We set out this year to win the Colorado Birding Challenge, and although we haven't seen every team's results yet, we are fairly confident we succeeded.
For those unaware, the Colorado Birding Challenge operates on a county-by-county par system. The number of bird species normally expected in each county this time of year is set as that county's "par," and the winning team is the one who finds the highest percentage of par.
Last year we ended the day in Clear Creek County with an incredible 162% of par, but it still wasn't enough to win. In certain counties, the par is... shall we say... a LITTLE low, and it makes the teams in those counties hard to beat. We saw the writing on the wall, and this year we went to the county that was, in our opinion, the most underrated in terms of par: beautiful Dolores County in southwest Colorado.
Dolores County contains almost every kind of landscape that western Colorado has to offer. It stretches from low hot desert with Lucy's Warblers and Gambel's Quail all the way up to alpine tundra with ptarmigan and rosy-finches. And it has long been my favorite county in the state, almost criminally neglected by birders and almost everyone else who isn't in the know, as evidenced by the shockingly low par of just 57 species (!!).
We devised a route that started near the county seat of Dove Creek and proceeded west to east, low to high. Our first bird, before dawn, was Common Poorwill, followed by a Great Horned Owl that flew alongside our car at point blank range for a hundred yards. It was a signal for how our day would go.
We found 50 species at the Dove Creek sewage ponds, including Nashville Warbler, Marsh Wren, and a surprising Type 1 Evening Grosbeak (a wandering individual from the Pacific Northwest). A Purple Martin was a great find at the 4 and M pond. Some species we thought we'd missed at low elevation popped up in the high country, including Western Kingbird and Black Phoebe. We had set an ambitious but very doable goal of 100 species, and when it became clear we would blow past that mark, we started aiming for 114 species, 200% of our par. When THAT milestone fell with two hours of daylight remaining, we decided to aim for 120, which came in the form of an amazing flock of about a dozen Pine Grosbeaks feeding on Green Gentians (an amazing plant that takes 40 years to flower and is experiencing a superbloom in the Rockies this year). After full dark, we continued on to see if we could replicate last year's feat of ending with a Boreal Owl. We succeeded.
121 species for the day.
Folks, that's 212% of par.
In the end, we didn't find any ridiculous rarities, but we also didn't miss too many expected birds except for our namesake dippers and, incredibly, Canada Goose. It was an astonishing day with perfect weather in one of the greatest places on Earth.
I owe a debt of gratitude to my excellent teammates (Luke Pheneger, Brian Genge, and Pablo Quezada) and especially to our many donors, all of whom will receive a personal thank-you in the next few days with a picture of the individual bird from our big day that we named in their honor. If you want a bird named after YOU, it's not too late to donate at https://charity.pledgeit.org/2026COBC/teams/dippers !
Thanks to everyone at Colorado Field Ornithologists who organized this fun event for the benefit of birds and their habitats. Hope to see you again next year.
Nathan Pieplow
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