More on the Karval Mountain Plover Festival - Lincoln County

[KevyG...@aol.com]

Hello Fellow Birders,

 

   I just want to embellish Seth Gallagher's report on the Karval Mountain Plover Festival with an account of the effort that went into finding the plovers this year.  Typically we see plovers during the Friday evening tour, they're often quite approachable via the big yellow school bus and give us great looks.  However, this year the Friday night tour failed to discover any plovers in the usual haunts.  Saturday dawned with folks anxious to catch a glimpse of the Ghosts of the Prairie and we were certain we'd see a few on our way to the Brett Grey Ranch (TNC property) about 20 miles west of Karval.  As the morning wore on the false alarms triggered by horned larks and killdeer seemed to exacerbate the situation, and the entire morning trip failed to turn up even a single plover.  By noon the festival sponsors were getting quite nervous; folks had traveled from faraway places like Maryland and Canada, and even the distant country of Texas!, to see Mountain Plovers.  Where were they?  Much hypothesizing was done; were they not back from their wintering grounds yet?  Had the drought opened up so much more bare ground that they were dramatically more dispersed?  Had we all gone blind?  Regardless of the reason, we simply hadn't seen any.  So right after lunch the Karval Community Alliance in the form of Jeff Thornton, and Doctor Vicky Dreitz, director of the plover research project at Karval, set out on an expanding square search of Lincoln County to find the elusive birds while we tourists enjoyed our visits to various properties to discover the many other birds (and Swift Fox!) in the vicinity.  Around 5pm Jeff called our bus driver to announce they had conjured up three plovers, so off we went across country (it's amazing where those folks will take a big yellow bus).  Finally, there they were!  The late afternoon light shown brightly off their breasts, giving us great looks.  One male worked on a scrape and performed both aggression and courtship displays for us (actually for the other male and the female, but we enjoyed them, too).   Though we were famished and there was a great chuckwagon dinner awaiting us in Karval, we were loathe to leave them.  After all, without the plovers it is most probable none of us would have ever heard of Karval, met it's amazing people or experienced it's wonderful community.  And an 87-species list for a short weekend ain't bad, either.

 

   Karval - it's great for birding.

 

Keep Smilin',

Kevin Corwin

west Centennial

Arapahoe county

[Deborah Carstensen]

   You mentioned seeing a swift fox on our trip in Karvall, but I thought they said it was a kit fox. It seems like both could fit the animal we saw, does anyone know for sure which one it was?
Deb Carstensen, Littleton
Sent from my iPhone

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[Seth Gallagher]

Deb:
The critter we saw was indeed a Swift Fox, Kit Fox are pretty scarce and native to the west slope of Colorado.....thanks for coming out!

Seth Gallagher
Fort Collins, CO

[Deborah Carstensen]

Thanks for everyone's response the the fox question! Swift fox it is!
Deb Carstensen , Littleton

Sent from my iPhone

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