Outdoors

Tuesday, March 17, was St. Patrick’s Day, of course, but it was also the first day of spring in Evergreen. The day started with a meadowlark on the lawn at Evergreen Lake, reported very early by Deb Calahan and not seen after by any others. It probably had continued on northward.

I am just back from a brief trip to Bosque del Apache Wildlife Refuge. Three friends and I drove down together and a fifth drove over from Arizona to join us, so we made five musketeers. We took one day to drive down and one to drive back with a few stops along the way and had two full days on the refuge. Bosque del Apache is one of the gems of the National Wildlife Refuges. It is managed largely for the sand hill cranes and snow geese which winter there in great numbers but it is also very people friendly.

I have just mailed in a count for the Great Backyard Bird Count to the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology at Ithaca, N.Y. This count is a joint effort of the Laboratory of Ornithology and Audubon. It is such an easy count to do that I thought some of you might be interested in taking part next year.

Aside from the usual nuthatches, chickadees, woodpeckers, siskins and juncos, there haven’t been many unusual birds around this winter. I have had several Townsend’s solitaries reported, crows and magpies, and a few red-winged blackbirds, but nothing really unusual or exciting. The red-winged blackbirds seem to be a remnant of birds that never left last fall. They have stayed on at the lake because there are plenty of feeders available in the area, and they return to the lake every evening to roost in the cattails overnight.