Welcome! This site provides information about life and nature in central Colorado. You can get an overview of the area here. If this is your first visit, feel free to just poke around using the page navigation box at the right (or in the lower right corner of the page, depending on your monitor and/or browser). The various pages under “Birds” are the most extensive and, probably, the most interesting and informative; most popular are photos of nestlings from our nest box monitoring and information about Christmas Bird Counts.
If you’ve been here before, welcome back! This page provides information about new pages, changes and/or additions to old pages, and whatever else I might have done since you were last here.
Currently in progress
- A page with links to various bird population databases and some suggestions about how to use them to answer fun and interesting questions
- Essays about the reasoning behind hyphenated common names in birds
Recent additions
8/10/09
Lots of new photos added (although the text is a bit rough) under Miscellaneous photos. Most interesting (at least to me) are those of a male Mountain Bluebird that we surprised in a nest box with his soon-to-be-fledging offspring on Father’s Day; photos of a Broad-tailed Hummingbird nest we were able to monitor for 3 weeks; and photos of an unusual (for our property) Western Bluebird nesting. A friend also had a pair of American Kestrels nesting in a box on their house; she has provided some nice photos of the fledglings. Eventually a number of these photos will be added to the appropriate species pages or will have their own pages added. But that work will have to wait for the end of nesting season.
5/1/09
When checking the American Dipper nest, we saw the female in the nest, incubating and watching us. See a photo here. (Scroll down to the bottom.)
4/27/09
I’ve summarized the rules (and exceptions to the rules) for the 4-letter bird banding codes that some people use as abbreviations when writing about birds. Some people love ‘em; some people hate ‘em. Decide for yourself here.
4/24/09
I wrote a page about the small mammals that use our nest boxes and how to differentiate their nests.
