Spring is Coming — Promise

It has been a long cold hard winter along the Front Range of Colorado. We have gotten enough snow in February to wipe out the incipient drought we were headed into, which is a good thing. But it came at the cost of a snowstorm every couple of days. That was hard.

We’re not out of winter yet — March and April are typically our snowiest months in Colorado.

But as the dogs and I went for our morning walk, we also found the first signs that spring is on the way.

Male Northern Flicker — red-shafted variety. Only males have the red stripe on the jaw.

As we walked, we heard the “eh-eh-eh-eh-eh” call of a male Northern Flicker trying out his mating call.

Male Spotted Towhee looking for seeds in the snow.

Further on, we found a Spotted Towhee by his “cha-cha-chaaa” call. Like the flicker, his calls right now are just warm-ups. He quickly dropped down to the snow to hunt for seeds.

Hearing these guys practice their mating calls cheered me up. And as we walked home through the cold, the sun broke through the clouds, promising a sunny day.

Windy Days

We’ve had some windy days lately. Two days ago (October 20, 2019) we had gusts up to 40 mph (miles per hour) — it was hard to walk in that wind!

As we battled the blustery weather while walking the dogs, I happened to look to the west, where I saw lens-shaped clouds hovering over the tops of the mountains.

Once inside, I decided to clean up some photos on the computer. I happened across this shot of Longs Peak from near Estes Park from fifteen years ago.

North Face of Longs Peak, October 2006

What caught my eye initially was the odd shaped cloud over the east face of the mountain top — just like what I’d seen while walking the dogs. This is called a ‘lenticular cloud’, meaning lens-shaped. Lenticular clouds indicate that the wind is really ripping, pulling relatively moister air up to the top of the mountain, where it forms a cloud as it crosses over. Although these clouds seem to stand still, in reality, they are constantly forming on the near side, then evaporating on the far.

Notice the snow blowing off the ridge to the right (west) and dropping into the basin below the summit. This extra snow helps build glaciers.

According to the Rocky Mountain National Park Service Wind page, in the winter, the average daily wind speeds on Longs Peak are 65 mph, so the average is higher than our peak wind speed on Sunday. It often blows at over 100 mph, and the maximum wind speed recorded was in excess of 200 mph!

Suddenly, I’m more appreciative of our relatively calm air.

This Winter’s Weather Patterns

I’ve been obsessing for the last couple of posts about how dry we’ve been this winter. This image from the NOAA GOES satellite says it all:

The blue is storm clouds — Winter Storm Quinn, to be exact, that dumped feet of snow on the Sierra Nevada. It hit the Colorado border and turned north to hammer Wyoming and Montana. Now it is making another U-turn and started into the Dakotas, Nebraska and Kansas. These states are under a winter storm warning. Quinn will make its way to the storm weary east coast later this week.

What do we get? Nothing. Nada. Zip.

And this is the storm pattern we’ve had all winter.

Sharp-shinned hawk misses flicker for lunch

The gregarious band of little bushtits took off in a burst of feathers and cheeping alarm calls.

I looked up just in time to see a Northern flicker shoot out of the top of a tree, with a sharp-shinned hawk in hot pursuit. Luckily for the flicker, the hawk had made its move too soon, and given the flicker a head start the predator couldn’t overcome.

Northern flickers spend all year in the wooded areas of the Front Range of Colorado. They are in the woodpecker family, but they spend as much time on the ground as they do in trees, stabbing their big sharp beaks into the soil in search of insects.

Sharp-shinned hawks are woodland predators. They, too, live year-round in Colorado woodlands, and in fact they cover most of North America.  Most of their diet comes from birds that they surprise and chase through the trees — exactly what I saw today, except that the flicker got away.

Not reindeer, but…

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!

Spring is coming. Really.

If we can just hold on a little longer, spring is coming. How do I know? Robins, dark-eyed juncos and rufus-sided towhees are back at the feeders.

Dark-eyed juncos come in many different plumages. You know that they are dark-eyed juncos, though, because they have dark eyes, and they have a yellow beak.

This dark-eyed junco looks more like the next bird, a rufus-sided towhee than the previous junco. But compare the beaks.

Rufus-sided towhees have more distinct wing bars and a dark beak compared to the juncos. They are also a bit larger than juncos.

Also, as I was walking into to library this morning, I heard a crow making a weird ringing “B’Dong! B’Dong!  B’Dong! B’Dong!” call. It drew a crowd as people interpreted the call as “Hello! Hello!”If I tried I could kinda hear “Hello! Hello!  Hello! Hello!” instead of “B’Dong! B’Dong!  B’Dong! B’Dong!” Maybe it was imitating the sounds it heard from the patrons entering the library.

This crow made to most un-crow-like “B’Dong! B’Dong!” call. Some people felt it sounded more like “Hello! Hello!

One man walking by stated that it was “a crow mating call.” I haven’t been able to confirm that crows make a very un-crowlike “B’Dong! B’Dong!  B’Dong! B’Dong!” when searching for a mate, but I can’t deny it yet, either. It does say that crows are capable of some very odd sounds, well beyond the classic “caw”.

So hang in there! The weather for the rest of the week should melt off some snow!

Where have all the birds gone?

Look at this picture. Look at it closely. Count the number of birds in it. How many did you find?

If you counted zero, nada, zilch, you are not alone. Since before Thanksgiving, I have seen very few birds at our feeders.

In an email to Hugh Kingery, of the Audubon Society of Greater Denver, said that several people all along the Front Range have commented on the lack of birds at their feeders. He feels that there are fewer coniferous (spruce, pine and fir) tree cones for the seed eaters to feed on, but others say that their berry bushes are full of berries, with no birds eating them.

So far, nobody has any speculation on where the birds went, either.