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Soon Spring

© B. J. Barton

In North Central Colorado, along the Front Range of the Rocky Mountains, I notice the very first signs of Spring in February. It's the birds that catch my attention. One day between snow storms, I hear the chattery calls of male House Finches as they start claiming their territory. Their chest and head feathers have turned bright red. Male Gold Finches, who have been a drab olive green all winter, become noticeably yellower than the females.

Now, I hear the chickadees calling "sweeter, sweeter" to each other, the Flickers are drumming and calling, and I saw a little flock of Redheads on City Park Lake this morning. A male coot, with head and neck lowered even with his body in an aggressive display, was chasing another male coot away from his mate. Yes, the birds are definitely into Spring.

Taking the dog for a walk on the bike path along the Cache la Poudre river, I see congregations of Black-billed Magpies (Pica hudsonia), repairing old nests or building new ones high in the cottonwoods. When I took ornithology, I had to do a nesting study, so I watched these beautiful black and white birds raise their families. I spent hours each week between March and May, sitting in the bushes in the Nature Center with my binoculars and notebook. I watched them build nests of twigs and sticks, held together by mud or cow dung. The bowl was covered by a big canopy of twigs, and the bowl was lined with soft rootlets and some other interesting things like pieces of paper or ribbon. It sometimes took as much as six weeks to get a nest just right.

Magpies often nest in loose colonies, with sometimes two or three nests in a tree, and many trees in a colony. These gregarious birds "talk" a lot to each other and have quite a variety of sounds. For most of the birds I was watching, egg-laying began in March, and the female deposited one egg each day for about a week. Then she began incubating the eggs, sometimes sitting patiently through wind and snow to keep them warm. They all hatched about 18 days later. Both parents fed the chicks who quickly became noisy and demanding. Most of the chicks obligingly fledged by late May when I had to complete my study.

The earliest wild flowers I have found blooming here are Stemless Daisies (Townsendia exscapa). These little white Daisies grow along the foothills and I usually find them about the time Spring makes its formal appearance on the calendar. They hug the ground, often in gravelly, disturbed soil, and can easily be missed, but they are very pretty and well worth searching for.