Wildlife Window: Looking for birds, but finding litter - Loveland Reporter-Herald

Birdlife’s spring migration always excites me to get afield and see what visits each year.

To appease the yearning to get afield and to satisfy my curiosity about which species are already here, I went to Weld County Road 48 just south of Lower Latham Reservoir east of LaSalle. The roadside wetlands make it a favored site for spotting shorebirds. Here’s what I found:

• 21 lesser yellowlegs;

• 1 three-piece living room sofa with one piece a recliner;

• 6 black-necked stilts, gracefully wading atop their bubblegum-pink feet and legs;

• 6 five-gallon buckets including one Cenex Super TMS Plus Heavy Duty Engine Oil, one O’Reilly AW-32 Hydraulic Oil, one Kerosene for Portable Heaters, one Shell Rotella T4 15w-40 Motor Oil, one Liquid-O-Ring Multipurpose Polymer 400 and one unlabeled white plastic bucket filled and heavy with what smelled like tar;

• 4 American avocets;

• 1 Budweiser bottle with a cardboard six-pack carton;

• at least 32 marsh wrens, mostly heard singing but a few seen perched atop the cattails;

• 1 broken green alcoholic beverage bottle;

• 27 California gulls circling in a flock slowly passing overhead;

• 1 Modelo 12-ounce aluminum can;

• 4 nests of Canada geese with an adult incubating eggs;

• 2 Tecate 12-ounce aluminum cans;

• 5 barn swallows intermittently swooping about and perching on just about everything;

• 1 Coors 12-ounce can;

• 8 willets easily distinguished from the lesser yellowlegs by their size and their striking black-and-white wing pattern visible when they flew;

• 1 Budlight 25-ounce can;

• 2 northern harriers, obviously a female and a male by the difference in plumage color and pattern but probably a pair because of their tolerance for each other’s presence;

• 1 wide-mouth plastic cookie or candy jar;

• 3 American white pelicans flying overhead, as much ballerinas as birds;

• 1 Skol Vodka 750-milliliter plastic bottle;

• 37 northern shovelers, the males pumping their heads in mating displays;

• 1 Aturo Trail Blade tire;

• 14 mallards, paired and several walking through the grass to find a nesting spot;

• 1 pile of household trash and garbage amounting to enough to fill three trash barrels.

• 3 great-tailed grackles, all males;

• 1 portable black plastic tool cabinet with three of four wheels and some drawers;

• 1 male brown-headed cowbird, seemingly imperturbable perched atop a fence post;

• 1 four-foot length of ringed black plastic flexible drain pipe;

• more western meadowlarks, red-winged blackbirds and yellow-headed blackbirds than I cared to count.

Though I intended to go birding, I found a lot more than just birds. You might summarize my outing as being as much trashing as birding.

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Wildlife Window: Looking for birds, but finding litter - Loveland Reporter-Herald
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