Cheyenne Christmas Bird Count report

The bushtit made its first appearance on the Cheyenne Christmas Bird Count Dec. 17, 2022. A small flock has been hanging out at Lions Park this fall. Photo by Grant Frost.

Cheyenne Christmas Bird Count had several remarkable observations

By Barb Gorges

            Perhaps somewhere in the archives of Rocky Mountain National Park is my signature on a piece of paper from the cylinder on Hallett’s Peak, proving I made it to the top in August 1973.

            Short of birth, death and graduation records, most of us don’t lead a permanently, well-documented life. But if you participate in a Christmas Bird Count, you can look yourself up online, at least back to 2005. More important are the number of birds counted, distances traveled and the weather conditions. That data goes back to 1900 (1974 for Cheyenne).

Explore the data at https://netapp.audubon.org/cbcobservation/. The address changes whenever the sponsor, the National Audubon Society, reorganizes its website.

            This year was the 123^rd Christmas Bird Count, straddling the year end of 2022-2023. The Cheyenne count was held Dec. 17, 2022, within a 7.5-mile-diameter count circle centered on the State Capitol.

            The 20 participants together walked 26 miles, drove 76 miles and watched feeders for 15 hours.

            Here is the list of 51 species and how many were seen of each, plus a few notes.

Cackling Goose 97

            These geese used to be lumped with Canada geese as four smaller subspecies, sometimes as small as a mallard, and are showing up more often.

Canada Goose 1,148

            These may be a mix of a non-migratory local flock and some migrating here when there’s open water.

Snow Goose 1

            Oh no – is this species of goose thinking about wintering here too?

Mallard 354

Northern Shoveler 8

Redhead 1

Ring-necked Duck 2

Green-winged Teal 22

Common Goldeneye 7

Gadwall 2

Rock Dove (pigeon) 129

            There’s a much larger flock in northeast Cheyenne that eluded us.

Eurasian-collared Dove 181

Wilsons’s Snipe 3

            They know where there’s a spring providing open water.

Northern Harrier 5

Sharp-shinned Hawk 2

Cooper’s Hawk 1

Bald Eagle 4

Red-tailed Hawk 12

Rough-legged Hawk 4

Ferruginous Hawk 2

Eastern-screech Owl 1

Great-horned Owl 2

            Good showing of raptors, including the merlin and kestrel listed below.

Belted Kingfisher 2

            Always a couple along Crow Creek.

Downy Woodpecker 5

Hairy Woodpecker 1

Northern Flicker 15

American Kestrel 1

            Not all of them migrate farther south.

Merlin 1

Northern Shrike 2

Blue Jay 13

            This eastern bird continues to increase in numbers here.

Black-billed Magpie 80

            It should really be the state bird since it stays year round and cleans up carcasses.

American Crow 133

Common Raven 30

            Lorie Chesnut videoed a flock of 25. Jane Dorn, who studied ravens for her masters degree, said young birds may flock, otherwise, ravens hang out in ones and twos. To tell them apart from crows, listen for the raven’s croak compared to the crow’s caw. Also, when flying, the raven’s tail looks like the point of a diamond. The crow’s looks like a half-circle fan. Crows are only 17.5 inches from beak tip to tail, ravens are 24 inches.

Black-capped Chickadee 14

            I need to more careful in assuming all the chickadees I see are mountains and check for their white “eyebrows,” which the black-cappeds don’t have.

Mountain Chickadee 22

Horned Lark 9

Red-breasted Nuthatch 4

White-breasted Nuthatch 4

Brown Creeper 2

            These are very hard to see. They are like a moving piece of bark on a tree trunk.

European Starling 444

Townsend’s Solitaire 10

            This relation of the robin is more slender and is all gray. It likes to sit at the tip top of trees, especially junipers, eating their berries.

American Robin 5

            Every year there are a few that winter here. We aren’t sure if these birds spent the summer here or if these are birds that came from farther north.

Cedar Waxwing 6

            Waxwings only show up when they find fruit still on the tree or shrub so seeing them is very lucky.

House Sparrow 432

House Finch 119

American Goldfinch 2

American Tree Sparrow 42

            In summer, small flocks of sparrows are often chipping sparrows. But they leave in fall and the tree sparrows come for the winter.

Dark-eyed Junco 59

Song Sparrow 2

            They are almost always year round, by a creek.

Bushtit 10

            This is the flock our Christmas Bird Count compiler, Grant Frost, has been watching this fall. We are happy they stayed for their first count here. If they make it through the winter, they might decide to stay and make a state breeding record.

Pine Warbler 1

            This is the same bird that has been hanging out in Chuck Seniawski’s backyard this fall. Nice it could stick around and provide a count record.

Golden-crowned Kinglet count week

            Not an unusual bird in winter, but there are not many to be seen, plus they are tiny and not noticeable in the treetops where they hang out.

Barb Gorges is the author of “Cheyenne Birds by the Month,” www.YuccaRoadPress.com. Her previous columns are at https://cheyennebirdbanter.wordpress.com. Contact her at bgorges4@msn.com.

Vagrants visit this fall

Unusual birds “on the road” this fall, including around Cheyenne and southeastern Wyoming

Chuck Seniawski has been hosting this lost pine warbler, from Eastern North America, at his bird feeders nearly every day since early November and so far, through Dec. 5. It should have migrated south instead of west. Photo by Chuck Seniawski.

By Barb Gorges

            On Nov. 9, a friend called to tell me she heard a story on KUWR, Wyoming’s National Public Radio affiliate, about a Blackburnian warbler that blew across the Atlantic to an island off the southwest British coast, exciting birdwatchers.

            It’s ironic that this eastern North American bird was named by a German zoologist for an English naturalist, Anna Blackburne (1726-1793). She never saw a live specimen, but her name seems appropriate because the 5-inch-long male burns with a flaming orange throat and head on a body that is otherwise black and white.

This female Blackburnian warbler, photographed at the Wyoming Hereford Ranch May 28, is considered a “vagrant” in Wyoming because it is a long way from its normal range in eastern North America. The female’s throat is a paler orange than the male’s. Photo by Mark Gorges.

We’ve had a few Blackburnians accidentally find their way to Wyoming. At eBird.org, under the Explore tab, you’ll find that Mark Gorges, my husband, was the last to record one in Wyoming, a female, on May 28 at Wyoming Hereford Ranch.

Warblers typically eat insects, so the lost warbler Mark saw could find them in late May. Warblers leave the north in September and October when cold weather limits their food supply.

However, beginning Nov. 11, Chuck Seniawski has had a pine warbler visiting his Cheyenne feeder nearly every day through Nov. 27, so far. This is another lost eastern North American species – and it is way late for an insect eater.

Pine warblers, according to Doug Faulkner’s “Birds of Wyoming,” published in 2010, are “vagrants.” Their normal migration, breeding and winter ranges in the eastern U.S. and southeastern Canada are nowhere near Wyoming.

However, Doug wrote, every fall there is at least one reported in Wyoming, usually between mid-August and mid-September. Doug’s only winter report was a pine warbler that spent five days in December 1988 eating peanut butter at a feeder in Gillette.

Chuck says his pecks at his sunflower feeders, hunts on the ground underneath and uses the birdbath. He isn’t sure if the bird is eating seed bits or finding something else. When he posted a photo, Don Jones, eBird regional data reviewer in Laramie, who spent four years back East, agreed with his identification. Also, Chuck had just seen one in Central Park in New York City.

Pine warblers look a little like a female or a winter-plumage male American goldfinch, yellowish with dark wings with two white wingbars, so maybe we should all examine our feeder birds more closely.

Serious birders stake out reservoirs during fall migration, including the Laramie Plains Lakes. Jonathan Lautenbach was rewarded with being the first to record two king eiders, sea ducks, Nov. 12 through 18 at Lake Hattie. He reported they were a female and a juvenile male, plain brown. The adult male, not seen, would be half white and half black with a bright yellow-orange “bill-shield” on its forehead.

eBird shows these king eiders as the first to be recorded in Wyoming. Doug Faulkner does not list them at all in his 2010 book, which is a comprehensive review of bird sightings up until that point.

King eiders breed in the Arctic, across northern-most Canada. They winter around coastal Alaska and northeastern Canada, but there are frequent winter sightings in lower 48 states, most often coastal, and they are also usually female and juvenile birds.

Cheyenne birder Grant Frost was probably checking Sloans Lake in Lions Park for interesting ducks and other waterbirds when he came across a small flock of bushtits Nov. 3 and again Nov. 27. “Peterson’s Field Guide to Birds of North America,” published in 2020, describes their habitat as brushy woodlands and pine-oak forests of the southwest.

But if you look closely at Peterson’s range map, it shows this thin line of purple (meaning year-round resident) drawn up the Front Range of Colorado, practically pointing to Cheyenne. More bushtits may be in our future. Look for pale brown and gray, 4.5-inch-long birds building sack-like hanging nests.

            Grant also found a blue-headed vireo at Lions Park Nov. 1, and it was last seen there Nov. 3 by Vicki Herren. Vireos are much like warblers, eating insects, but also fruit in winter. This species breeds across Canada, through New England and down through the Appalachians. It winters along the southeast coasts of the U.S. It’s possible that the birds from western Canada would head south through Wyoming to get to the Texas Gulf Coast. They are just hard to pick out from other vireos and warblers bouncing around in the trees.

            Unusual bird observations submitted to eBird automatically get flagged. You are asked to write a description of your observation and submit a photo if you can. Someone appointed by eBird for that area will decide whether your record becomes public.

            These days eBird and the Wyoming Bird Records Committee work together. Find out more about the committee at https://wybirdrecordscommittee.wordpress.com/.  

Female Blackburnian Warbler, May 28, feeding on insects in a cottonwood tree on the Wyoming Hereford Ranch, outside Cheyenne. Photo by Mark Gorges.