Evergreen Audubon’s annual banquet is a time to celebrate and acknowledge all the ways in which the members of our community contribute to manifesting our mission of wildlife and habitat conservation and natural history education. Each year as part of our celebration we announce the Bear Creek Watershed Bird-of-the-Year and honor those folks who successfully completed our annual Birding Challenge.
Among the birds seen within the Bear Creek Watershed and nominated for Bird-of-the-Year in 2022 were: a Snow Goose at Evergreen Lake, a leucistic (reduced pigmentation) Mountain Chickadee in Evergreen Heights, a Rose-breasted Grosbeak – slightly outside of the Watershed at Beaver Ranch, a Green-tailed Towhee in Evergreen Meadows, a Yellow-headed Blackbird at Evergreen Lake, a Lewis’s Woodpecker at Cold Springs Gulch, a Ring-necked Pheasant at Bear Creek Lake Park, a Short-eared Owl – slightly outside of the Watershed near timberline in the Deer Creek drainage, and a Common Poorwill in the Circle K Ranch community of Upper Bear Creek. An additional two nominated species, a Bobolink at Evergreen Lake and a Brown Thrasher at Echo Lake, were definitely given consideration as they are vagrants to the Watershed, that is they are extremely rare and well out of their normal range. Finally, in making our final determination we came down to not one Bird-of-the-Year but two, both vagrants and both never recorded previously by Evergreen Audubon in the Bear Creek Watershed, a Yellow-throated Warbler seen by Margo Constable at Cold Springs Gulch and a Mississippi Kite seen by Hannah Criswell in Evergreen Meadows just south of Marshdale. These two new sightings bring the total number of birds recorded in the Watershed to 334 species.
As for the Birding Challenge for 2022; to have successfully met the challenge a person must have seen a third of the recorded species in at least one of six geographic regions. So, here are those 1/3 thresholds:
Jefferson County: 130 species
Clear Creek County: 75 species
Gilpin County: 64 species
Park County: 102 species
State of Colorado: 171 species
Bear Creek Watershed (Bear Creek and its tributaries from Mount Blue Sky (aka Mount Ev*ns) to Bear Creek Lake Park): 111 species
Five prior participants once again successfully met the challenge: Chuck Aid, Ron Belak, Peg Lin, Kathy Madison, and Steve Garman, and we had five new folks who also met the challenge this year: Hannah Criswell, Chris Marr, Holly Marr, Pam King, and Jim Steverson. Hannah deserves special commendation because she exceeded the required number of birds for five of the six areas (only missing Gilpin County).
I hope that some of you are already getting fired up for this year’s Birding Challenge. I already have 38 species in Jeffco and 73 for Colorado. Not sure how I’ll beat out Hannah, but I’ll give it a try.