Today was dedicated to visiting Black Canyon (of the Gunnison) National Park. Another truly stunning piece of Colorado landscape. It took us ’till 9 o’clock to get there and having paid our $30 admission – no reduction for pensioners – we discovered that the road was still closed beyond the Visitors Centre, meaning that South Rim Road birding (some of the best in the park) was off the agenda. We then enquired about the Oak Flats trail for a stab at Dusky Grouse. ‘Yes it was open but it was a little slippy and you might be better off using spikes’ said the Ranger, but a guy managed to get round the two mile loop yesterday without a problem’. As we need Dusky for one of the ‘big six’ we decided to give it a bash. It took us two hours to get half way with Jane spending as much time on the ground as she did standing! Two guys ahead of us, but going in the opposite direction, reported seeing three grouse though all had disappeared over the ridge. We stuck it out until lunch but frustratingly only heard a couple of calls. After lunch we gave it another two hours, this time from the safety of the overlook but again no joy. Mercifully it wasn’t a ‘dot day’ with a small handful of ticks added and we did do a recce in the evening for our crack at Gunnison Sage Grouse – the rarest of our trip targets.

Monumental – the scenery that is, the birding not so much. We started the day in the Colorado National Monument park – a bit of a hidden gem, with more than a nod to the Grand Canyon. The birding was OK, with some additions to the trip list like Woodhouse’s Scrub-Jay, Peregrine and Black-throated Sparrow. After a walk on the Devil’s Kitchen trail we took a side trip up onto the ‘highlands’ around Pinyon Mesa, adding Western Bluebird and Cooper’s Hawk. Lunch was taken at lower altitude along the Colorado River, at the Connected Lakes section of the previously visited Colorado River State Park and the adjacent Audubon site. A brief pit-stop back at the hotel and we finished the day at Horse Thief Canyon SWA – barely a rustler in sight and even fewer birds! So a day more memorable for the scenery than the birds though we have now passed the 100 mark for the trip. Can’t believe we’ve already been here a week!

We’ve been here long enough now to stop ducking the issue of… sparrow identification! America has a plethora of these ‘little brown jobs’, many of which look identical to the untutored eye! So far we’ve managed to see and identify four: White-crowned, Song, Sage, Vesper. Two of these were seen on todays leg from Rangely to Fruita – our overnight stop for the next couple of days. Our journey included a drive up the Canyon Pintado, over the Douglas Pass at 8268ft, down to Highline Lake State Park, before checking in to our La Quinta hotel, which overlooks the Colorado River State Park and the Colorado National Monument. We’ve definitely seen more small birds since we headed down and south – the temperature this afternoon reaching the high 60’s f. As well as sparrows we’ve seen a few new waders, including: Yellowlegs – Greater & Lesser, Black-necked Stilt, American Avocet and Long-billed Curlew. The trip list is beginning to look more respectable.

We knew when we woke up that our morning Sharp-tailed Grouse ‘hunting’ session was our last before we had to move on west. After yesterday’s hard graft – for little return – I wasn’t optimistic. We’d already worked out that we weren’t far enough into the hills at the site north of Hayden but the road was impassable – we’d nearly got bogged down in the wet mud on the tack and had seen others do the same. One car abandoned by the roadside had come off the track and needed recovering. Still we arrived for dawn and gave it some time before finally moving on to the Twenty Mile Road site – our last roll of the dice. We parked up between the gate and the ranch on the top of the rise and started scanning the likely lekking spots. Yesterday I’d seen three distant birds in flight which could have been them but I wasn’t sure, so when a single bird, followed by another, landed in the top of a distant bush I was hopeful. Careful checking with scopes by both of us, Jane in the back and me in the front to avoid disturbance and we were confident we had our target! Eventually a male landed on the snow-covered grassy knoll and did a bit of strutting but we suspect any females were the other side of the ridge and out of view – his and ours. Grouse species number two under our belt, we returned to our hotel for breakfast and then headed west to our overnight at the Moosehead Motel, Rangely. Our itinerary was thrown off course when we discovered that the Dinosaur National Monument park was still closed for the winter. We occupied our time with a quick trip into Utah, adding another State to our list, and did several sites around the town. An Osprey on the nest at Kenney Reservoir and a Downy Woodpecker in the park adjacent to our motel were the only afternoon additions to the list. It’s pretty clear that small birds are at a premium – few migrants have arrived this far / high north yet. The search continues..!

Sometimes in birding things just don’t work out. We started and finished the day at two different Sharp-tailed Grouse lek sites, but didn’t get a sniff. We spent the rest of the day visiting half a dozen birding locations around Steamboat Springs and did manage to add a few trip ticks, but it was hard going. The temperature was below freezing for most of the day and most of the water bodies we visited were understandably frozen. In one small corner of Stagecoach State Park reservoir we did find a few Barrow’s Goldeneye and around the ski resort several Stellar’s Jay. We spent a long time looking at flocks of Junco feeding by the roadside – mostly they were the localised race of Red-backed, with a few Pink-sided individuals amongst them. Animal highlight was a distant Porcupine. After thirteen hours of non-stop birding a MacDonald’s, a beer and an early night!

Having grabbed the grouse the evening before we had the option of setting off west, from our overnight stop at Walden, before breakfast. I took the bags out to the car and discovered it covered in a layer of snow. We headed off on the 14 to join up with the 40 just a few miles before the high-point of our journey at Rabbit Ears Pass, at close on 3000m. The further we went west the worse driving conditions became until just before the pass we were in an almost total white-out. We managed to join the end of a convoy of cars and got over the summit as the traffic management signs were saying passenger vehicles were required to fit snow chains! The worst of the weather subsided as we descend from the summit and we stopped for breakfast in Steamboat Springs. A walk along the river produced Bonaparte’s Gull, American Dipper and a Mink. A recce of a couple of grouse sites and an early check-in at our hotel in Craig gave us a relaxed afternoon and an opportunity to look at some of the local birding hotspots. Best sighting was of a Golden Eagle on it’s pylon nest.

We had an early breakfast before heading off at dawn, just up the road, to Rocky Mountain Arsenal wildlife refuge – a ‘brown field’ land reclamation scheme on the outskirts of Denver. A good place to kick-start our Colorado list. An early highlight was a very smart male Horned Lark – later we saw a shed-load! Plenty of ducks and grebes to keep us busy, a few bush birds – including Western Meadow Lark – and the usual raptors – Bald Eagle, Northern Harrier and Red-tailed Hawk. Bison were a highlight, along with Coyote and Prairie Dogs of one variety or another. We left the plains and headed west towards the snow-capped mountains, arriving at our over-night destination of Walden by early afternoon – giving us four hours birding the vast sage brush prairies and doing a recce for our first grouse target Greater Sage Grouse. On the circuit, which also included many ponds (mostly frozen) and riparian woods, we had some good stuff including: Sage Thrasher – only seen a couple of times before – Great Horned Owl on the nest, Sandhill Crane and more duck sp. We ended the session with a trip to reconnoitre the Sage Grouse lek for the morning. Some reports say that the evening can be as good as the morning but with better light. We arrived at the spot, scanned, and almost immediately saw the head of a male buried in the vegetation. An hour and a half patient watching produced four more and some brief displaying. We eventually decided to leave driving back along the track and over the ridge. There on the skyline was another bird and as we scanned we located at least another dozen! Last bird of the day was a lone soaring Golden Eagle – presumably looking for a grouse supper! A really great first day birding in Colorado with nothing to grouse about.

We woke up this morning to serious snow, with daytime temperatures unlikely to get above freezing – we’ll have to see what the day brings!

We were up at 6.00 am to do our final packing and get a lift to Cromer station. Train to London via Norwich and then the Lizzy Line to Heathrow, where it was busy but no hold-ups. Our BA flight, direct to Denver, landed 40 minutes early and we were through Border / Customs and on our way to ALAMO car hire in no time. A short drive to the Quality Inn, provisioning at the local Walmart and we were in bed for 8.00 pm – with the time difference that made it three in the morning. No wonder we were done in! Still we did manage to get our list off the ground with nine species on the way to and around the hotel – Swainson’s Hawk (doubtless now called something else), Killdeer, Mallard and Red-wing Blackbird the highlights. Today we start birding in earnest and our first crack at a grouse sp.

We’re off tomorrow on another birding road-trip of America – this time to the Mid-West. We’re particularly on the hunt for chickens & grouse – doing the famous ‘chicken run’ of Colorado and Kansas, but there’s a few other bits and bobs we hope to catch up with along the way – not to mention the amazing scenery. Packing is proving to be a challenge with clothing required for daytime temperatures of 0 deg in the Rockies to 25 deg in the Prairies! If all goes well I hope to post the odd report and photo on this blog. Now back to the packing..

My plans to send regular posts of our recent trip to India took a step-back when we discovered that WiFi was non-existent in Arunachal Pradesh and there were frequent power outages. The state is in the north-east of India and is a restricted area requiring special permission to enter. This involved more paperwork, lengthy delays at the border and telephone calls from the local police to keep tabs on us. This is one of those regions occupied briefly by the Chinese in the Sino-Indian war in the 1960’s and the location of recent political controversy following the publication of new maps which appear to annexe the state to China. Not surprisingly there was a significant military presence throughout our stay.

Arunachal Pradesh is mostly Himalayan foothills but with a number of peaks exceeding 23,000′. The highest point on our journey was Sela Pass at 14,000′ – which was plenty high enough from a respiratory perspective! Stunning mountainous forests, tiny communities and terraced cultivations clinging to the hillsides and torturous access tracks with frequent land-slides. Most flat valley locations being occupied by military installations. We stayed in a variety of hotels / lodgings with the most remote, Bompu Camp, a tented settlement 4 hours from the nearest main road. Run by the local Bugun tribe, it provides basic but homely accommodation right at the heart of Eagle Nest Wildlife Sanctuary – an extravagance of biodiversity with over 450 bird species, relatively easily accessed by a network of tracks and trails. On the way up to and from Eagle Nest we stopped off at the Nameri NP, had a day trip to Sela Pass and birded around Tenga Market and the birding hotspot of Mandala.

Over the whole trip, including Assam, we recorded 330 birds and plenty of interesting animals, butterflies and general wildlife – but it felt like we’d barely ‘touched the sides’ of this fascinating region. Mountainous forest terrain is a birders ‘heaven & hell’. You can walk for miles and hardly see a bird, then they come in waves – a dozen species in a mixed feeding flock are past in minutes. Seeing them is difficult – photographing them, near impossible! Here is a sample of my best efforts, punctuated with a few ‘holiday snaps’.