Birds and Nature

The first pic shows this 3 1/2 foot long bull snake that I had to swerve to miss in the road from Florence to Williamsburg. It gets a bunch of traffic and it was just laying soaking up the sun in the road where it was in danger of being either hit accidentally or on purpose so I turned around and moved it off the road. Lucky it did not like the sound/vibration of my car being near it so I didn't have to get out and use a long stick to encourage it to move as I usually have to do. All native snakes are important to our ecosystem and should not be killed (actually bull snakes will keep rattle snakes away from one's house). SeEtta

I didn't find either the male or female yesterday morning-stayed about a half hour then went birding nearby and returned but neither in site. When I got there this morning I spotted the male right off but still no sign of the female. The male spent more than 20 minutes perched to look for prey on the utility line above where I was parked so I got some nice photos from fairly close. The bottom pic shows the bird with a big grasshopper in it's bill and almost sticking him in the eye. This was one of several he caught and ate before flying back to the nest tree. A raven flew close to the nest tree and this male defended the probably non-viable nest by flying after the raven. It is sad to see this male waiting for the female to return and defending a nest that has been abandoned for too long. SeEtta

I have been out of town a few days so have not gone out to observe the pair of rare Scissor-tailed Flycatchers that have been nesting south of Florence,CO so I was dismayed when I was unable to find the female this morning. I observed the nest tree for over 2 hours and drove by it to look for the female on the nest without success. Though the nest is difficult to see, I do not believe the female could have been sitting on it. I can only suspect that something bad has happened to her. I do not know how long it has been since she sat on the nest as a request for sitings on our state birding listserv produced no sightings since I saw her last five days ago on Monday. I did see the ever-faithful male who has always been nearby the nest tree on the days I have observed. In fact he would usually fly up to near the nest while the female left to forage. Today I saw him sitting in the nest tree quite awhile, still guarding the nest. SeEtta

Yesterday I was walking in Florence River Park at the edge of that small south central Colorado town when I spotted this juvenile Broad-tailed Hawk fly by. Broad-tailed Hawks are most often seen in Colorado during migration with most sightings in the spring. This young hawk quickly flew out of view so I did not get very good photos. The top photo shows the profile but not features. So I used photo editing software to lighten up a second similar photo as shown below that now provides a view of field marks for this heavily marked light morph juv Broad-tailed Hawk: dark and very pointed wing tips;; black trailing edge to wings;heavily marked underparts; pale secondaries. SeEtta

I found this female Black-throated Blue Warbler earlier this month on private property in the Florence, CO area. This species is quite rare in my area. SeEtta