Bird Conservancy of the Rockies - Chatfield Banding Station Fall week 1 of 3

[Colin Woolley]

Hi CoBirders, 

In partnership with Denver Audubon, we are running a pilot fall banding season at Chatfield State Park, where we have been running a spring station for over 20 years. Our goal is to test out the same site during fall migration, with the hope of running a full fall banding season at this site in future years. We are running the Chatfield station three days a week for three weeks in September this year, with our first week having just wrapped up. I'll be posting weekly summaries here instead of the usual daily summaries. 

This past week, we banded on Tues, Thurs, and Sunday. Across those three days, we banded (or recaptured) 48 individual birds of 14 species. As expected, Wilson's Warblers have been our most common species, though we've been seeing many of the local nesters as well. Here's the full list:

Dusky Flycatcher - 1

American Robin - 1

Black-capped Chickadee - 4 new, 4 returns from Spring

Northern House Wren - 3

Gray Catbird - 2 new, 3 returns from Spring

Wilson's Warbler - 14

Yellow Warbler - 1

Common Yellowthroat - 2

Blue-gray Gnatcatcher - 1

Western Tanager - 2

Yellow-breasted Chat - 3

Spotted Towhee - 4

Song Sparrow - 2

Lincoln's Sparrow - 1

This coming week we'll be running the station on Tues, Thurs, and Sat. We are hosting public and school group visitors similar to our spring season, with one public group timeslot on weekdays (7am) and three timeslots on weekends (7:30, 8:30, 9:30). I believe all the public visitor timeslots are filled for this short season, but in case of cancellations you can join a waitlist through Denver Audubon's event calendar here.

Colin Woolley

Bird Conservancy of the Rockies