San Luis Valley Summer Highlights

[mvjo...@gmail.com]

Thought I would follow up and bring you up to date on some of the summer highlites here in the San Luis Valley 

First of all, we had pretty good spring and early summer moisture patterns. The snowpack was at or slightly above average. The snowpack combined with plentiful early rainfall made for excellent growing conditions for grasses and forbs. There seemed to be water everywhere and our spring report of exceptional numbers of migrating shorebirds attested to that fact. With saturated soil conditions, the resulting lush vegetative response seemed to bring about some bird occurrences that may be linked to the vegetative conditions.

The first unusual summer bird was Dickcissel. There were not one but three individuals reported, two by Stump near Alamosa and one other at the MVNWR (ebird). Our local records had only one individual...a single bird found by Hugh and Urling Kingery during the first Atlas surveys decades ago. The next amazing bird was an apparent Eastern Meadowlark near Del Norte (pending review). This represents the first San Luis Valley record for the species and included video. These two species prefer tall grasslands and weedy habitats.  

We will be watching for Dickcissel and E Meadowlarks in the coming years, but more often than not, such irruptions of similar species like Grasshopper Sparrow and Cassin's Sparrows in the Valley have proven to be one-hit wonders. I think the SLV influx was a weather-related, one-time event but we will keep watching as always ....

John Rawinski

Monte Vista, CO