In the last three months, we’ve had 8″ of moisture. That’s an incredible amount of water for a region that normally sees 14-16″ for the entire year. It has been a cold, wet, gloomy spring.
This morning, the dogs went berserk at something in the backyard. When we looked out, we saw a male and a female mallard duck. This is unusual, because the nearest open water is at least 2 miles away.
Here is the male mallard pushing his way through the snow towards our bird feeders. We think he was looking for grain that the other birds spill out of the feeders, but our corgi eats it up as fast as it hits the ground.
In this photo, the male is eating some grass. I don’t think it agreed with him, because he stopped after only a few mouthfuls.
This is the only shot I got of the female mallard. She is on the far side of a little fencing we have to keep the dogs from wearing a path in the grass by chasing squirrels.
My husband called them “cold ducks” — a play on them being out in the snow and the wine called “cold duck”. Get it?
The Front Range got our long anticipated (some might say dreaded) monster snowstorm over the weekend. Totals for snowfall were in the 22-27″ range where I live on the west side of Denver.
Twenty-two inches.Twenty-seven inches.
While we were all digging out, our furry friends were having problems of their own.
We’ve had a huge red-tailed hawk hanging around the neighborhood this week. I assume it is a female, because female raptors are bigger than males. And she was big.
And I knew she was a red-tailed hawk (Red-Tailed Hawk), even without seeing her tail, because 1) she was big, 2) she had a stocky body with a short tail, which meant that she was an open country “buteo” hawk, as opposed to an “accipitor” that hunts in the trees. 3) she had a “belly band” of rust colored feathers across her tummy, with a white patch above. (For more about identifying a red-tailed hawk https://amylaw.blog/2020/04/25/hawk-conflict/)
She really didn’t like me photographing her. There was another group standing a few feet away, and I never got a photo of her looking at them at all. But she glared at me — a lot.
In between glares, she was kinda fidgety. She stretched…
…scratched …
… and turned around. Did I mention that she was a red-tailed? She had the reddest tail I’ve ever seen on a red-tailed hawk.
As we were cooking Thanksgiving dinner this noon, my husband happened to look out our kitchen window at the bird feeders in our back yard. “We have bushtits!”
Bushtits on suet feeder.
These gregarious little birds move around the neighborhood in a small flock. You know they are passing by their flitting flight, and their cheeping “contact” calls.
Male bushtits have dark brown irises…
Bushtits normally eat insects — scale bug, mostly, but spiders, caterpillars, wasps, ants, beetles — anything that crawls. After the 18 inches of snow dumped on the Front Range, though, insects were in short supply.
…while female bushtits have yellow eyes.
And so they resorted to our feeders.
I don’t know whether this is a bit of mealworm suet, or a chunk of sunflower.
In the summertime, bushtits need to eat 80% of their body weight to keep from losing weight. That adds up to a lot of scale bugs.
Either will give her energy through the cold weather.
But in winter they have to eat more. They are probably less choosy about how they get their calories. And are thankful for whatever they find.
Female leaves feeder with a choice morsel.
I think I’ll make sure I’ve got plenty of mealworm suet for them, in any case.
Due to complications last summer, my husband and I weren’t able to volunteer with Front Range Pika Project last fall. We were determined to make it this year.
If you have been following my blog for several years, you might remember that two years ago, in 2017, my husband, my son, my son’s girlfriend and I visited a pika site near Grand Lake, on the western edge of Rocky Mountain National Park. We were disappointed that year to find the site abandoned.
This year, I was a little faster on the sign-up, and found a more promising site. This one was on the lower edge of the tundra, at 11,961 feet. The trail to get to the site was just 2 1/2 miles long!
What I forgot was that the parking area was at 10,440 feet. When we do the math, that’s an average grade of 14%. Hmmmm…..
By the time we’d gone 100 feet up the trail, my husband and I realized this was going to be a lot harder than it would have been twenty years ago. But we took it slow, and stopped frequently to rest. It took us two hours to go the two and a half miles, but we did it.
View as we left the forest and came onto the tundra. The pika site is the talus slope at the base of the mountain. In winter that area will be covered with six to ten feet of snow.
As we came onto the tundra, we had to skirt around a wetlands created by snowmelt draining off the surrounding peaks. The snows pile up here in winter.
We heard squeaky-toy squeaks of pika calling before we got to the talus. And once we got to the talus, pika were very obvious.
Pika in a rare state of not running. The jumble of rocks it is on is called ‘talus’.
We immediately saw a little pika scampering across the rocks. It was running to a small patch of plants at the base of the talus.
The pika is cutting down plants until it has a mouthful. You can see the trimmed tops of the plants in the foreground.
Good pika habitat needs a pile of rocks jumbled together to form lots of nooks and crannies. It needs lots of plants nearby to eat, and to cut for hay. And it needs deep winter snows to protect the pika from predators, howling winds and bitterly cold temperatures. This was very good pika habitat.
What I hadn’t expected is that the pika had two speeds: still, and running. There was no walking between tasks. They hustled.
In this shot, you can see that they are members of the rabbit family, not the rodent family.
Pika gather the plants and dry them, turning them into hay. They then eat the hay through the winter. That means that pika have to gather enough plants to feed themselves for 8-9 months of the year.
The pika brings the cut plants back to the talus, and drops them in piles outside their holes. You can see some of the plants at the entrance to a den. The plants dry into hay, which the pika eats through the winter.
It takes about 62 pounds (28 kg) of forage to feed a pika through the winter. That translates to 14,000 trips to gather this much hay. No wonder they hustle.
What these little guys can’t take are temperatures over 75o. They are climate-change indicators. If their world warms too much, they will not survive.
It has been a wet winter and spring where we live. If you are in the continental United States, it’s been cool and wet where you live, too. This has been the wettest 12 months in the history of the United States. (https://www.wunderground.com/cat6/Wettest-12-Months-US-History)
According to NOAA’s drought monitor (https://droughtmonitor.unl.edu/), almost no place in the US is currently in drought, which, if you follow these things, is pretty amazing.
Drought Map, Courtesy NOAA The tan and yellow indicate that the area is drier than normal.
But here in Colorado, we have been really wet. How wet? Take a look at this:
This is the % of Normal Snow.
100% of Normal would be an average year — we are getting all the snow we normally do. So when it says that the San Juan Mountains are at 728% of normal that means they have over SEVEN TIMES as much snow as they normally do.
In Colorado, we tend to like the extra snow in the mountains; we view it as a bank account we can draw on — more is better.
It started off with driving sleet that soaked our birds.
Both of them huddled together for about half an our — the longest I’ve seen both birds in the nest during the day.
But by 10:00 am, they were soaked.
1:03 pm Then the snow began to build up.
1:32 pm What the still photos don’t really show is how much the wind was howling, and the nest platform shaking. Denver International Airport, ten miles away from the nest, recorded 80 mile an hour gusts — hurricane force winds!
1:49 pm We kept losing power and internet, so I would go for a time without seeing the bird on the nest. When internet came back up, she’d still be there, patiently keeping her eggs warm and dry with her body.
2:11 pm She’d shake her head once in a while, but mostly she did her job — she sat on her eggs, and let the snow pile up.
4:31 pm Both eagles were back on the nest.
To all those who had to be out in this miserable storm — to keep the power on, to keep the internet up, to keep us safe, and to keep eggs warm — thank you.
We woke up to 12o F (-11o C) in central Colorado — we have yet to have a significant snowfall in the foothills west of Denver. It’s been a little odd to see so many different types of winter birds coming to the feeder without snow. But they are coming!
House sparrows. House sparrows were introduced into North America in 1851 and 1852. They quickly covered the US and most of Canada and Mexico.
House finches. According to Birds of North America (https://birdsna.org/Species-Account/bna/species/houfin/introduction), house finches started out as a desert species of California and Mexico. They were released in New York City in 1939, and have exploded across the country.
Collared doves. These birds were introduced to North America in the 1970s, and have since spread across the continent. Scientists worry that they will compete with native doves, like the mourning dove, but the verdict is still out.
Black-capped chickadees. Always in motion, these guys flit from tree to feeder to bushes.
Red-breasted nuthatches. Five years ago, I rarely saw nuthatches at my feeders. Now they are fairly common. (Nuthatches paring up)
Dark-eyed juncos. I rarely see dark-eyed juncos when there isn’t any snow on the ground. This year, I’ve seen a lot of them.
Hairy woodpecker. People in our neighborhood trim the deadwood out of their trees pretty quickly, so it’s a treat when they stop by.
Bushtit. These little guys usually fly around in a flock of 20 or so, chipping constantly to keep in contact with each other. (Sharp-shinned hawk misses flicker)
We hope your holidays are filled with as many interesting visitors as ours!
We had a small herd of deer come into our yard this week. We’ve had deer in the neighbor’s yards before (Backyard Deer), but with our dogs, this is the first time in years that they’ve come into ours. The recent cold weather has kept the snow from recent storms on the ground longer than usual, which means that the deer had a harder time getting to the grass. Hunger made them a little bolder than usual, and prompted the visits to our garden for leftovers. We kept the dogs inside, and were happy to share.
I hope that you get many wonderful unexpected visitors this season. Merry Christmas!
Colorado In Depth and At Altitude 