Tag Archives: songbirds

Colorado’s Ute Mountain Mesa Verde Birding Festival (FSB Festival Report)

I hadn’t visited the Four Corners region of Colorado in sixty years, so when I got an email inviting me to keynote a birding festival almost literally in the shadow of Mesa Verde National Park, well, it took me about one wingbeat of a Broad-tailed Hummingbird to accept. The festival was the Ute Mountain Mesa Verde Birding Festival and why they chose me harkens back to last year’s blog post In Search of the Green-Tailed Towhee. Each year, the festival selects a different featured or mascot bird to help promote the fest, and the committee just happened to choose the GTTO (the bird, not the car) for 2026. After doing a quick web search, they found my blog—and the rest is history.

**My invitation to the Ute Mountain Mesa Verde Birding Festival resulted from last year’s blog post In Search of the Green-tailed Towhee.**

Well, not quite. I still, after all, had to attend the festival—and what a delight it turned out to be.

After being invited, the first thing I did was to look up what kinds of birds I might see. It was a good list, consisting of a nice mix of conifer forest, wetland, and sagebrush birds. What got me doing lizard push-ups, however, were the birds of the pinyon-juniper forests—what the locals refer to as the “PJ forest.” These birds included several species that are challenging to find in Montana such as Blue-gray Gnatcatcher, Gray Flycatcher, Pinyon Jay, and Green-tailed Towhee. Even better, it included a couple of potential lifers pour moi, especially Virginia’s Warbler and Gray Vireo.

**Having Amy along for the first few days helped make this trip extra special!**

What made the trip even more exciting was that I convinced my wife Amy to fly down with me a couple of days early to explore Durango and visit Mesa Verde National Park—where we saw my first Black-throated Gray Warbler in eight or nine years and heard both Rock and Canyon Wrens right next to the famous Cliff Palace dwellings (see above photo)! Afterward, we took a delightful hike on the park’s Knife Edge Trail, and almost immediately Merlin’s Sound ID picked up one of my top trip targets: Virginia’s Warbler! It took only about five minutes to get a glimpse of this gorgeous little creature and as a bonus, the trip’s first Blue-gray Gnatcatchers joined it. Alas, Amy had to head home Wednesday, but that may have been just as well since three intensive days of birding lay ahead of me.

When you get invited to speak at a festival, it is common to be asked to “co-lead” field trips with local birders who are the real experts. Doing this may be the best part of the invitation, and I felt especially excited about the trips I had been assigned. The first, led by Mesa Verde’s Chief of Natural Resources, Paul Morey, took us into the little-known wilderness part of the park—a section along the Mancos River closed to the public. The river—a creek by Montana standards—led through spectacular groves of cottonwoods as well as PJ forest and sagebrush habitat, overlooked by the impressive main ridge of the park.

A special bonus of our Mesa Verde wilderness hike was getting to see the restoration work the park has been doing–including facilitating the return of beavers to the Mancos River. This has already improved water levels and sedimentation that the cottonwood gallery forest needs to thrive.

We got some nice surprises on our four-mile hike: Golden Eagles, Plumbeous Vireos, Lark Sparrows, more Virginia’s Warblers, and two Red-naped Sapsuckers. Lazuli Buntings and Yellow-breasted Chats earned crowd favorite honors, though the chats did their best to elude us visually until late in the hike. Another great thing about the trip, however, was getting to meet wonderful, bird-loving folks from all over the country—new friendships that would solidify over the next couple of days of birding.

**Not surprisingly, Lazuli Buntings were one of the crowd favorites of our first-day group.**

Friday’s trip took me to another place that had limited access—a downstream section of the Mancos River located in the heart of the Ute Mountain Tribal Park. To enter this area, you need to be on an official tour organized by the Tribe (see details here) and all I can say is “Do it!” I got an inkling of what we were in for as we passed the impressive Chimney Rock and entered the canyon itself. On both sides of us, incredible walls like giant Jenga constructions rose for miles upstream, the river threading through them as if nothing had changed for millennia.

A highlight of our Ute Tribal Park trip was a Black Phoebe, a bird common in California but fairly scarce in these parts.

Don Marsh, our fearless leader, had us stop at many locations and the birds repeatedly surprised us. Almost immediately, we saw ten Western Tanagers moving together upstream, surely still in migration. Say’s Phoebes, Ash-throated Flycatchers, Lark Sparrows, and Woodhouse’s Scrub-Jays flitted between trees and bushes while more chats and Gambel’s Quail provided an alluring soundtrack.

**Most visitors to Mesa Verde don’t realize the remarkable number of Puebloan sites—thousands of them—that fill the area, including this spectacular cliff site in the Ute Mountain Tribal Park.**

Don had been charged by festival organizer Diane Cherbak to find me my Number One Target Bird, Gray Vireo, and he set about this task with determination. On only our second or third stop, he said, “I hear one,” and for the next fifteen minutes, we doggedly tried to get a glimpse of it. The little bugger didn’t make it easy! We saw movement in bushes and others in our party shouted, “There it is!”—always a split-second late for me to see. FINALLY, the bird quit taunting us and popped up to the top of a bush where I got a lengthy, glorious glimpse of this drab, but thoroughly enchanting little bird! This trip also provided some additional adventures including a flat tire and a break to admire impressive cliff dwellings and petroglyphs few people ever get to see.

**My top trip target bird did its best to stay out of sight before finally posing for a photo op. Thank you Gray Vireo—and Don, for finding this bird for me!**

Saturday saw us in the good hands of Brenda Wright and Coen Dexter, two of the area’s top birders, as we explored the Canyons of the Ancients National Monument, a sprawling region northwest of Cortez. This was the heart of Pinyon-Juniper country and offered a wonderful mix of PJ forest, agricultural fields, Puebloan ruins, and yet more stunning canyons. On our explorations, we saw yet another Gray Vireo along with Brewer’s Sparrows, Cassin’s Kingbird, Juniper Titmice, both Sora and Virginia Rail, and perhaps the day’s highlight, a pair of mating dark morph Swainson’s Hawks! Fittingly, our last new species of the day here was the festival’s featured bird, a Green-tailed Towhee that I saw dive into a bush and stuck around long enough for everyone to see it.

**Woodhouse’s Scrub-Jays greeted us every day of the festival—incredibly adaptable birds that I had seen only twice before.**

I honestly felt sad to leave this amazing festival in a remarkable part of the world—and I encourage you to give it a try. The festival offers more than twenty tours over its five days and has some of the friendliest people I’ve met anywhere. Both Durango and Cortez are fun towns to explore and hang out in, and both offer great Mexican food, fun shopping, and other cool activities. Speaking of food, a wonderful local caterer creates some of the yummiest “field lunches” I’ve ever had—so yummy that I usually ate them by 9 or 10 o’clock each day. Best of all, the festival is for a good cause, being the main fundraiser for the Cortez Cultural Center.

For more information, check out the festival website: https://utemountainmesaverdebirdingfestival.com/

I certainly hope it’s an event I’ll return to one day.

My Colorado eBird Trip Report: https://ebird.org/tripreport/519560

The Ute Mountain Mesa Verde birding festival is the major fundraiser for the Cortez Cultural Center each year. The center’s mission is to “provide programs that enrich the lives of our community and its visitors by increasing cultural awareness, promoting the arts, and educating about the area’s history, diversity and natural environment.”

Turning Useless Lawn into Vital Habitat

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Today, we repost one of our most popular blogs of the past few years. The timing is no coincidence. It is SPRING, and it has never been more urgent to protect our native birds, insects, and other wildlife. One of the largest untapped potentials for doing this is for homeowners to create native habitat in their yards. If you live in Missoula, we are sponsoring a native plant giveaway of red osier dogwood on Saturday, April 18, 2026 from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. at 1300 Murray Street on the right just past Lolo St. as you drive up Rattlesnake Drive. The first 50 people will receive a free plant with instructions on how to care for it. Hope to see you there!

As the winter chill wears off, many of us are anticipating how we can spi1300ff up our yards. That can be a tall order when we’ve inherited a landscape of sterile lawns and imported ornamental plants that have no business growing in Montana—or, most likely, wherever else you happen to live. Fortunately, this situation presents us with a wonderful opportunity to bolster the native ecosystems we know and love. How? By replacing exotic species with native plants that are both beautiful and provide real value to birds, insects, and other native wildlife.

**Our blue penstemon and other flowering plants feed a host of native insects, including a variety of bumblebees.**

A Scientific American article titled “The American Obsession with Lawns,” points out that lawns began sprouting up in America in the nineteenth century. They were an attempt to emulate trendier Europeans and, more important, to display wealth and status. Fast forward to today, and a house doesn’t seem complete without its neatly-mowed spread of Kentucky bluegrass. Unfortunately, our obsession with lawns comes with a host of problems.

**As you can see, we aren’t purists. Here, native mock orange (white flowers), snowberry, and fireweed thrive amid California poppies and some kind of honeysuckle I can’t recall the name of!**

Especially in the West, lawns gobble up water that we can scarcely afford. Just how much depends on location and other factors, but keeping a lawn alive can devour between 15 and 75% of a family’s household water consumption. Keeping those lawns green and pristine-looking also can be expensive, especially factoring in the gas and electricity required to run lawnmowers, and the fertilizers and herbicides to keep lawns green and weed-free. Speaking of “weed-free,” despite industry claims that herbicides and other garden chemicals are safe, I am skeptical. Do you really want to be dumping things into the soil that may persist for decades and have unknown long-term health risks. I don’t—especially when my yard sits only twenty feet above the aquifer that I and the rest of my community depends on for drinking water.

Despite industry claims, I don’t think we’ll know the full impacts of a lot of chemicals for years. Unless we want to keep repeating chemical disasters, it seems prudent to avoid commercial herbicides and insecticides whenever possible. Replacing at least a bit of your lawn with native plants is a great way to do that.

All that said, my biggest beef with imported lawns and plants is that they have needlessly transformed productive habitat into sterile expanses with almost no useful function. Sure, a lawn is great for kids to play on—we keep a patch of it ourselves—but our grass obsessions have come at an extreme cost to wildlife, especially to native insects and birds. Many of you have probably heard the shocking statistics that America has lost one quarter of its breeding birds in the short space of fifty years. There are many causes for this, but habitat loss probably ranks at the top. While much of this loss may have been unavoidable, in the case of our lawns, it is not.

Even common, beloved birds have seen dramatic declines in the past fifty years, and habitat loss is often a culprit. Yards filled with native plants can be a major step in reversing this trend. (This is a newly-fledged Black-capped Chickadee sitting in one of our mock orange plants.)

Author Douglas Tallamy (Nature’s Best Hope) points out that 40 million acres of our nation’s natural habitats have been converted to turfgrass—an area about 42% the size of Montana! If we “turf owners” convert just half of our lawns to native habitat, it will restore an area larger than the Everglades, Yellowstone, Yosemite, Grand Teton, Canyonlands, Mount Rainier, North Cascades, Badlands, Olympic, Sequoia, Grand Canyon, Denali, and the Great Smoky Mountains National Parks. Talk about your game changer!

One great thing about native plants is that once you put a few in, they find where else they want to be. This patch of beebalm came up totally on its own—much to the delight of honey bees, bumblebees, and butterflies. (Golden currant in the background, angling up to the right.)

Fortunately, converting your yard to native plants is fairly easy to do. A simple online search reveals nurseries that offer native plants all over our state (also check your native plant society—see below). You don’t have to create your own “national park” all at once. Just dig up a strip of your present lawn and put in some native shrubs. Here in Montana, you’ll want to stick to deer-resistant plants such buffaloberry, juniper, or maple sumac—or better yet, protect plants with fencing until they grow large enough to thwart deer. Before planting trees, think about how big that tree is going to be in fifty or one hundred years—and plant it in an appropriate spot. If you live in a fire area, you’ll want to make sure you keep a defensible space around your house, too.

**Native plants don’t just “grow” native insects. Many provide fruit and seeds for birds, as this berry-laden serviceberry branch shows.**

Incorporating native plants into your yard brings immediate rewards. Our modest native plantings attract chickadees, juncos, wrens, kinglets, and other native birds, many of them feeding on the insects that the plants produce. Why not join the fun? You’ll discover a whole new aspect of gardening, and take satisfaction in helping the wildlife we hold dear.

This House Wren and its mate successfully raised a batch of youngsters in our yard last summer. At times, the pair were bringing caterpillars and other insects to their chicks *every two or three minutes!* To my satisfaction, I watched them grab most of these insects right off of the native plants in our yard!

Sneed’s Favorite Native Plants for the Yard That Don’t Need Deer Protection: buffaloberry, maple sumac, juniper, mountain mahogany, chocolate coneflower, yellow coneflower, Oregon grape, pussytoes.

Sneed’s Favorite Native Plants That Do Need Deer Protection (at least until they grow larger): golden currant, beebalm, burr oak, purple coneflower, mock orange, aspen, rabbitbrush, serviceberry, cottonwood (need a LARGE space).

A Word of Advice: Never, EVER plant any grasses unless you really know what you’re doing. Even native grasses can quickly get out of hand—as I have learned the hard way.

To find out sources of native plants and seeds, check the website of the Montana Native Plant Society. They have lists of resources for every part of the state! If you don’t live in Montana, you probably have your own native plant society you can look up! Here in Missoula, another great resource is Watershed Consulting, which has a wonderful native plant nursery. You can get their list via:

Website: www.mtnativeplants.com; Email: hello@mtnativeplants.com; Andy Martinez, manager: 406.529.7746

If you can’t find a good source of native plants near you, call up the wonderful Audubon native plant database. There you can just enter your zip code and begin finding the best plants to put in near you. Even better, you can purchase the plants directly from the website.

For another great, and more detailed post, about transforming your yard into habitat, check out Shane Sater’s excellent post on his “Wild for Nature” website!

Costa Rica’s La Angostura Florencia Wetlands: Turning Disappointment into Delight

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Today, we wrap up our 2026 Costa Rican adventure with a post from Braden. Our nine-day trip was filled with incredible birds—and a share of setbacks caused by unexpected weather and road closures. In fact, circumstances prevented us from visiting our major final destination, El Copal (see Braden’s 2024 post). That disappointment, however, turned into great good fortune. Why? Because it redirected us to what would become one of our favorite birding locations of the trip.

My dad and I woke to the sound of a Barred Antshrike singing outside our Airbnb. After packing our stuff and stepping outside into the bright, clear morning, we realized that there were two antshrikes, one singing from each side of us. It took little prompting for both the male and the female to come in, giving us the best looks at the species so far on our trip and knocking off another target from my dad’s list. The antshrikes, along with several cooperative White-eared Ground-sparrows on the lawn of the property and the steady flyovers of parrots and oropendolas, started our day off strong.

Great looks at White-eared Ground-Sparrows and both male and female Barred Antshrikes helped kickstart our fabulous final day of Costa Rican birding.

We’d been so successful with our target birds on the trip that our plans for this morning were simple: bird somewhere not too far out of the way back to San Jose, and spend one last morning enjoying Costa Rica’s birds. The night before, we’d decided on a nearby wetland called La Angostura Florencia, where the wide open habitat would render the birds easier to see than in the dense, rainforests we’d spent the last few days.

Disruption of our plans helped us discover several great new CR birding locations, including Tranki Garden near Turrialba. Here, the proprietor David has been creating a great new birding hotspot where we got our lifer Ochre-bellied Flycatcher!

So far, during the trip, we’d had pretty bad luck with just looking at eBird hotspots and trying to bird them. Some hotspots were closed, and we had caught David, the manager of Tranki Garden, off guard by showing up without calling ahead of time. One place we’d gone to was just completely private property (which we hadn’t known ahead of time), and the owner asked us to leave. La Angostura Florencia wetlands, however, was great—no locked gates, no private property signs, just a public, protected wetland nestled into the foothills of the Talamancas. As soon as we pulled onto the dirt road leading towards the water, we started spotting things.

**As La Angostura Florencia rolled into view, we immediately became excited by its birding potential—potential that would be fully realized!**

The first sighting of the day was our most unexpected. We stopped to scan a little creek, and my dad spotted a Black-crowned Night-Heron lurking on a rock. As I stepped out of the car to look, movement caught my eye—a large, brown mammal trotting through the forest on the other side of the road. As it grew closer to us, I realized this wasn’t a coati (which is a fairly common mammal across most parts of Costa Rica) but a tayra! Tayras are large members of the mustelid group (the group of mammals that includes weasels, otters and martens) and I’d never seen one before, despite all the time I’d spent in Costa Rica. We turned our attention towards the tayra as it scaled a tree and disappeared into the foliage above. Despite the mosquitos moving in on us from all sides, the day was off to a great start!

Though we’d seen a Green Ibis earlier on the trip, this pair at La Angostura Florencia gave us our first close, leisurely looks. Unlike other ibises, the Green Ibis prefers swampy or flooded forests to wide-open wetlands.

We kept driving slowly, rounding a corner and flushing a bird up from the road. “Sunbittern!” my dad yelled as it escaped into the trees. We got out again in an attempt to relocate it, but couldn’t get eyes on it again. Fortunately, there were tons of other birds around, calling, singing and foraging in the trees above and around us. We slowly made our way down the road, identifying warblers and other neotropical migrants above our heads as a variety of species gave us great, eye-level views. The dawn chorus consisted mostly of flycatchers, but we did hear a Thicket Antpitta singing from the shrubby, overgrown edge of the road!

As the wetlands came into view, we again got out and walked towards them, sidestepping a massive mud puddle in front of us. Two Green Ibises croaked from a Cecropia tree a dozen meters away, and we stopped to watch a Gray-headed Kite, our second of the trip, hunting and soaring over us. The heads of waders and waterfowl kept popping up from the grassy marsh in front of us, and we identified them one at a time.

**We got wonderful views of this Gray-headed Kite both perched and in flight—one of our best raptor experiences of the trip.**

“Snowy Egret!”

“Black-bellied Whistling-Duck!”

“Purple Gallinule!”

“Ooh, that one’s a Limpkin!”

While many of the wetland birds were the same as the birds we’d seen at Caño Negro, seeing them in a new location felt satisfying. Costa Rica isn’t known for its extensive wetlands, but the presence of these birds at La Angostura Florencia meant that at least several populations of these species could be found in abundance in the country. We spotted some fun songbirds in the shrubs on the border of the wetland, too. Both Olive-crowned and Gray-crowned Yellowthroats sang from the grass, and a Slaty Spinetail rattled off from a bush near the road.

Near the center of the wetland, the grass gave way to a large river. On a sandbar in the river stood a Wood Stork alongside a couple of egrets, and a Muscovy Duck floated by with a horde of babies in tow. From one overlook, my dad and I got both Ringed and Amazon Kingfishers while White-throated Crakes sounded off in the tall grass.

As we reached the end of the road, a flash of movement and tail feathers caught our eye. A small, gray raptor had launched out of trees, just missing what we assumed to be a Squirrel Cuckoo as it dove for the cover of the grass. The raptor landed on a low bough in front of us, and as I raised my binoculars, I realized that it was not the Gray Hawk I’d assumed it to be. No, this was an accipiter, slate gray, with a dark cap, yellow eyes and rufous legs.

“That’s a Bicolored Hawk!” I yelled, probably too loudly, though the bird seemed unperturbed.

**One of our best raptors of the trip, Bicolored Hawk was a bird I had longed to see since first coming to Costa Rica two years earlier.**

Literally two days ago, after seeing a Black Hawk-Eagle, I had been texting my friend Drew about the raptors I had yet to see in Costa Rica. Raptors are some of the coolest, and most difficult, birds in the neotropics. They’re hard to target and show up seemingly at random. Over the months I’ve spent birding in Central America, I’d slowly accumulated most of the uncommon raptors in the region—White Hawk, Ornate and Black Hawk-Eagle, Barred Hawk, various kites and falcons. But the few that I’d never seen before are not only elusive but quite rare, and the two I wanted most were some of the rarest: Bicolored and Tiny Hawks. Both of these species are widespread across Latin America but very infrequently reported, and while I’d been looking for spots to search for both (especially Bicolored) as my dad and I had journeyed across the country, I’d just had to admit to myself that nowhere were these species reliable. By this last day of the trip, in fact, I’d given up on seeing them.

**“You lookin’ at me? I’m lookin’ at you, Braden!”**

But suddenly, there was an adult Bicolored, taking in the sunlight, fifty feet away. My brain went into shock as my dad and I stared at it and snapped pictures. It felt like seeing a ghost. After about five minutes, the ghost flew away, leaving its vivid image seared into my memory forever.

My dad and I high-fived, then turned around, not quite believing our luck. And our luck continued.

On the way back down the road, we ran into a trio of birders—two from Great Britain and their guide—who had just spotted a Great Potoo a couple hundred meters away. They wanted to scope the wetlands for Snail Kites first, but said they would walk back to show us where the potoo was afterwards. We forged on ahead, hoping to find the roosting nocturnal bird by ourselves. As we passed a gap in the trees, I spotted exactly what the other birders had been looking for—a single Snail Kite soaring over the marsh. This location was known for the species, and it was only my second sighting of one ever, after the ones I’d gotten to see with Nick in Florida in 2022. (See THIS POST.)

**As much as we’d been looking forward to seeing one, we had to admit that our first ever “potoo lump” er, huh, lacked in excitement.**

We kept walking, my dad taking the lead, when a small, yellow and white flash caught my eye. I snapped my fingers, alerting my dad to walk back towards me. There, in the shade on the side of the road, perched a White-collared Manakin. My dad had been trying to get good looks at manakins during the whole trip, but they had been incredibly uncooperative. I’d spotted a White-ruffed while he was in the restaurant at Arenal, and we’d spent hours trying to get good looks at Long-tailed a few days before. And now, here was my favorite of the bunch, a spectacular male White-collared, sitting and posing right in front of us. Between the manakin, the Bicolored Hawk and the antshrike this morning, it felt as if the trip had come completely full circle.

**This great look at a White-collared Manakin finally ended a string of frustrating close calls my dad had experienced trying to get a good look at one.**

To make things even better, the British birders returned and showed us where the Great Potoo was! It was a little underwhelming, given that the bird was far away and completely still, but a lifer’s a lifer! We finished the morning with around 95 species, far exceeding my expectations for the wetland and wrapping up our phenomenal Costa Rica expedition.

Link to our Costa Rica eBird Trip Report: https://ebird.org/tripreport/482094

If you enjoyed this post, here are links to the previous Costa Rica posts in this Series:

Birding Costa Rica—Beginning at the Airport

Arenal for Antbirds

Caño Negro: Costa Rica’s Epic Wetland