Cheyenne Mountain State Park

I've been trying to stay a little closer to home, the migration has started so we're getting a lot of new birds and some winter residents coming back.  When I say the migration I'm talking about the entire event which starts at the end of June.  We don't get a lot of fly-throughs until the middle of July when small warblers and sparrows and finches start things off.  That's part of why I saw that Lazuli Bunting in Canon two weeks ago and a few more on a walk through Ute Valley Park here in The Springs.  I'm also looking for specific habitat for when the large, in both size and number of birds wing their way past. 

 A sparrow of some kind

 

    Bumblebee on a... purple... flower

After a fiasco with breakfast, namely The Ultimate Source of Energy, Gregor and I started at Cheyenne Mountain State Park.  I was there the day it opened and remember being hugely unimpressed.  I'll blame that on the Free-ride or Die life stage.  The park is a monstrously huge, diverse well maintained playground.  Excellent for cross country mountain bikes, cyclocross (and their derivative the sportive gravel grinders).  We started down the "Talon" trail, it sounded birdy enough.  The sun spilled warm light over an arid, dry prairie; the yellow and brown grasses intermingled with fresh greens; copses of scrub oak and woody shrubs interspersed with the occasional big pine.  There were black phoebes, several types of sparrows, purple finch (which aren't purple at all), lazuli bunting, spotted towhee and the ever present chickadee.  I'm not a small bird expert by any means, and sparrows are a definitive weakness.  There are just too many of them and they all look identical to me, there were both streaked and non-streaked varieties.

Sparrow, perhaps a savannah sparrow. or perhaps not.

The park at no point illustrates or mentions our beloved mountain chickadee, instead depicted only the black capped.  We do have black caps as residents, but we also have the mountain variety, which looks and acts differently.  This might seem like a stupid thing to pick over but it does mean the difference in a life list check box.  The difference between the two is minute to most people.  Black caps have a more buff coloured breast, even in their "worn" plumage.  Mountain chickadees are solidly white in the breast and slightly silvery.  They also have a white stripe above their eyes that make them look like they're wearing little masks.  These tiny bandits are gregarious and brave.  All chickadees can feed upside down like their more specialised brethren the nuthatches.

black capped chickadees

The trail wends its way into a mature conifer forest as you move west towards Cheyenne Mountain.  The chickadees persist with their deep, buzzy "chickadeedeedee" call resonating through the forest.  The sparrows restrain themselves to the trail.  The undergrowth is alive with towhees foraging for bugs, scrub jays sit in tall perches keeping a close sentry, and every oak has its own male hummingbird watching for rivals.  The winged jewels that we have are most commonly broad tailed hummers; they look like ruby throats but they have very broad tails.  We also get ruby throats, black chins, calliope, and an orange and green bird I'd like to call Allen's but I don't think are.  As we walked they would occasionally give us little fly-bys, their helicopter wing beats temporarily drowning out the other calls.

Broad tail hummer

 We reached a high point in the park and could hear wild turkey gobbling north of us.  We sat and watched a spotted towhee in a tree calling for a few minutes before we turned back.  We followed the Turkey Trot trail back in the hope of catching the Turkeys, but to no avail.  We heard them several times afterwards though. This park will be an excellent place to come back to in the next few weeks as more and more passerines flow down from Canada and the northern US.

 

two male spotted towhees