROW of the winter on CR 54. Both birds were in seperate flocks of white crowned sparrows. Lower Latham has open water in the very middle, which was heavily packed with birds, but too far out for me to tell what was out there. It appeared to mostly be geese, but could well have been many ducks mixed in too.

Not too exciting by its sheer species, but I counted 47 Western Meadowlarks all in one place at a feedlot off of County Road 19, which seemed like a rather large number. Also quite a few flocks of horned larks, but alas did not find any snow bunting mixed in with them, thought small number of longspurs (3). A drainage ditch no more than 25 feet wide, but with water, had a huge (400+) number of mallards sitting on it on WCR 46. It was quite a sight because they were so densely packed in there.

Raptor count was
8 bald eagles (6 just east of Milliken feeding on a dead goose)
13 red tail hawks (in a year where I have been seeing a high number of dark morph and harlan's birds today everything was light morph!)
8 kestrel
1 ferruginous
3 harriers
1 Cooper's
2 prairie falcon (one hunting starlings)
1 Merlin
Bombed out of roughies though!

Cathy Sheeter
Fort Lupton,CO