Colorado adopted the Lark Bunting in 1931, which is a grassland bird and not a backyard bird in any sense.
Lark Buntings live out on the shortgrass prairie of the eastern plains, the males black with a bold white wing patch in summer, and they leave the state entirely for the winter. You will not see one from a kitchen window in Denver or Boulder. Colorado picked a bird that stands for its landscape rather than its gardens.
The gardens have something more interesting going on: Colorado is where the eastern and western bird faunas run into each other.
The twelve birds Colorado feeders report most
From Project FeederWatch, the Cornell Lab of Ornithology's winter count, in which volunteers record what turns up at their own feeders. The 2023–24 season had 475 participants in Colorado. The percentage is the share of Colorado feeder sites that reported the bird at least once.
| # | Bird | Share of CO feeders |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | House Finch | 87.8% |
| 1 | Dark-eyed Junco | 87.8% |
| 3 | Black-capped Chickadee | 81.7% |
| 4 | Northern Flicker | 80.7% |
| 5 | Downy Woodpecker | 70.1% |
| 6 | American Robin | 62.8% |
| 7 | Eurasian Collared-Dove | 62.0% |
| 8 | Red-breasted Nuthatch | 61.4% |
| 9 | White-breasted Nuthatch | 58.5% |
| 10 | Blue Jay | 57.7% |
| 11 | Black-billed Magpie | 57.3% |
| 12 | American Goldfinch | 56.7% |
Four things in that list worth knowing
Blue Jay and Black-billed Magpie at almost the same number
Tenth and eleventh, 57.7% against 57.3%. That is the whole story of Colorado birding in two rows. The Blue Jay is the eastern jay pushing west along the Front Range towns; the magpie is the western bird that has always been here. Almost nowhere else in the country do you get both in the same yard.
Two nuthatches, and the smaller one is commoner
Red-breasted (#8) ahead of White-breasted (#9). The Red-breasted is a small, nasal, rusty-bellied bird of conifers with a black line through the eye; the White-breasted is bigger, cleaner, and the classic bird that walks down a tree trunk head-first. In Colorado you can get both at the same suet block.
The dove at your feeder is probably not native
Eurasian Collared-Dove is seventh, at 62% of Colorado feeders. It arrived in North America in the 1980s and spread across the continent within a few decades — a pale, square-tailed dove with a thin black collar on the back of the neck, bigger and greyer than a Mourning Dove and with a three-note coo rather than a mournful one.
Your hummingbirds are western, and they are gone by autumn
No hummingbird appears in the list above, and that is a quirk of the calendar rather than of Colorado. FeederWatch counts through the winter, and Colorado's hummingbirds are summer birds — the Broad-tailed Hummingbird breeds here, at elevations up to around 10,500 feet, and is in the state only for a few months. They are not the Ruby-throated of the eastern states; that bird barely reaches Colorado at all.
What is on our Colorado mug, and where each bird actually ranks
The Backyard Birds of Colorado mug is drawn with the House Finch (=#1, 88%), a Hummingbird, the Chickadee (#3, 82%) and the American Robin (#6, 63%).
Three of those are in Colorado's top six. The hummingbird is there for the summer half of the year, when it is one of the most-watched birds in any Colorado yard — it simply cannot appear in a winter count.
Two illustrations we still owe this state: a Broad-tailed Hummingbird, which is the hummingbird a Colorado feeder actually gets, and the Dark-eyed Junco at joint first.
If you want more of them
Black-oil sunflower for the House Finch, chickadee and both nuthatches. Suet for the flicker and the Downy. A low tray or bare ground for the juncos, which feed down there and rarely use a hanging feeder.
And put the nectar feeder out in late April rather than late May. Four parts water to one part sugar, no red dye, changed every few days once it is warm.
Where these numbers come from: Project FeederWatch, Cornell Lab of Ornithology, Top 25 Feeder Birds for Colorado, 2023–24 season. These are volunteer reports from their own feeders, not a formal survey, and they describe the winter feeding season rather than the whole year — which is why no hummingbird appears. Percentages are the share of participating sites that reported the species. Broad-tailed Hummingbird breeding elevation from the Cornell Lab's All About Birds. Colorado state bird designation: 1931.
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