Brother Terry plays landlord to bluebirds

If you’ve been to the Rocky Mountains, you know how gloriously blue the sky can be. Now imagine a bit of that azure clipped out and dropped onto a fencepost. You have a Mountain Bluebird. If there is a bird in the world that makes better use of a single color, I want to know about it. A Mountain Bluebird is a breathtaking as a brisk hike at 12,000 feet.

One of Terry’s Mountain Bluebirds perches atop its nesting box near Montrose, Colorado. Photo by Terry Ryan.

For many years now (I doubt he’d want me to say just how many), my brother Terry has been tending and observing the activity around a group of bluebird nesting boxes in a state park not far from his home in Montrose, Colorado. Needless to say, Terry is a birder and has been contributing species to our 2015 Big Year list regularly. He doesn’t seem to mind being responsible for all the birds in the western U.S. The rest of us live in the Midwest and East.

A few years ago, my wife Fran and I accompanied Terry and his wife Cheryl on a visit to the nesting boxes. We were treated to close-up viewing of Western and Mountain Bluebirds by the dozens as well as their nests and eggs. Terry had put together a display, complete with his own photos, providing a lot of good information about the birds and their behavior. It took up a prominent spot in the state park headquarters.

Terry had been caring for the birds and educating park visitors entirely as a volunteer. It was a proud moment seeing his dedication and recognizing Cheryl’s patience with him. They both deserve a lot of credit for helping bring back birds whose populations had been declining.

It’s also nice to be able to add Mountain and Western Bluebird to the Big Year list this year, along with all the other birds Terry and Cheryl have contributed. Without them, we wouldn’t yet have broken last year’s count of 179 species.

Official Big Year species count: 181