[Douglbirds] Yard birds

[Hugh Kingery]

    The snow sure seems to bring out yard birds in quantity. 15 juncos or sparows or both showed up before sunrise (I guess we had one today) when the light was so poor I couldn't ID them. Urling just counted 25 tree sparrows -- more than we've ever seen here. Also, this morning, 23 American goldfinches (no siskins, but 2 yesterday) and 42 juncos. These packs showed up before (goldfinches) and after (sparrows and juncos) a Cooper's hawk perched in our juniper for a half-hour and a sharp-shin made a spectacular cruise past the feeders.  

    Last weekend,  also during a snowstorm, we had comparable numbers of various feeder birds. Oddities (for us) included one White-crowned sparrow for a couple of days. The tally included 60 juncos, 43 house finches, and various others. A flock of Horned Larks has gravitated among various plowed roads -- Willow Lake Drive and CAstlewood Canyon Rd during the week. 

    Our neighbors, Betsy and Bob Pankey, called about a bird that took up residence in their horse barn and shows no intentions of leaving. We ski toured over there, and called it an exotic dove. Then Bob figured out that actually it's a bobwhite! Last summer another of our neighbors bought some bobwhites to train his hunting dogs. The birds escaped, and at least some have survived, it seems, with a savvy instinct to find shelter and food -- a horse barn has a lot of food for a bird.

    We don't have the bushtit reliability of some Douglbirders; four last Thursday are the only ones we've seen this year. Of course, we haven't spent a lot of time here -- we were gone 22 oif 26 days around Christmas, and didn't have anybody fill the feeders (lucky for that anybody). Within an hour after we refilled them, the birds flocked in. (We finally got our road plowed -- it looks like a bobsled run.)

Hugh Kingery
Franktown, Colorado
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