Bluff Lake is Denver’s best birdwatching spot — and a bridge to the city’s history

Editor’s word: That is a part of The Know’s sequence, Workers Favorites. Every week, we’ll provide our opinions on the most effective that Colorado has to supply for eating, purchasing, leisure, outside actions and extra. (We’ll additionally allow you to in on some hidden gems). 

There are some parks and open areas in metro Denver that, should you use your creativeness and squint good, could make you are feeling miles away from town.

It could be form to say that Bluff Lake Nature Middle is one in every of these locations, however in reality, the 123-acre wildlife refuge and environmental schooling heart by no means lets guests neglect the place they’re. Airplanes, automobiles and bikes might be heard at each level. Close by hammering and drilling at development websites within the Central Park neighborhood add to the din.

That city setting on the intersection of Martin Luther King Boulevard and Havana Method, nevertheless, is what makes it so superb that Bluff Lake is the No. 1 spot inside town limits for birdwatching, in keeping with the ebird on-line database and neighborhood discussion board.

Birders have recorded a whopping 230 totally different species at Bluff Lake, together with frequent residents like red-winged blackbirds, furry woodpeckers and green-winged teals; extra magnificent denizens like nice blue herons, nice horned owls and Swainson’s hawks; and uncommon guests like a semipalmated sandpiper and a Cordilleran flycatcher. Within the final two years alone, birders have positively recognized not less than eight species new to the protect, together with a golden eagle and a red-eyed vireo.

The variety of species noticed there may be way over at another metropolis park, open area, creek, wetlands, greenbelt, path or pond inside town limits. On my most up-to-date go to, I used to be graced by a household of great-horned owls, two sorts of hawks, yellow warblers, American coots, cliff swallows and goldfinches.

The juxtaposition of metropolis life with pure magnificence is a part of what makes Bluff Lake such a terrific place to stroll — particularly when you think about its historical past on the fringe of city and rural.

Like all of the land in Colorado, the world round Bluff Lake was utilized by the Cheyenne, Arapahoe and different Native American tribes earlier than settlers from the east started creating farms and ranches. However by the late 1800s, the 9-acre lake was a part of an enormous swath owned by Cyrus Richardson, a rancher and lawyer. It was fed by streams and used to irrigate native nurseries.

It continued within the function of an irrigator till the Forties, when town’s Aviation Division purchased the land across the lake to make use of as a “crash zone” for Stapleton Worldwide Airport, in keeping with a historical past of Bluff Lake that’s laid out on its web site. Crash zones had been “required on the finish of all runways to defend the encircling neighborhood from airplane actions.”

It additionally turned a part of an enormous north-south aviation and military-industrial complicated that ran from the Rocky Mountain Arsenal chemical weapons manufacturing plant, down via Stapleton and into Fitzsimmons Military Medical Middle and the Lowry and Buckley air bases.

By the mid-Nineties, most of those amenities had been decommissioned and/or changed (though there may be nonetheless a navy presence at Buckley) and metropolis planners started to show the land — a few of it contaminated by this level — towards different makes use of, like housing and open area. That labored significantly effectively for Bluff Lake, which had been just about undisturbed by people for 50 years as a crash zone. Birds and animals, however, had turned it into a house.

Round that point, the Sierra Membership sued town of Denver, saying that the airport had allowed de-icing chemical compounds to spill into Sand Creek, killing the fish, in keeping with Bluff Lake Nature Middle’s web site. The 2 sides finally settled and Denver agreed to protect the Bluff Lake space and make investments greater than $3 million to “improve wildlife habitat, restore the banks of Sand Creek, construct an interpretive path system and assemble open-air shelters.” That course of has continued, and immediately the character heart is owned by its governing nonprofit group.

The care put into it’s evident. An extended stairway leads down from the car parking zone to a spot on the creek. This can be a good place to seek out herons and egrets on some days. From there, strolling counter-clockwise across the path, you could find woodpeckers, warblers, towhees and dozens of different species. Finally, the trail results in an extended boardwalk out into the lake, the place it’s attainable to see geese and geese of every kind, relying on the season.

On the far level of the lake is a chook blind for extra viewing. Previous that, coming again round towards the car parking zone, the path rises alongside the bluff that the lake is known as for. That is the most effective space to see swallows, hawks and, in fact, that owl household nesting in a big tree above the lake.

With the housing developments that press into the edges of Bluff Lake, you’ll not have forgotten that you’re within the metropolis whenever you get again to the car parking zone. However taking an extended final look via the lenses of your binoculars, you’ll not have forgotten how resilient nature is, both.

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