A short report from Cheyenne and Kiowa counties 2/14

[David Suddjian]

DFO's outing to Cheyenne and Kiowa Counties on Monday 2/14 had the Common Redpolls in Cheyenne as a highlight, which I posted on from the field that morning. But the flock of about 35 redpolls were at CR 20, not 22 as I had posted that day. I've attached two nice pics taken by Gary Witt, including redpolls flying! Here is a link to our checklist with some other photos. 

https://ebird.org/checklist/S102681205

eBird has no other records of redpolls from Cheyenne County, and it seemed from the CFO county birding page that there were none, so perhaps this was the first county record. 

After encountering so many Rough-legged Hawks (and other raptors) the prior week in Phillips and Yuma, we were surprised by the paucity of raptors on our transects through Cheyenne and Kiowa. There we had just 4 Rough-legged Hawks as opposed to 27 in the two northeastern counties, And those were our only 4 identified buteos the entire day; we even missed Red-tailed Hawk despite driving over 350 miles in eastern CO!  Open field birds like Horned Lark and Lapland Longspur were fairly sparse (224 and 47 on our 18 complete checklists, for example). Also missing for us were Golden Eagle, Ferruginous Hawk and Prairie Falcon, all to be expected I think, on such an outing. 

At Neenoshe Reservoir we found great numbers of geese, with an estimated 25,000 white geese  (mostly Snow) and 13,000 Canada/Cackling. 

David Suddjian

Ken Caryl Valley

Littleton, CO