| Colorado Birdin' Apr 26-May 2, 2003 |
| (c) Copyrighted by Cyndie Browning 2003 |
Tuesday morning (the 29th), I woke up about 6:30 and was out of the house before 9:00, long before Mom or Dad had even rolled over for the first time. I'd decided to spend the morning, if not the whole day, at the Colorado National Monument, part of the Uncompahgre Plateau that lies south-southwest of Grand Junction. The last time I visited my parents was 9 years ago but I wasn't a birder back then, so I knew there was a lot to see up there. G.J. sits at about 4500 ft. elevation while the highest point of the winding road through the Monument is several thousand feet higher, so you could spend a good deal of your time adjusting to the change in altitude. However, I planned to bird mostly from the car which meant my ears popped going up and coming down but for the most part, the altitude didn't bother me. Just inside the east entrance to the Monument, I noticed lots of bird activity off to the left and heard birds singing from the tall trees that shaded several garages and other caretaker buildings near the gate, so I pulled over to the right, stopped the car, and got out to look. Western Kingbirds (YB#17), Mockingbirds, House Finches, and Mourning Doves were abundant. I also kept hearing a most emphatic "REEEEER!!" coming from both sides of the road. The sound reminded me of the alarm calls given by prairie dogs but this was not prairie dog habitat, just low-growing scrub and chaparral hunched above verrrrrry rocky ground. So I decided to follow that sound to see what I'd find, and was doing so when a quail-sized bird flushed from the bushes in front of me, and just before it landed some distance away, I saw the dark forward-curving head plume of a bird I knew I'd never seen before. And from that moment, honey, the chase was on! I followed that bird very stealthily (as stealthy as someone my size ever gets), always keeping one eye on where I planted my foot, not wanting to step on anything slithery with fangs! and eventually got a kick-ass look at a male Gambel's Quail perched on top of one of those bushes, calling "REEEEER! REEEEER!!" Lifer #3!! and YB#18. Then the bird flushed again and I continued following it, eventually watching for 10 minutes as a female Gambel's clucked and muttered to herself as she wandered back and forth between two bushes. She's rather drab compared to the male except for the same rusty bars on her flanks. I'll bet I chased and watched those darn quail for a good 30 minutes and loved every minute of it, with more quail calls coming from all around me, and I delighted in knowing, "they're everywhere!!" John and I used to find California Quail on our property in the desert south of Riverside, CA, but that was more than 10 years ago. Compared with that memory, these guys were simply AWESOME!!!!!!!!!! When I finally got goin' again, I did as the Birding-Colorado book suggested and stopped at every turn-out, parked the car, and wandered about in the brush to see what I could see (being careful not to wander TOO far and fall off the edge of one o' those cliffs!! The higher I got, the more scary became the edges of those cliffs). And in the process, I added even more year- and Colorado-birds to my list: Black-chinned Hummer, Willow and Ash-throated Flycatchers, and Bushtit (which I'd last seen in California in 1999) (YBs##19-22). While exploring at one turn-out, I came across two more mockingbird-shaped birds in the same tree, with long tails this time, that I strongly suspected of being---and indeed, they were---Townsend's Solitaire, Lifer #4 (YB#23). I was really excited about finding them, too, until I got back in the car, looked at my checklist, and saw that the square next to "Townsend's Solitaire" was not shaded, which means that I've already seen this bird at least once before. I couldn't remember where, tho', but that's the way life is, I guess.... "ya can't always get what you want." Well, imagine how tickled I was when I finally got home to Oklahoma and began putting all these sightings on my Avisys records and discovered that no, I had never seen Townsend's Solitaire before so this WAS a lifer after all! And as with the quail, I watched those two Solitaires for a good 20-30 minutes, just watching them. They were totally quiet the whole time while they hopped back and forth from tree to tree, watching me rather suspiciously, I suppose, perhaps protecting a nest nearby. There seemed to be lots of _gray_ birds in the Monument: Bushtit, Bewick's Wren, Blue-gray Gnatcatcher, Mockingbird, and the Solitaires. At one of the turn-outs, a White-throated Swift tore through the air over my head. This was a species I was especially looking for, Lifer #5 (YB#24), and I was glad to find it because that meant I wouldn't have to take a side trip through the Black Canyon of the Gunnison on my drive back through Pueblo on Thursday in order to find 'em. They seemed to be all over the Monument in pockets, scarfing up bugs as fast as they could turn and bank on the thermals at the edge of those cliffs. And at another turn-out, this one called Ute Canyon, I followed my ears to another singing bird ("zeea-zeea-ZEE-ZEE-zay") that looked like a Chickadee's head clapped on the body of a Black-and-white Warbler: Black-throated Gray Warbler!! Lifer #6 (YB#25, and ironically, another "gray bird"). I'd never even heard of this bird until a year ago when I began thinking about visiting my folks and wondering what kind of birds I might find in Grand Junction, and I was absolutely thrilled when I realized what this little guy was. I still think the Gambel's Quail was the best bird of the day, hands down, but that Black-throated Gray Warbler was a very close second. I think I only found 19 species in the 6 hours I spent in the Monument but _4_ of those were lifers!! so I wasn't complainin'. I got back to Mom and Dad's about 3:30 that afternoon, hauled in my cooler, birdin' bag, sweatshirt, long-sleeved T-shirt, water bottle, Sibley's Guide, purse, and the rest of my stuff (I maintain a very high personal comfort level when I travel), dropped it on the floor of my room, and collapsed on the bed. Mom came in a few minutes later and was kinda surprised to find me lyin' on my back, starin' at the ceiling, still catchin' my breath! I said, "THIS is what it looks like AFTER I've been out birdin' all day!!" She laughed and sat down on the bed beside me, asked what I had seen, and we spent the next half-hour or so lookin' at bird pictures in my Sibley Guide as I told her all about what I'd found up there. Having once identified that "REEEER!" call as belonging to the Gambel's Quail, I soon discovered that Mom and Dad apparently have Gambel's Quails around the cornfield that's immediately behind their house, in the yards of the rural homesteads adjacent to the cornfield, so now Mom's on the look-out for quail. Only one more full day remained in my stay with Mom and Dad. Tomorrow, if Dad didn't need me at home, I planned to visit the Connected Lakes area that runs along the Colorado River as it leaves Grand Junction and meanders westward through the desert. |
| Chapter 2: Apr 29, 2003, Colorado National Monument |
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