We started this weekend with a Birder’s Breakfast - a breakfast burrito - which I think should be
the traditional breakfast of birdwatchers and birders. Our first activity of the day was a bird walk
with the Valley’s birding authority,
John Rawinski. We began on the south side of the Home Lake Veterans
Center, where tall fir trees as well as tanks, a jet airplane and a cannon covered
the grounds. We saw pine siskins, a nuthatch,
a magpie and a house sparrow.
Moving into an open
area we saw cranes circling high on thermals, getting altitude for the next leg
to their nesting grounds.
On the north side of the property facing the Rio Grande to
the north and a service lagoon to the west, the group spotted a northern
flicker on a distant tree branch, two killdeer across the marsh on the levee
and two bald eagles soaring high overhead. We also saw a house finch, a dark-eyed
junco and a song sparrow.
The hour-long walk was very enjoyable. Before leaving we had
John sign our copy of his birding guide, Birding Hotspots of South-Central
Colorado.
After a rest at home in Alamosa, we headed back to Monte
Vista and climbed on board a yellow school bus loaded with enthused crane watchers for the Sandhill Sunset Tour. A
snowy rain came in just before the buses start to load. The late afternoon
(prevening) turned cold and gray as the bus headed south to the Monte Vista National Wildlife
Refuge. The first stop at the refuge was
the wooded observation area on the south side.
The cranes were close. We could see their red and white heads and the
rusty color on their backs—a dusty pigment from the clays that the birds paint
themselves with as camouflage on their nesting grounds.
Across the roosting area the cranes congregated with geese.
We saw two white spots and thought snow geese. Talking with one of the guides he agreed they
were snow geese but we decided to come back the next day when the light was
better and we could confirm the sighting.
We continued on to the auto loop and the other pull outs and
then headed further south to CO 370 looking for cranes in the cultivated fields
but saw only a few birds. We wondered if the stormy weather was keeping the cranes further afield. Usually when the sun sets the refuge skies are
filled with thousands of cranes and
geese. This evening it was more like the
high hundreds. But it was still an impressive sight.
Our tour guide, a employee from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife
Service, entertained us with sandhill crane facts and stories. The other
birdwatchers on the trip also enjoyed the tour and said the cranes and the San
Luis Valley were spectacular.
We returned for Day 2 of the Crane Festival on Sunday and
boarded the yellow school bus for the Valley Raptor Tour guided by Hawks Aloft.
On Hwy. 15 south we stopped to try to identify the shadowy figure of a raptor
in poor morning light in a shady, shaggy tree.
On the MVNWR we saw
red-tailed hawks and golden eagles
flying on high. At Home Lake we
saw red-tailed hawks, a northern harrier and bald eagles. An American coot,
common mergansers and cinnamon teals
swam in the canal.
Returning to the Ski Hi complex our band of happy raptor
watchers disembarked from the bus and the two of us drove down to the refuge to
find those white geese. After a fair amount of searching we found them at the
southwest observation area mingling with the Canada geese. We determined that
they were indeed snow geese on their northward migration.
Our Monte Vista Crane Festival count yielded 27 birds and
four new birds for our SLV bird count.
We saw:
Killdeer on the ground
Pine siskins in fir trees
Snow geese with Canada geese
Cinnamon teals in irrigation canal
A great weekend in the San Luis Valley.
No comments:
Post a Comment