A local news station has a recurring segment they run called “The Most Colorado Thing I Saw Today.” Viewers send in photos, or one of the reporters comes across something quaint or quirky. You know the sort of thing. Cowboys skiing at Steamboat. Ranchers riding their horses through Walmart. Folks fly-fishing a flooded cul-de-sac in …
Tag: Colorado birds
The Very, Very Few Birds of Winter
This time of year I sometimes feel like a castaway walking to the edge of the surf and looking long and hard at the horizon. Inside the house here, plants that can’t overwinter outside are struggling: some of the Calendula succumbed to aphids; the rosemary dried — it likes neither electric heat nor wet feet, …
Woodhouse’s Scrub-Jay
Cold. A little snow. The cottontail is out between flurries, nibbling on the pale grass. She looks up when I turn the car down the drive, with an expression that can only be described as woeful. Someone on Facebook, of course, will be summiting a mountain; a friend will post a picture with people you …
Migratory Thrush
When I was a boy, robins were plump little things with cranberry-red breasts. They usually came with a sprig of English Holly. My experience of them was confined to the graphical: they were on Christmas cards from Gran or Auntie Millie, almost every year, and they were European Robins — not the big-bodied thrush of …
Strange birds
Once upon a sunny morning a man who sat in a breakfast nook looked up from his scrambled eggs to see a white unicorn with a golden horn quietly cropping the roses in the garden. The man went up to the bedroom where his wife was still asleep and woke her. "There's a unicorn in …
