BMW Birding on Mount Bierstadt

I visited my best friend in Colorado last week and we had a blast of a time. Although birding was not the main purpose of my visit, I was still able to get a few photographs of some great Colorado birds.

BMW 1-Series Convertible

Getting around together was made considerably more exciting in Matt's bimmer. Let's just say it gets a lot more attention than my Honda Civic.

We decided we should hike a mountain, and Mount Bierstadt was a nearby choice. Mount Bierstadt is not far from Denver in the front range of the Rocky Mountains and is one of Colorado's 14ers (mountains that exceed 14,000' elevation). We huffed and puffed our way to the summit and were rewarded on the way back down by a sighting of a hen White-tailed Ptarmigan and her two chicks.

White-tailed Ptarmigan

Hen & Chick

Chicky

There is not a great variety of birds likely to be encountered at this elevation but we did see Clark's Nutcracker, Common Raven, White-crowned Sparrow and a recently fledged American Robin. It was odd to see the Robin at several thousand feet above the tree line, and I'm not exactly sure what it was doing there.

We were also fortunate to see a nice assortment of alpine mammals.

Mountain Goat

Bighorn Sheep

Yellow-bellied Marmot

Fabulous.