Important Bird Areas: Southern Rockies & Shortgrass Prairie

The sites listed here come from The American Bird Conservancy Guide to the 500 Most Important Bird Areas in the United States (2003). The Southern Rockies/Colorado Plateau region (sites #1-7) includes most of Colorado, eastern Utah, and northern Arizona and New Mexico; the dominant vegetation is coniferous forests (often lodgepole pine) mixed with aspen at higher elevations, and pinyon-juniper woodlands lower down. Birds here segregate by elevation as well, with Brown-capped Rosy-Finch and White-tailed Ptarmigan on alpine tundra, Williamson's Sapsucker in conifers, Virginia's Warbler and Lewis's Woodpecker in montane shrub, and Gray Flycatcher in pinyon-juniper. The shortgrass prairie (sites #8-11) lies just to the east, an arid area in the rain shadow of the mountains that is home to Lesser Prairie-Chicken, Ferruginous Hawk, Mountain Plover, Long-billed Curlew, Burrowing Owl and McCown's Longspur.