Environment:
Start Time: 8:25 AM Temperature: 56 degrees Sky: Sunshine, few clouds, healthy breeze.
First full day of Autumn gets off to a warmish start. Still not a crazy amount of birds but enough to keep me busy. A lot of birds were just flying by as demonstrated by the mini-gallery below. Award winning photography by no means but you can tell that they are birds. All the other birds who were either too lazy to fly or too tired from having just flown were perched either way off the trail or way high up in a tree – or both. I think the Northern Flicker posted here is the closest I got to a bird today. The Osprey population seems diminished – I either saw two of them or one of them twice. Today’s featured image is of a couple of Mallards who were sound asleep on a rock out in the Arkansas River.
Sightings:
Birds: Mallards, Osprey, Double Crested Cormorants, Canada Geese, Starlings, Killdeer, Gulls, Red-tailed Hawk, Belted Kingfisher, Northern Flicker, Turkey Vulture, Swallow, White-crowned Sparrow, Blue Jay
Critters: Prairie Dogs, Woodlouse, Monarch Butterfly, Orange Sulphur Butterfly
Gear: Nikon D5600, 55-300mm
Turkey Vulture in flight at Lake Pueblo State Park, Colorado September 23, 2021 
Male Belted Kingfisher in flight at Lake Pueblo State Park, Colorado September 23, 2021 
Swallow (my identification) or Martin (Google identification) in flight at Lake Pueblo State Park, Colorado September 23, 2021 
Osprey in flight at Lake Pueblo State Park, Colorado September 23, 2021