Suburban food sources - Arapahoe

[Jared Del Rosso]

On Saturday (11/09), I took a walk through my neighborhood in Centennial. (Lots of snow here...) Right away, I encountered a North Flicker feeding on the fruit of Thicket Creeper (Parthenocissus inserta), which grows prodigiously in a yard up the street from me. Magpies seem especially drawn to creeper fruit; this was my first time seeing any other species feeding at these creepers, though that's just a neighborhood bias. The fruit usually remains untouched until frost.

Today (11/10), another neighborhood walk yielded a small group of Cedar Waxwings feeding in a hackberry tree at a park. I didn't have binoculars. The birds were high and mostly obscured by leaves. I think there were several not-yet-adult-plumaged birds among them. They seemed to be flycatching and gleaning insects in the tree. I didn't see them with hackberry drupes, but I did see them with insects. I thought one had a worm-like larvae at one point, but I can't be sure. I briefly saw an insect flying amid the hackberry leaves.

Otherwise, lots of Spotted Towhees and Dark-eyed Juncos visiting my yard, enjoying bird seed.

- Jared Del Rosso

Centennial, CO

[Patrick O'Driscoll]

Good observations, Jared -- 

An across-the-alley neighbor behind my east-central Denver house has a lot of that creeper going up the side of the house, and I've seen as many as four Northern Flickers at a time working through it for the berries.

I, too, have plentiful juncos (at least two dozen, and today the season's first White-winged specimen) and a couple or three towhees in back.

No waxwings at my house of late; they all seem to be at Denver City Park a mile away, flying to and from and back again in various junipers around the park for their berries.

They are especially mobbing junipers east of the park's largest lake and in the "pinetum" conifer grove beneath the south wall of the Museum of Nature and Science. 

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