January 18, 2008

Blog Stew with Lynx

¶ A Colorado lynx apparently walked to Yellowstone. (Hat tip: The Goat.) Or maybe you thought I was referring to an early Web browser.

¶ The Evening Grosbeak is back. No, not the bird, the bar in Cañon City. In the 1980s, we called its similar previous incarnation a "fern bar." Now it is a "martini bar." Social historians, please note. Whatever it is, Cañon finally has one, again.

¶ Conclusion: it was a Northern pygmy-owl. (Apparently it rates a hyphen, for some dark reason known only to the American Ornithologists' Union.)

¶ Another visitor today was a Clark's nutcracker. It was a little out of place too, but only by altitude. I have never seen one down this low (6,600) feet, but there is no reason it could not come down from the higher ridges, which are 9,000-plus feet in elevation.

2 comments:

mdmnm said...

I find these stories of animals traveling great distances, like this linx, amazing. Do you suppose he is headed back to Canada? A few years ago a mountain lion relocated from the White Sands Missile Range in southern NM to the Colorado border (to study the effect of removing lions from the population) made his way back to the study area in a little over a year. More tragically, a big male bear that was captured in Albuquerque and relocated to Mount Taylor, some eighty miles west, was struck by a car on the last major road before getting back up onto Sandia Mountain (where he presumably came from) just 24 hours after his release.

Kathryn and Ari said...

Love those pygmy owls. And talk about a great name for a tavern!

Looking forward to reading more posts-

Kathryn
www.outwithari.blogspot.com