Laura Erickson’s For the Birds

Every December, a little before New Year’s Day, the American Birding Association names a brand-new Bird of the Year, and this year their choice was the Horned Lark. Talk about perfect timing! The Horned Lark happens to be the most abundant bird we saw on my Colorado trip, with over 500 individuals tallied over the 10-day birding tour. Our group found them virtually everywhere, from the rocky heights of Loveland Pass down to the windswept Pawnee National Grasslands and agricultural areas of eastern Colorado and western Kansas.

The Horned Lark was #23 on my life list. I found my first in the field behind the Natural Resources Building at Michigan State on May 8, 1975. I was only aware of one, but this was the height of their breeding season, so there was almost certainly another one nearby. The bird I identified helpfully had his or her “horns”—tiny pointed feathers on the sides of the head—fully erect, and even more helpfully stuck around long enough for me to page through the field guide to ensure that no other birds were a better match.

As a rank beginner, I needed to see every one of a bird’s field marks to add it to my life list, and Horned Larks usually keep those tiny feathers down flat against the head. Both my Golden and Peterson guides mentioned the black tail that makes recognizing them in flight rather easy, but my eyes were not yet quick enough to take in details like that when birds were in flight. Fortunately, this one stayed down to earth.

I almost certainly saw other Horned Larks that year, but I didn’t recognize them. Indeed, I didn’t recognize another Horned Lark in the wild until we moved to Madison, Wisconsin, the following year, and it took a couple more years to get good at recognizing them in flight. I spent a lot of time birding with friends in the agricultural and restored prairie areas of Columbia County—prime habitat for Horned Larks—and was getting faster at taking in important details.

But I did see and grow intimately acquainted with two Horned Larks while we were still at Michigan State, just not in the wild. One of my professors in the Fisheries and Wildlife Department handed me a box with a nest and two nestling Horned Larks found on one of the intramural ball fields on campus. A groundskeeper tried moving the nest to a safer place, but the parents ignored it. My professor said that if I didn’t take them, he’d have to euthanize them. In retrospect, that would have been far more merciful—I had no wildlife rehabilitation skills and no understanding of baby bird diets, so I failed miserably, leaving me with both very tender feelings about and a lot of guilt toward Horned Larks.

Well-meaning people with the best of intentions can cause a great deal of suffering without even realizing it when they try to raise baby birds without the right skills and understanding of that species’ natural history. Even after I had the skills and became a licensed wildlife rehabber, I never again handled a Horned Lark, baby or adult, so have never had an opportunity to make any kind of amends.

As soon as the ABA announced that the Horned Lark was their 2026 Bird of the Year, I felt obligated to finally write something about this lovely grassland bird, but up until the Colorado trip, I hadn’t seen any this year. I knew I’d see them in Colorado, and sure enough, on our very first morning, after breakfast, loading up the vans, and a long drive up the mountains, we found our first at Loveland Pass.

The van thermometer read 8º F, the wind was howling, and the snow was blowing—daunting conditions even for this northern Minnesotan. I knew we’d see plenty more Horned Larks on this tour, and I was supposed to be focusing on our “target” bird here, a White-tailed Ptarmigan. Our group gathered in a line behind the White River National Forest sign by the parking lot, hoping against hope for a miracle.

The only other time I’ve ever been to Loveland Pass was during my Big Year in 2013, when I came along on one of the “Minnesota Birding Week” trips led by Kim Eckert. That time around, an avalanche put the kibosh on getting there the first day, and the pass stayed closed the entire time we were in Colorado until our very last morning, so we made a detour en route to the airport. We didn’t have a lot of time, and ptarmigan plumage in winter is exactly the color of snow, but someone managed to pick out a tiny black beak in the distance, and voilà! We watched for a few minutes before we realized there were actually two birds in view. The photos I got were the only pictures I’d ever taken of this stunning bird.

But now on the first morning of this 2026 trip, as we stood in the frigid wind for a few minutes, and even though the whole point of this stop was to search for ptarmigans, those Horned Larks were tantalizingly close. I had to try to get a photo! So I moved 10 or 15 feet beyond our group, away from the shelter of the sign, widening my stance and bending my knees slightly to brace myself against the powerful wind. The larks kept fluttering up, but every time they alighted out of view behind rocks—I never did get a photo. But suddenly, out of the white came a ghostly form who alighted barely 15 feet from where I was standing—no Horned Lark, but a Horned Lark miracle!

I took a bazillion photos of this stunning male ptarmigan while he stayed on the rock for over a minute. Right before he started to walk, I just happened to start shooting a video which caught every second as he walked directly toward me and then on past, giving everyone nice closeup looks. My excitement and the blasting wind made it hard to hold my camera steady, so the video is herky-jerky, but I got a lot of decent screen-captures from it. He called just before flying off, and I got a noisy but useful 6-second sound recording.

When Russ and I were in Alaska, I got to see some very close Willow and Rock Ptarmigans, but none of them stand out in my memory. This experience was so unexpected and so amazing that the memory will stay with me for life. All because of those wonderful Horned Larks, who clearly don’t hold a grudge.