Today’s nippy hike with Captain Jack resulted in a lower number of species than yesterday’s, and no photos at all—until the very end, when I got a junco to pose. (Our hike also got interrupted a few times by a helicopter flying low above us a time or two.) At the end of it, I would’ve been slightly disappointed, had the morning itself not been so lovely.

But as soon as we got home, I heard a commotion in the side yard: a scrub-jay going nuts around a dense clump of foliage. Must’ve been some hawk or owl or other critter up in there. Grabbed my camera and—over the next fifteen or twenty minutes—got a whole mess of photos of the little mobs of birds who came to help deal with whatever danger lurked within: finches, sparrows, towhees, more juncos.

Funny how things end up sometimes.

Grandeur Peak Area List
At 8:49 MST, I hiked a few hundred feet up a mountain.

1. Lesser Goldfinch* (v)
2. House Finch*
3. Black-capped Chickadee (v)
4. Woodhouse’s Scrub-jay* (v)
5. Rock Pigeon*
6. Spotted Towhee* (v)
7. Dark-eyed Junco*
8. Black-billed Magpie* (v)
9. Townsend’s Solitaire (v)
10. European Starling

Elsewhere

11. California Quail
12. House Sparrow

(v) Voice only
*Also elsewhere