COLORADO 2011: The Pawnees

It was not long before ubiquitous Horned Larks and Western Meadowlarks were spotted flitting about the flat grasslands that dominant the eastern plains of Colorado. A dark morph Ferruginous Hawk was a wonderful way to begin a number of raptor sightings for the day that included American Kestrels, an immature Bald Eagle, Swainson’s and Red-tailed Hawks, one of which was a dark morph circling above a pond full of waterfowl.

The Pawnee National Grasslands in the northeastern part of the state encompasses a great deal of area, much of it rolling golden grassland during this season. Herds of Pronghorn (above) added to the color and could often be seen on the run. On this very pleasant day we encounter very few people as we traversed a large area in search of three specialities of these grasslands.

Near the Briggsdale school, Richard spotted a group of three Mountain Plovers amongst a row of corn stubble. Two were males vying for a female and spring was definitely in the air as male followed female at a slow pace with tail fanned.

A short distance away we worked the Murphy’s Pasture section (above) for longspurs, which meant that we had to keep an eye on the tail color and pattern of the birds we came across in flight. We soon got the hang of the dark tail of Horned Larks and concentrated on finding a small bird with a white tail. Finally, after hundreds and hundreds of dark tails, a flock of twenty McCown’s Longspurs (below) feeding in the short grasses along the edge of a dried up pond.

McCown’s are certainly the easier of the two longspurs to find. Habitat no doubt playing a part in that, in that the Chestnut-collared Longspurs prefer taller grass. We would encounter several more large flocks of McCown’s, before finding several groups of Chestnut-collared on the western side of the Pawnees. Unfortunately we were unable to locate them on the ground and had to wait for them to take to the wing. At least the majority were males, making it easier to identify them in flight as they have an almost all black belly, whereas McCown’s have a black breast band.

Surprisingly there were few raptors here today, but we did get to see several Sage Thrashers, Black-tailed Prairie-Dogs and Thirteen-lined Ground Squirrels.

We finished the day watching an assortment of waterfowl on a small pond which had a beautiful male Yellow-headed Blackbird flying towards us from the surrounding cattails. A breeding plumaged Horned Grebe was spectacluar as it floated amongst Shoveler, Gadwall, Mallard, Green-winged Teal, Cinnamon Teal, Lesser Scaup, American Coot and Western Grebes. Shorebirds must be just arriving as we only had one each of the yellowlegs and a handful of Killdeer.