Bonkers day in Grand Co., Sept. 1, & other stuff

[Ted Floyd]

Hey, all.

Yesterday morning, Mon., Labor Day, Sept. 1, on the drive back from the 14th annual Yampa Valley Crane Festival, I stopped off at the Wolford Reservoir Overlook, Grand Co., where I beheld an armada of waterskiers and practically no birds at all. So I tried my luck at the Pass Creek inlet off U.S. 40 a very short ways south of the overlook. Right away, I saw seven Baird sandpipers, uncommon in Grand Co. and a county lifer for me. The flock put up, then just as quickly put down with two quite unexpected pectoral sandpipers, rare in Grand Co. and another county lifer. Birding is funny: the disheartening spectacle of all those waterskiers one moment, the thrill of a couple of county lifers the next.

But that flock of midsize calidrinids was the mere cherry on top of an extraordinary morning in Grand Co. Earlier in the day, at an undisclosed location[*] in the Routt National Forest, I had wandered a very short distance from the vehicle to take care of business (morning infusion of mate...diuresis...), when what should I see on the forest service road, directly right in front of me, but a magnificent gray wolf, Canis lupus. Birding is funny indeed: One moment I'm taking in the stillness and near-birdlessness of a chilly morning in the Colorado high country in early Sept.; the next, I'm staring straight into the gaze of a wolf, in what was surely one of the most electrifying instants in my entire life.

Let's see, what else? Windy Gap Reservoir, west of Granby a bit, had decent-looking shorebird habitat, but no shorebirds at all. It was full of other birds, though, including the usual late-summer slug of piscivores, among them 51 ring-necked ducks and 4 lesser scaup.

The Grand Co. high country was overrun, felicitously so, with Canada jays. Saw them at every stop. And, with apologies to Tony Leukering (sorry, not sorry), I snuck this individual onto my Grand Co. eBird trip report for the day:

I alluded at the outset to the Yampa Valley Crane Festival. It was wonderful. Highlights for me, all from that productive stretch of U.S. 40 in Routt Co. between Steamboat Springs and Hayden, inclusive, with slight detours for Stagecoach Reservoir (south of Steamboat) and Jimmy Dunn Gulch (north of Hayden), were the following: multiple Solitary & Least sandpipers (both county lifers for me—hey, shorebirds are hard, in my experience, in Routt Co.); a magnificently vocal golden eagle on the lonely steppes around Jimmy Dunn; a lowland, presumed-migrant olive-sided flycatcher; 1 veery & 5 Swainson thrushes; a Nashville warbler, 3 American redstarts, and 3 Townsend warblers; and 3 evening grosbeaks. The Yampa River Botanic Park, right in Steamboat, had goodly numbers of Calliope, Rufous, & Broad-tailed hummingbirds; the Yampavian Ranch outside Hayden had a Black-chinned. And nice numbers of common migrants & summer residents during my three full days in the Steamboat–Hayden area, as per the eBird trip report tally functionality: 239 sandhill cranes; 34 Wilson snipes; 48 western wood-pewees and 14 eastern kingbirds; 18 western warbling-vireos; 1,497 violet-green swallows, the majority of them during a rainstorm fallout at Stagecoach; 4 marsh wrens; 17 gray catbirds; 49 savannah sparrows; 9 green-tailed towhees; 8 orange-crowned warblers, 34 common yellowthroats, and 31 Wilson warblers; and 27 western tanagers.

Here is a Swainson hawk, just outside Hayden, chowing down on perhaps its last supper, a smooth green snake, Opheodrys vernalis, before embarking on the long haul down to the Argentine:

Here's a long-tailed weasel, Neogale frenata, a. k. a. The Big Stoat, who kept me company at the bunk house where I spent the holiday weekend:

And here's one of the many leopard frogs, Lithobates pipiens, gallivanting at the edge of a little pond just north of where The Big Stoat and I were lodged:

Kudos and appreciation to the board and staff of the Colorado Crane Conservation Coalition for putting on yet another excellent crane festival!

Ted Floyd
Lafayette, Boulder Co.

[*]There is a bit of sensitivity regarding the precise location of the wolf. Hence my georeferential vagueness in the matter. Agency biologists are on it. We got this.