AMB Requirement #2: Identify and list at least 200 bird species in Colorado

Okay, I'll admit, I'm greedy.

This requirement would, in the grand scheme of things, be no big deal.  For me or for anyone else in the AMB program.  After all, with the amount of field trips and all the expert eyes looking for birds, you'd have to just plain not be paying attention - or perhaps the apocalypse would come - to not reach 200 bird species during the year we're in the program.

I mean, I came into the program with well over 200 species in Colorado.  I suspect most - if not all - of my classmates were in the same boat.  But as I prepared for the program, I set a goal to reach 200 species while *in* the program.  It just seemed like a good idea at the time.

Then......as things got rolling and I was racking up the species, I decided I wanted to reach that 200 mark by December 31.  Something about wanting to check things off,  complete the requirements.

I got close, but no cigar.  At the end of 2013, I had 191 species.

That was okay. It just meant that in 2014, I was really itching to get to 200.

And so it went.  I got some new gulls early in the month (Glaucous and Great Black-backed).  On our last class field trip, I got a White-winged Scoter:  a fine bird and a good look at it.  A little more than a week ago, I got a Gray-crowned Rosy-Finch.  It was a great bird, but from a long ways away, and on a feeder, and on a snowy and windy day, and there were no great photos.

And I was still a bird away.

On January 13th, we had a class on gulls.  Appropriately enough, I went to Chatfield State Park before class (class is in the Audubon center at Chatfield), and saw three California Gulls on one of the not-completely-frozen quarry ponds there.  Bird #200!

But then I got home and checked my records.  Dang.  I already had this bird during the AMB timeframe, back in the fall.

So on January 14th, I followed my instinct (and instructions from many more skilled birders who have come before me) and went again in search of #200.  It turns out that #200 is a bird I've seen before - just not in the AMB program.  And it took some walking and looking and searching, which makes it rewarding.  And - to dramatize things a bit - I had a perfect shot lined up of the female of this species, and it was a brilliant look (and a bit more difficult to ID).  But then, a woman on the other side of the river - the South Platte, on the north side of Denver - let her four dogs loose on the sandbars, and my birds all flew.

Lucky for me, I got this one shot before they were all gone.  I present my 200th Colorado bird in the AMB program:  a beautiful male Barrow's Goldeneye.

Thankfully, I'm done with this requirement.  Unless, of course, some other crazy thing enters my mind, like trying to see exactly how many Colorado birds I can see during the class year.  Not that I'm competitive or anything.  Hmmm.  I wonder if they have records of most birds seen during an AMB year?