Timnath Reservoir and Loveland 2/8

On my lunch break at noon I decided to head over to Timnath Reservoir. There was a little bit of open water on the north side and to my surprise a lot of birds which included 100 Mallards, 45 Northern Pintail, 40 Common Goldeneye, 25 Common Mergansers, 24 Redheads, 4 Green-winged Teal, and 3 Ring-necked Ducks. Then I came across the flock of geese in which the approximate numbers were 2200 Cackling Geese, 250 Canada Geese, and 1 Ross's Goose. I would guess there was more interesting geese in the flock, but they were to far away to do much with.

This was just the beginning of the fun. As I drove around towards the northeast side of the lake I was noticing large numbers of fairly common birds. These included 320 Horned Larks, 115 Eurasian Collared-Doves, 36 Western Meadowlarks, 45 House Sparrows, 7 Red-tailed Hawks, and 2 Northern Harriers among others. I then found a Prairie Falcon sitting on a large telephone post and the best was a calling Swamp Sparrow (129) in the marsh along the northeast side of the reservoir. It isn't the first time I have had one at this location, but it is the first time in a couple of years. The biggest surprise was there was that I wasn't able to find a Lapland Longspur in with the large numbers of Horned Larks, although I wouldn't be surprised if there were a few out there. To bad I only had a one hour lunch break as I could have spent a couple more hours out there trying to find something else of interest.

On my way home from work I decided to try to find anything around the Cattail Pond area and I was successful. Ryan's Gulch again had large numbers of Ring-necked Ducks and Canvasback. While scanning the ducks at Cattail Pond I started hearing a bird calling in the cattails, I quickly knew what it was, a second Swamp Sparrow for the day. Unfortunately, the Trumpeter Swan was missing for the second day in a row. Perhaps this time it has really moved on, but only time will tell. Bud Mielke Reservoir keeps getting more open water and with it more birds are moving in, but nothing of interest. 

It was a very exciting day for the little time I was able to spend outdoors.