ESTESBOG

Monday morning I had a doctor’s appointment in Greeley at 0800. Afterwards I headed to Brush to my office. It’s a little over an hour’s drive and, as I often do, I decided to take a “shortcut” on some back roads. My route took me to the eastern Morgan County town of Weldona and from there northward on an uninhabited series of dirt roads to the ridge along the Judson Hills and eastward to the escarpment above Wildcat Canyon. It’s dry, rugged country and usually chock full of birds.

It was about 50 degrees Fahrenheit. I was driving with the driver’s side window down listening for bird songs on the south slope of the hills when I heard a loud, sweet song. I stopped and backed up until I heard it again. It was a spectacular song, beginning with a slurred whistle followed by a complex series of trills. It was vaguely familiar yet not something I’ve heard very often out here on the northeast Colorado plains.

For a minute or two I was frustrated. I just couldn’t tell where it was coming from. Then I finally spied a pale little face staring out from inside a large, snowplow-damaged sandsage (silvery wormwood) shrub on the banking of the road a few feet away. As I focused the camera on the face, the little bird began to sing again. Wow, what a voice!

It was a Brewer’s sparrow, a pale, drab little bird of the shrubby steppe. This first cousin of the more familiar chipping sparrow stages and migrates through this part of the world both spring and fall but nests mostly on the high ground north of the escarpment along the border with Wyoming another 60 miles to the north. We rarely hear one sing around here.

Last June and July Joe Rigli and I observed a male Brewer’s sparrow acting territorial in somewhat similar shrubby habitat a few miles east of the same spot. Some books claim the species nests sporadically in northeast Colorado. I think the Judson Hills are one such area. From now on I will know their song.

PGW