It’s located about 1.5 hours east of Salt Lake City.  The lake is above 10,000 feet.  We saw snow on the way to this mountain!  In fact, there is a picture of the same lake on July 3, 2011 on utahbirds.org and the lake is covered in snow!

The weather was very nice to cooperate.  On the way up the clouds were dark and ominous and on the way back it poured.

But after lunch I took a hike and the sun came out.  This was a good thing because I forgot to bring jackets and it was a cold.  Who knew it could be so cold in July.  It was a great day because I saw two new life birds.  At this point, I’m lucky to see a new bird in Utah once every six months.  So two was really exciting.  One of the life birds is the Pine Grosbeak.  Here’s the male.

If you look closely you can see that the upper beak comes to a curved point that ends over the lower beak.  The picture below is either a female or a juvenile.  The juveniles are supposed to look extra ragged, but both birds looked ragged.  She had her beak open a lot.  I couldn’t figure out why because she wasn’t singing and it wasn’t hot.

This was a very exciting find because I had no idea what they were until I scoured the internet for answers.  The female was acting a little like a baby because she kept chasing after the male and trying to make contact with him.  So perhaps she had her beak open because she was a juvenile and it’s some baby-like behavior?  I’m not sure.  They both spent awhile preening.

Later on there was an epic singing battle between the Pine Grosbeak and a White-crowned Sparrow.   I’m not sure who won, but there were three Pine Grosbeaks and only one sparrow, so the sparrow might have had to give up ground.

The gardens, however, are full of birds and bunnies!  Very hungry looking bunnies.

I got some great shots of a Black-Headed Grosbeak.  There are many types of grosbeaks.  Birdchick has a beautiful picture of a Rose-Breasted Grosbeak.  Utah is supposed to have them but so far I’ve only seen Black-Headed Grosbeaks.

The first time I ever saw a grosbeak was at my feeders.  He was terribly shy and so I could only get pictures through the glass.  Grosbeaks prefer forests, so they were a lot more comfortable with me in their space.  His breast is puffy in this picture because he was singing.

Black-Headed Grosbeaks are sometimes confused with Spotted Towhees.  In performing an identification, make sure you look at the eyes.  Spotted Towhees have red eyes.

Black-Headed Grosbeaks have a lovely song.  I’m embarrassed to write that I thought I was listening to a House Finch singing until a saw the bird.  I’ve been listening to the Stokes bird identification tracks, but they’re not sinking in yet.  I can identify almost any track from the 1990′s based on four bars of music, but not these bird tracks.  All that talent wasted on crappy alternative music.

Grosbeak refers to the large beak of a group of seed-eating passerines, i.e. songbirds.  You can really see in the above picture that their beaks look disproportionately large compared to other songbirds.  See, for example, a House Sparrow.

Now compare the female Black-Headed Grosbeak to the House Sparrow.  If it weren’t for that beak, you could easily confuse the grosbeak for a sparrow, right?

I mean, checkout her crown.

It’s pretty similar to a white-crowned sparrow.

So watch the beak!