Nippy at the start of our hike this morning, but verging on warm by the end of it. (Got to nearly 60° (F) in afternoon!) A day of blue skies, wispy clouds, a cottontail, a couple deer, a couple solitaires, and a mess of juncos.
Heard a Mountain Chickadee didn’t get a good lookg and got no photo. Saw a scrub-jay with a peanut about a mile from the neighborhood.
The sun felt good today.
Grandeur Peak Area List Beginning at 8:42 a.m. (MST), I hiked a few hundred feet up a mountain.
Took quite a few photos today but, oddly, the best were of mammals. After going over the bird pics, I decided to post a shot I took of a Dark-eyed Junco hanging out in a tree beyond my deck.
But my hike with dog—while briefer than yesterday’s—was a fun one. Deer and a cottontail and a nuthatch and a titmouse and a nippy breeze in the canyon and a warm sun under cloudless skies up the juniper barren. Then a quick grocery shopping trip, followed by glimpses of starlings bathing in a snowmelt puddle and pigeons sunning themselves on a utility line.
And that’s about the story of the first day of March. Tomorrow’s supposed to get to 50°.
Grandeur Peak Area List Beginning at 8:42 a.m. (MST), I hiked a few hundred feet up a mountain.
Nippy in the shade still, but warm in the sun. And the days are forecast to successively warmer through the weekend. Spring.
Jack and I completed most of our regular hike before veering off-course and up a high deer trail that connected with the route to the ridge overlooking our neighborhood, the one with a cairn on top. We even ventured farther up, to more than 6,300 feet, before returing.
The clean spring air and exercise and unnerving cloudlessness thrilled us both, I like to think—which was fortunate, in that birds were rather scarce.
That soon won’t be the case, though, I can tell.
Grandeur Peak Area List Beginning at 7:39 a.m. (8:39 MDT), I hiked about 1,200 feet up a mountain.
1. Northern Flicker (v) 2. Spotted Towhee 3. American Robin** 4. Woodhouse’s Scrub-jay (v) 5. Rock Pigeon* 6. Black-capped Chickadee 7. House Finch** 8. Black-billed Magpie** (v) 9. Cooper’s Hawk
Elsewhere
10. Song Sparrow
Mammals
Mule Deer
(v) Voice only *Also elsewhere **Voice only elsewhere †First-of-year
