High Plains Snow Goose Festival wrap, Feb. 19-21

[Ted Floyd]

Hi, all. Sorry, belated report. I'll be brief-ish. In a nutshell, the High Plains Snow Goose Festival, Feb. 19-21, based out of Lamar, Prowers County, featured ridiculously nice weather, good birds, and great company.

I already posted about the birds along Willow Creek, right in Lamar, on Feb. 19: northern cardinals, red-bellied woodpeckers, eastern/Carolina white-breasted nuthatches, eastern bluebirds, white-throated sparrows, and more.

The trip to Two Buttes State Wildlife Area, Baca County, Saturday afternoon, Feb. 20, produced the usual suspects: porcupines, curve-billed thrasher, golden eagle (pair), canyon towhee, mountain bluebirds (many), ferruginous hawk, great horned owl (at nest), canyon wren, pine siskin, and more. A special treat was seeing a red-bellied woodpecker and a ladder-backed woodpecker in the same tree--I think that was a first for me. Sounds like one of the participants got on a Carolina wren, but I didn't see the bird.

The "departure trip" on Sunday, Feb. 21, featured many good birds. I'll break it out by location:

--Downtown Lamar, Prowers County, at daybreak, a nice flyover by great-tailed grackles.

--Hasty Campground, Bent County, greater white-fronted goose (1, a flyover), 2 greater roadrunners (north side of campground), 1 red-bellied woodpecker, 1 for-sure northern shrike and 1 I-think-it-was-a-loggerhead-shrike, 1 marsh wren, 2 eastern bluebirds, 2 myrtle warblers, and 5 pine siskins.

--John Martin Reservoir, far east side at the dam, Bent County, many snow geese, 1 glaucous gull, and 1 merlin.

--Crowley Reservoir ("Lake Meredith"), Crowley County, hard to access the lake, but here we saw our only northern pintails of the day; also lots of snow geese, a loggerhead shrike, and an I-don't-know-what-kind-of-shrike-it-was.

--Lake Henry, Crowley County, 700+ common mergansers, 15 scaled quail, 2 or 3 lesser black-backed gulls, and 2 more loggerhead shrikes.

--Box Springs Pond, Crowley County, 1 merlin, several marsh wrens, and a great throng of chorusing drake redheads.

--And our last bird of the day, at sundown at the Arby's in Limon, Lincoln County, a great-tailed grackle making a racket--with the great-tailed grackles overflying the Burger King in Lamar at dawn, nice bookends to a nice day.

Photos, audio, directions, insects, mammals, scenery, people, and more here:

http://tinyurl.com/HPSGF-2016

Ted Floyd

Lafayette, Boulder County