Centennial - Arapahoe

[Jared Del Rosso]

This morning, I walked the High Line Canal and Little Dry Creek in Centennial (Arapahoe), then walked my dogs around Chapel Hill Memorial Gardens. An eventful morning, highlighted by:

-- A singing Black-headed Grosbeak along the canal,
-- A female Northern Flicker feeding nestlings along the canal,
-- Cordilleran Flycatchers along the Little Dry Creek,
-- A female Common Merganser in the Little Dry Creek,
-- Raccoon and Red Fox sightings,
-- A flyover, calling Red Crossbill at Chapel Hill Memorial Gardens (odd for June?). The crossbill may have ended up in my yard by the time my dogs and I got home. Something finch-shaped, red, seemingly too big for a House Finch, and single -- unlike most of the House Finch families right now -- seemed to fly away from my bird bath as we stepped back into the yard. Too poor and uncertain of a sighting, as the bird didn't call, to list it as a new yard bird though.
-- And what ended the morning: on the walk back from the cemetery, a rather violent encounter between two magpies, a robin pair, and a fledgling robin, that ended with one magpie keeping the adults at bay and the other hammering away at the skull of the still living, but not for long, fledgling. Most of me wanted to chase the magpies off. But I didn't. (Perhaps I ought to have? There's plenty of food for magpies to go around.)

- Jared Del Rosso
Centennial, CO

[Matt Rodgers]

Good call on leaving the magpies be no matter how macabre the seen as those types of things are part of nature too; I saw a dead goose and gosling on the road to the west of Fiddlers Green tonight that were no doubt the result of a careless motorist but the magpies were already going to work taking care of the free meal with young ones perhaps in their nest to feed.

Matt Rodgers