Lazuli bunting and little blue heron.

[Marcia Wade - Lafayette, Boulder County]

On June 14 a lazuli bunting came to my feeder, located immediately to west of Centaurus High School on South Boulder Road in Lafayette, and was there several times the week before.  He is very shy and hard to get pictures of, altho I did manage to get a couple  of very bad pix.  On June 15, there was a little blue heron in a small pool in Coal Creek on the Coal Creek Trail just east of the Aquarius Trailhead.  It has been hanging out in that same pool for the past three summers, and being a birding novice, I thought it was a juvenile great blue heron.  Farther up the trail to the west, there has been a snowy egret  fishing in a larger pool, which is located at the end of the tunnel where the creek goes under Empire Rd (a/k/a Hgwy. 42), and a pair of black capped night herons have a nest on Empire Road in the cottonwood tree at the bridge that goes over Coal Creek about an eighth of a mile west of the Aquarius Trailhead.  At Hecla Reservoir, about 1/4 mile to the northeast of the South Boulder Road King Soopers in Louisville, I have seen for weeks every day, a small flock of American avocets (about 8).  A female has made a nest right along the trail that goes around the reservoir, and has four eggs in it.  Daily visitors there for the past couple of weeks have included goldfinches, a yellow rumpled warbler, a small contingent of double crested cormorants, a pair of wood ducks, a  pair of hooded mergansers, a spotted sandpiper, and there is a bittern in the reeds that I hear frequently, but have never seen.