Roger's Birding Adventures: Birding beautiful Mills Canyon and Harding County, NM - Northern Shrike, Rough-legged Hawks, Canyon Wren and more!

I made my first visit to Harding County today to do some exploring and start that county list. I took along my wife Carol because I had a feeling it would be a special day, and it was!

Harding County is the least populated county in New Mexico. In fact it isn't even close with the last census in 2010 showing less than 700 people! This county is stunningly beautiful and with little or no traffic.

Most of Harding County is vast open High Plains comprising of both ranches and the Kiowa National Grasslands. Birds can be sparse out on the open prairie, but the species that are found there are pretty cool. For instance the first three birds we saw driving north out of the small town of Roy were Rough-legged Hawks!

The star attraction in Harding County is undoubtedly the breathtaking Mills Canyon. Here, the

Canadian River takes a huge deep slice out of the High Plains. You start close to 6,000 feet as you leave Highway 39 and drop to almost 5,000 at the bottom of the canyon. The scenery is off the charts and there is remarkable history too!

Mills Canyon is administered by the Forest Service and they operate a couple of camp grounds including the Mills Canyon unit, which is in a mind-boggling beautiful setting along the river and nestled in towering sandstone cliffs.

We descended down through Ponderosa Pines from the top of the canyon. The birding was great. One of the first birds was a stunning adult male Williamson's Sapsucker! Other birds included a very obliging Canyon Wren, White-breasted Nuthatch, Pine Siskin, Western Bluebird, Bewick's Wren, Spotted Towhee, and a Townsend's Solitaire.

We proceeded down stopping along the way to learn about the fascinating history of this area. It is named after Melvin Mills, who was quite a character! He established a famous apple orchard along the river and eventually operated a stage line deep in the canyon, which reportedly cut 100 miles off of the Santa Fe Trail.

It was fun taking it all in and there were some great birding spots in the riparian areas all along the river. It is a bit quiet here in the winter bird birdwise, but come spring the cottonwoods come alive with migrants and nesting species. Today was 70 degrees and everything was being fairly still down along the river. However, I did manage to find several large flocks of sparrows of several species including a White-throated sparrow and a Lincoln's Sparrow, which is rare in winter. The vast majority of the sparrows were White-crowned.

I can't wait to go back and camp in the canyon this spring. What's cool is that all the birds will be confined to a very narrow corridor along the river and squeezed between huge canyon walls.

We left the canyon and after having a delicious lunch at Annette's Diner in Roy headed over to Chicosa Lake. There isn't a whole lot of spots in Harding County where you can find water birds, but this is one of them. It used to be a state park, but now seems to be closed. One thing about the plains is that the wind can really howl and by 3:00 p.m. it was gusting to over 40! Nonetheless I hiked into the lake and was rewarded with 7 species of ducks, most notably a large flock of Northern Pintails. There were also Redheads, Green-winged Teal, American Wigeon, Lesser Scaup, Mallard, and Common Merganser. I'm hoping there will still be some water left for the spring shorebird migration.

We made the long drive home to Santa Fe after having spent a delightful day birding this great area. My Harding County list has finally been started and stands at 41 species! Looking forward to passing 100!