Rocky Mountain National Park 11/24/09

We set off for Rocky Mountain National Park early in the morning, only a few miles away from Estes Park.  Unfortunately most of the park is closed in the winter time due to the snow, but we still managed to see a ton of birds.  We started out by driving as high as we could to the end of the road.   Here we saw mountain chickadees and and abert's squirrel.  A flock of red crossbills also flew by.  Throughout the day we saw many more of each of these species. 

Near one of the park campgrounds, we came across a group of birds looking for handouts.  This included magpies, stellars jays, and clark's nutcracker, in addition to this abert's squirrel.

Abert's squirrel

Stellar's Jay

Clark's nutcracker

black-billed magpie

Also in the campground were 5 coyotes roaming around.  They seemed pretty habituated to people and were ignoring all of the cars that were stopping to photograph them.

At another park road, we saw a flock of red crossbills fly over.  We quickly pulled over and went into the woods to find them, and heard many other chirps.  Here we found more mountain chickadees, red-breasted nuthatches (very plentiful in the park), and a pair of red crossbills working on some pinecones.

male red crossbill

female red crossbill

mountain chickadee

On our way out of the park, we pulled over to find about 10 pygmy nuthatches, life birds for both Alex and I.  We continued out of the park, and on our way back into Estes Park, we were stuck in a small traffic jam due to a herd of elk gathering in the town.

We then headed to a river in Estes Park, where we heard we could find American Dippers.  After about 20 minutes of searching, Alex spotted this one working its way up river.