No more will I have to whine about no Collared Doves.  In our OKC back yard, we saw and heard them nearly every day.  Chickadees and Bewick’s Wrens used our nest boxes and fledged a brood or two.  The martin house only hosted two pairs, but that was a start.

In the evenings a Yellow-crowned Night Heron would sometimes use our patch of sky to cruise across south Oklahoma City.  We have had no sightings of the Monk Parakeets that we found a year ago.

In early August, I was finally able to get my son, Tim, and his family, along with Brian, to go camping with me in the Colorado Rockies!  My granddaughters are now twelve and ten and are great little adventurers.  This was their first mountaintop summer trip.  What fun we had!

We spent a day at the Great Sand Dunes NP, where a hike up into the mountains led us to a Horned Lizard.  After more than 30 years of roaming all over the Rockies, I had never seen a Horned Lizard there.  Quite a treat.  It was hot and the birding was practically non-existent.

In the San Luis Valley campground, we had jackrabbits and cottontails near our camp and the coyotes howled during the night — as did the wind that blew the sand into everything!

Near Creede, we found a couple of Big Horned Sheep on the side of a cliff with a Mule Deer.  Between Creede and Lake City we almost saw a Moose!  Actually, we had stopped to look for it in willows in the valley and a motorist stopped to tell us the moose had crossed in front of our parked truck while we were at the back of the truck and looking in the opposite direction!  Sigh!

Our base campsite was about 11 miles NW of Lake City, Colorado — a place I’ve embraced several times in the past.  Our animal-loving girls immediately were entertained by enticing the ground squirrels, chipmunks and hummingbirds into our camp as their.  A few sunflower seeds and a hummer feeder did the trick. 

We were camped near the Lake Fork of the Gunnison and Williams Creek, so one of our missions was to find a Dipper.  Sharp-eyed Sarah spotted one along the river and later Brian watched a pair dash up and down the river.

When one takes two granddaughters camping, sometimes there is a little birding.  Basically I get to see what accidentally lands nearby.  And in our camp, the Steller’s Jays found our handouts, to the delight of the girls, who had never seen a bird that looked like that! 

Brian and I did have a fairly respectable bird list, with Pine Grosbeak, Pygmy Nuthatch, Northern Three-toed Woodpecker, Red Crossbills, Sage Thrasher, Townsend’s Solitaire, Lewis’s Woodpecker, Merlin and American Pipit as highlights.

In the non-birding highlight category, Tim, Amy, Sarah and Sydney had their first bear sighting, and it was up-close and very personal! 

We had spent a successful day trout fishing and raspberry picking along the Lake Fork of the Gunnison, and were cruising slowly along the remote gravel road that follows the river, looking for just one more promising trout pool.  The girls were standing on the running boards and hanging on to the door posts because we were barely moving and there was not another vehicle on the dead-end road.